Hidden Flick: Women and Children First

The Cranes Are Flying tells of a woman who agrees to wed her Russian boyfriend, and yet he doesn’t tell her until the last minute that he is going off to fight the Nazis in a war that has to be fought—at any cost. In the confusion, she is led to believe that he is killed, and gets involved with another man during the war. Indeed, the luckless gent returns home both shattered by the bloody conflict with the Germans, and the fact that his faithless, misinformed girlfriend had so little regard for his well-being that she got involved with another man—a man who found a way to avoid military service by lying about his own condition. The real tragedy is, of course, the war, but the film is a stunner because it does, in fact, detail how the idea that one can go to bed without blood on one’s hands during a global conflict is hypocritical, vain, and tragically incorrect.

Ivan’s Childhood, is also a film made in the Soviet Union during the early 1960s, but that is merely a coincidence as I don’t condone communism as either a concept, an idea, or a way to build a nation-state. In the end, the individual that is supposedly being saved by communism is crushed by the very forces pretending to seek power for the good of all. However, both of these great films captured the innocence of citizens left behind when one goes off to fight in battle. The story of Ivan digs even further in its depiction of his bone-chilling plight during World War II. He is an orphan living in squalor in Russia, insisting on doing battle with the heinous Huns, otherwise known as the Third Reich, and the scourge of mankind in the 20th Century. He does, indeed, get his wish.

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The film was directed by the great cinema master, Andrei Tarkovski, who would go onto greater controversy and film fame with his epic about the icon artist Andrei Rublev, and his twin trippy science fiction classics, Solaris, and Stalker.

In the end, these two Hidden Flicks depict the sorrow and suffering that infects a society because of war, and the less said about its shattering storylines, and imagery the better. See them. Ivan’s Childhood is a masterpiece of plot and character development, telling the story of a youth’s innocence quickly turned into hard-edged maturity. The film also negates the old adage that one should never work with children in creating great cinematic art. Its Hidden Flick partner this week, The Cranes Are Flying, written and directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, is a rich tale of families torn apart at home during a war, and how prejudice about a person’s role in society can also fuel an individual’s downfall.

Again, it is merely a quiet irony and a sad coincidence that I am using two Russian films, two products of the old and corrupt Soviet Union to prove a point about how a group action can destroy the individual. These films don’t appear to attack their government for what it has done to their lives. They embrace their country, and fight for what is right and true in their hearts. At that moment in the 1940s…the United States and the Soviet Union worked as one with a legion of other allied nations to uproot the insidious specter of Nazi Germany. That is assuredly the overriding aspect of this conflict: it was certainly not just the men who made these grave decisions that paid the ultimate price during World War II; it was the women and children, regardless of ideology, who paid, as well.

And yet, as I think back about the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and one of the reasons that the terrorists used to justify their actions—that Americans didn’t know death on their own home turf, didn’t have the scars of battle shoved in their collective face—I do think of Russia, and the losses it took in their vast land during World War II. But I also think of the American Civil War in the 19th Century. I think of American relatives who lost generations of their families in Nazi death camps. I think of WWI, and the Korean and Vietnamese wars, and its toll on our nation, both physically and emotionally. I could think of any nation who is thought to be removed from war in some weird way. I think that it is a great misconception to believe that America has never had its own sense of loss in its own big way. After all, the thought may be that it is a greater misconception to think that a group acting as one centralized tool can bring positive change to a planet when thinking only of itself. Women and children first? Sure…but let’s not forget that anyone worth saving is worth saving for something that includes everyone. THAT is something that a terrorist will never understand…a god larger than us, including all of us.