by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie Charles and I watched together last night was Nine
Days of One Year, a 1962 production of the
Soviet Union, directed by Mikhail Romm from a script he co-wrote with Daniil
Khabrovitsky that’s essentially a romantic triangle set against the backdrop of
nuclear-power research. I’d first heard of this movie in Dwight Macdonald’s
collection On Movies, which
included a blasting review of it that made it sound so bad it could be a camp
classic — he began it something like, “‘Comrades!’ said Russian officials when
they still took the Five-Year Plans seriously. ‘We must catch up with and
overtake rotten, decadent American capitalism!’ Well, they haven’t done it in
pig iron and, as Nine Days of One Year proves, they haven’t done it in kitsch, either, and for the same
reason: we just keep coming up with new, more sophisticated methods of
production.” I had enough curiosity about this movie from Macdonald’s review
that when it appeared on TCM’s Sunday night foreign-movie slot I eagerly
recorded it — and was startled to find it was actually quite good, better than a U.S. film on the topic at that time
would have been. It’s possible that Macdonald was still bitter about Romm
because of the big career boost he’d got back in the 1930’s: after an early hit
with the 1934 film Pyshka (based
on Guy de Maupassant’s story “Boule de Suif,” which also inspired John Ford’s
1939 Stagecoach and Val Lewton’s
1944 Mademoiselle Fifi) he got
the plum assignment from Stalin himself to direct Lenin in October, the 1937 film meant to commemorate the 20th
anniversary of the Russian Revolution — the same commission Sergei Eisenstein
had got to commemorate the 10th anniversary of it in 1927. Romm also
made a sequel, Lenin in 1918, and
returned to Lenin as a subject for a documentary feature in 1949 (which I would
hazard a guess compares to Dziga Vertov’s 1934 masterpiece Three
Songs About Lenin much the way Lenin
in October compares to Eisenstein’s October) and a documentary short, Zhivoy Lenin, in 1957. Once Stalin died and Khrushchev instituted
the “thaw” Romm responded by becoming an outspoken voice for artistic freedom
(even kvetchy old Dwight
Macdonald gave him credit for that!)
and focusing mostly on documentaries, though he made a crime thriller in 1956
called Murder on Dante Street
that marked the film debut of the actor Innokenty Smoktunovsky, who plays a
supporting role in Nine Days of One Year and would go on to star in the Russian film of Hamlet (in Boris Pasternak’s translation) in 1964 and the
de-Gayed Tchaikovsky biopic the Soviets produced in 1969.
Nine Days
of One Year centers around three physicists
at a Soviet nuclear research institute: Dimitri “Mitya” Gusev (Alexei Batalov),
Ilya Kulikov (Innokenty Smoktunovsky) and the woman they both more or less
love, Lyolya (Tatiana Lavrova, who also made a film of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugen
Onegin — coincidentally playing a heroine
with her own first name, Tatiana — with Galina Vishnevskaya as her voice
double). The action begins when, in an attempt to build a controlled
thermonuclear reactor to try to harness the power of the H-bomb for peaceful
purposes, Professor Sintsov (Nikolai Plotnikov) runs the reactor at dangerously
critical levels and Gusev is exposed to 200 roentgens of radiation. It’s
explained that Gusev suffered a previous exposure to high levels of radiation
while at work on the Soviet A-bomb program a decade earlier, and a third
exposure will kill him. It’s also established that years before he had a
clandestine love affair with Lyolya, though after that she forgot him and
started dating his friend Ilya — not knowing there was any connection between
the two men — only she and Dimitri re-start their former relationship once Ilya
flies out to the reactor site to help rebuild the reactor and make it safer.
Dimitri and Lyolya end up getting married — in a rather dispiriting ceremony
that shows what the Soviets probably did if you wanted something more than just
a registry-office wedding but weren’t about to risk the opprobrium you’d have
suffered in the officially atheist Soviet Union if you’d gone for a church
ceremony. We get the impression that this is basically a “mercy wedding” since
all three parties in the triangle expect Dimitri to be dead within a year and
Lyolya and Ilya to get back together after he croaks. While all this is going
on Dimitri makes a sensational discovery that, at least at first, he believes
is the existence of free-floating neutrons in plasma, which will make
controlled fusion possible (Macdonald ridiculed the movie scientists’ shout,
“Hurrah, neutrons!,” as they appear to have reached this result). Only Dimitri
eventually realizes that the effect he discovered, while useful for space travel
(how? Romm and Khabrovitsky never bother to explain), is not actually free-floating neutrons in plasma and
therefore controlled fusion remains as elusive as ever. In the final scenes —
the movie’s construction gimmick is that it does indeed take place over nine
days in one year, but the nine days are not consecutive and the story jumps through a one-year
time frame in nine discrete one-day installments — Dimitri, having suffered the
third high-dose exposure that will kill him, volunteers to be the first human
to undergo a bone-marrow transplant that previously has been performed only on
laboratory dogs, and the movie has a daring open-ended ending in which he’s
about to go through the treatment but we have no idea whether he’ll live or
die.
What’s most fascinating about Nine Days of One Year is the level of angst in the storytelling; as I joked early on, if
Dostoyevsky had lived long enough to write a novel about nuclear power, this
would have been it. Macdonald faulted the film for recycling too many American-created
movie clichés, but if anything Romm and Khabrovitsky played against quite a few clichés; for example, the marriage of
Dimitri and Lyolya isn’t the doomed Love Story-esque idyll it would have been in a U.S. film but a
miserable excuse for a union between two people who have little in common other
than their jobs — and there’s a feminist undertone in that one reason Lyolya is
unhappy in the relationship is she’s expected to do the stereotypically
“womanly” thing and cook Dimitri breakfast before he goes off to work — at
which she’s wretchedly untalented. Charles was amused by the scene in which she
boils a large pot of water so Dimitri can pour it over their car in order to
get to work; Charles remembered that in Buffalo, New York, where he spent a
large part of his childhood, his mom had to do that to warm the radiator enough
to turn the ice into water so the car would work. Nine Days of One
Year is also marvelously photographed by
cinematographer German Lavrov, Romm’s long-term collaborator; Romm and Lavrov
give us some surprisingly oblique camera angles and a couple of vertiginous pan
scenes following the characters up stairs. They also take full advantage of the
naturally indirect light in northern Russia; Conrad Hall once said he was
jealous of Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer, because the position
of Sweden on the earth relative to the sun gave him naturally indirect light
with which to work — and one wonders if Russian cameramen got the same
advantage from working in the far north of their country that the Swedes did.
It’s not often that you switch on something expecting a good-bad movie and end
up with a work of real quality; though Nine Days of One Year gets predictably soapy at times and has some longueurs (one does
get the impression that for Russian directors, especially ones like Romm who
started under Stalin and his ban on the rapid-fire montage cutting for which Eisenstein had become famous, slow
and ponderous = profound), for the most part it’s an interesting movie that maintains
one’s interest and eloquently balances the personal and the scientific. It’s
also got some surprisingly jaundiced social commentary about the Soviet system
and in particular the mind-numbingly stupid decisions made by the bureaucracy —
no doubt a reflection of the Khrushchev “thaw” era in which it was made!
