The Alive and the Dead

Ivan Sintsov is a correspondent for an army newspaper. When the war comes he goes to the front. He finds himself in the middle of the fighting. The retreat goes on for months. The losses are heavy. Somewhere in it he loses his party card. Without the card he cannot prove who he is. He is looked at as a deserter. There is nobody he can explain himself to. In the end one man believes him. The story runs from the first days of the war to the winter of 1941. It closes with the counterattack outside Moscow. It comes from a 1959 novel by Konstantin Simonov. The film opened on 22 February 1964. A sequel followed in 1967, covering Stalingrad. Kirill Lavrov and Anatoliy Papanov appear in it, a Soviet production Aleksandr Stolper finished in 1964.