Only Old Men Are Going to Battle

The Second World War, a Soviet fighter squadron. The squadron leader Titarenko is an experienced pilot who has also formed an orchestra; they play in their free time and the unit is called the singing squadron. New pilots arrive. All young, all inexperienced, with very few flying hours. The commander does not send them straight into action; he trains them first, and gets into trouble with his superiors for it. The flights begin. Some come back, some do not. After every loss the orchestra is one man fewer. Leonid Bykov directs and plays Titarenko; he co-wrote the screenplay. Serhiy Pidhornyi, Sergei Ivanov and Rustam Sagdullaev are in the cast. It was made in the Soviet Union, at the studio in Kyiv. It was shot in black and white; colour was available at the time and the choice was made deliberately, strengthening the sense of the period. Music is at its centre; the songs work not as a device for morale but as how the characters hold on to one another. The film reached a very wide audience in the Soviet Union and took a lasting place among war films. The narrative builds no scene of heroism; the deaths are sudden and most of them outside the frame. Bykov could not get permission to make it for a long time; the script was refused several times. Some of the pilots rest on real people. Its limit is scale; the aerial combat is limited and the budget shows. Who it is for: viewers who like Soviet war films and narratives grounded in music. Who it is not for: it is technically plain, the pace slow, and the ending bitter.