The Forty-First

The Russian Civil War. Maryutka is a sniper in the Red Army; she has shot forty White officers and missed the forty-first. The man she missed is taken prisoner, and Maryutka is assigned, with a small detachment, to escort him to headquarters. A storm hits on the way, the others die, and the two of them are left alone on a deserted island. There, two people from opposite sides fall in love. Grigori Chukhrai adapted the film from Boris Lavrenyov's novella, which had already been filmed in 1927. Izolda Izvitskaya plays Maryutka and Oleg Strizhenov the officer. It took a special prize at Cannes in 1957. It is one of the early works of Thaw cinema to tell the civil war seeing human beings on both sides.