CHAPAYEV Movie Review

A down-to-earth, iconoclastic, peasant-born Red Army commander takes on the White Russians in the bloody Civil War of 1919. Based on a biography of Chapayev written by one of his military associates, this enormously popular epic film was directed in a grandly pictorial, sweepingly energetic style, rousing yet not bombastic. Its creators, Sergei and Georgy Vassiliev, worked under the collective name of “The Brothers Vassiliev” but were in fact not brothers. (Go know.) Boris Babochkin makes a dashing and heroic Chapayev, though the pleasant surprise is that he's portrayed throughout as both a military hero and an ordinary human being—albeit one who rises to the occasion when circumstances demand. Chapayev contains a rather amazing and terrifying battle sequence in which the White Army forms what amounts to a parade of the dead; the instant that any one of their neatly uniformed soldiers is felled by gunfire, the dead man is instantly replaced by an identically uniformed man; the unit marches forward without the slightest disruption of its formation. The actual incident was designed to scare the hell out of the Red Army, of course, but its eerie recreation does a number on the viewer as well. (As a gentle reminder of how political climates can be even more unpredictable than El Niño, America's National Board of Review—originally founded in 1909 as the National Board of Censorship—gave Chapayev its Best Foreign Film of the Year Award in 1935.)

NEXT STOP … Strike, Ten Days That Shook the World, The End of St. Petersburg

1934 101m/B RU Boris Chirkov, Varvara Myasnikova, Illarian Pevzov, Boris Babochkin, Leonid Kmit; D: Sergei Vassiliev, Georgy Vassiliev; W: Sergei Vassiliev, Georgy Vassiliev; C: Aleksander Sigayev, Alexander Xenofontov; M: Gavriil Popov. VHS VYY, AUD, IHF