True Friends

Three men who were friends as boys realise in middle age that work has swallowed their lives: one is a famous surgeon, one an academic, one an architect. Keeping a promise made in their youth, they set off down the Volga on a raft. Along the way each collides with the vanity of his own profession. The film is not interested in the river trip. It is interested in remembering who you are in middle age: the further the three get from their titles, the more honest they become. The strand about the architect, and the bureaucracy around him, is its bravest passage. The form is light comedy: songs, accidents, misunderstandings in the towns along the way. When it was made matters. The script was submitted for approval in 1952 but was only cleared for shooting after Stalin's death, which makes it a product of the first relaxation of political control in Soviet cinema, and you can feel that in its tone. Mikhail Kalatozov directed. It won the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary and, with 30.9 million tickets sold, was the seventh most-watched Soviet film of 1954. Kalatozov's next film would be The Cranes Are Flying. Vasili Merkuryev, Boris Chirkov and Aleksandr Borisov star. Who it is for: viewers who like Soviet popular comedy and films about friendship. Who it is not for: anyone expecting sharp humour. The film is optimistic, polite, and everyone learns a lesson by the end.