Vanya and Nyurka’s excellent adventure

Печки-лавочки [Pyéchki-lávochki] (Happy-Go-Lucky) 1972 Gorkii Film Studio U.S.S.R. (96 minutes) written, directed by and starring Vasily Shukshin.

This entertaining Soviet comedy contrasts a pair of collective farm country mice with more sophisticated urban Soviet fauna in the heyday of the Brezhnev era in the 1970s.

The humor is sunny. The story has a quietly personal political intensity at its core that made the movie resonate for Soviet audiences. Without being fatally ‘anti-Soviet,’ it has fun showing how ungrounded contemporary Soviet urban life might look to down-to-earth farmers with a foot in the nineteenth century.

The film opens with the expanse of the wide-open steppe and the rhythm of the lives that husband it. It is filled with the bustle of modern train travel, Moscow's quick tempo and Coney Island-like summer crowds on a Black Sea beach. It ends with the protagonist sitting on a home field with his bare feet on the ground.

Vasily Shukshin, the Soviet writer, actor and director, wrote, directed and stars in the film; his is one of the many great Soviet faces beautifully shot in black and white by cinematographer Anatoly Zabolotskii. Shukshin grew up in Srostki, a remote village on the Katun’ River below Biisk in the Altai region of southwestern Siberia.

Vasily Shukshin as Vanya Rastorguyev among family in Shul'gin Log in Happy-Go-Lucky 1972.

He shot the film on location in Srostki and the nearby village of Shul’gin Log (as well as in Moscow and Crimea, and aboard trains) with a mix of professional actors and local people which give it a ‘nonfiction’ flavor that makes it homely and also enlivens it. His actress wife Lidiya Fedoseyeva Shukshina and their daughters Mariya and Ol’ga play the protagonist’s wife and daughters.

The story is simple. Vanya—Ivan Sergeyevich Rastorguyev (Shukshin)—a Siberian ‘hero tractor driver’ (though only shown scything manually, like a Tolstoyan peasant), takes his wife Nyura (Shukshina) on a two-week summer holiday to a Black Sea resort in Crimea.

Vanya and Nyura have lived in Shul’gin Log all their lives and never ventured outside their region. They travel 2400 miles by train to Moscow, stay in the city several days with a retired philologist they meet on the train, and then continue their trip to the Black Sea coast, another 900 miles to the south.

As Vanya’s neighbors celebrate his leave-taking, he makes sure they understand he would be just as happy to take the time off at home.

‘Hey…I don’t need a vacation,’ Vanya says. ‘I’ll go along with this resort thing if you really think I should. I’d just as soon take my fishing pole, sit on the river bank, and chill out. That’s all: happy-go-lucky.’

(Вот…не отдых мне не нужен, сдались мне этот саниторий если уж вы думаете, что я. Я вон пошел с удочкой, набережку посидел, и отдохнул. И все, печки-лавочки.)

The title comes from the Russian expression, pyéchki-lávochki, translated ‘happy-go-lucky,’ which means something more like ‘loosey-goosey’ or ‘come what may.’ Vanya uses the expression again, later on the train. After he and Nyura unwittingly encounter a thief, a retired professor with the same kind of suitcase comes into their compartment.

‘Here we go again with the happy-go-lucky,’ Vanya tells her, aggressively eyeing their pleasantly unsuspecting new fellow traveller.

It turns out that the professor, Sergei Fyodorovich Stepanov (Vsevolod Sanayev), is a philologist interested in regional dialects and folklore. He enjoys speaking with the couple and invites them to visit him in Moscow before continuing their trip to Crimea. This gives Shukshin license further to enliven his story with nonstandard words and folk expressions that go along with Fyodor Teleletskikh’s lovely background balalaika music.

Shukshin’s narrative style isanecdotal. In addition to the professor, the couple encounters a variety of Soviet types, from petty bureaucrats and policemen to students and a scam artist.

Lidiya Shukshina, Vasily Shukshin and Vadim Zakharchenko in Happy-Go-Lucky 1972.

A Phil Silvers-like ‘business traveller’ (Vadim Zakharchenko) offends Vanya by suggesting to him that he should leave his country ways of speaking and acting in the country when travelling among more sophisticated people, such as having his wife hide their money in her stocking. (Others offer similar advice, in that sublimely Chekhovian manner of being not all that more sophisticated themselves.)

Vanya angrily calls the interloper a ‘prostitute in trousers, and a hat, and a raincoat’ which, true to the art of Russian insult and like many a Bob Dylan song, uses incongruous, euphonious words for the sounds they make to shape the sense one wants them to mean (profursyétka v shtanákh, i v shlyápe, i v plashché—профурсетка в штанах, и в шляпе, и в плаще).

The film’s best sketch is Vanya and Nyura’s time with Viktor Aleksandrovich (Georgii Burkov), a smooth-talking charmer who talked his way on the train without a ticket. Viktor tells the couple he is a ‘konstruktor,’ or designer, first of trains, then of aviation, and the originator of System ‘Y’ (sistema ‘i-grek’).

'Floating in the air': Vasily Shukshin, Georgii Burkov and Lidiya Shukshina in Happy-Go-Lucky 1972.

Viktor describes to these wide-eyed country folk a train he is working on that can levitate across spaces such as rivers that once required bridges. He gives them gifts from his suitcase—to which he incidentally lost the key, thus must borrow Vanya’s knife to pop the locks. In the end, he finds a practical application for his system right before Vanya and Nyura’s eyes—not to mention those of a curious police sergeant (Viktor Filippov).

‘Well there you go, Ivan, you asked for an explanation of System “Y”,’ Viktor says after the policeman leaves the compartment.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Just then, right before your eyes, System “Y” went into operation.’

‘Huh?’

‘Well, there we were in the air. We ever so gently rose up and then ever so gently touched down.’*

The exchange gives Vanya an inkling of what he soon will discover. Shukshin’s humor works by putting together lively characters from different walks of Soviet life, letting his characters have fun at each other’s expense while treading lightly on the edges of state organizations, institutions and ideology.

Vanya and Nyura scratch their heads throughout at the odd ways of ‘sophisticates’ whose mild patronization makes the couple the more sympathetic.

Having identified Vanya as a ‘type,’ the professor they met on the train gets him to speak to a group of university students on a subject of his choice. Vanya frets over what to say, thinking that his views must be too narrow, his learning to shallow to say anything useful to these privileged intellikents. He ends up telling them what he thinks is a silly story about shearing a horse’s mane, which he wraps up with a French ‘merci’ for the benefit of his learned audience.

In doing so, he turns the tables on the educated folk without really understanding what he has done; the professor gets it though.

Nyura and Vanya on holiday in Crimea in Happy-Go-Lucky 1972.

 *‘Вот, ты сейчас, Иван, спрашивал насчёт системы “игрек”?’

‘да.’

‘толко что, на ваших глазах, сработала система “игрек”.’

‘эх?’

Так вот, мы были в воздуке. Мы так плав-нень-ко поднялись, и плав-нень-ко опустились.’

The Man

The Man 1972 U.S. (93 minutes) directed by Joseph Sargent; screenplay by Rod Serling, based on Irving Wallace’s 1964 novel.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Once upon a time there was a stereotypical ‘minority’ American political figure modeled after an image of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, whose dignity and status seemed to derive from the essential fact that he had no real power and influence when push came to shove. He was ‘safe.’ His status and gravitas made him a ‘role model’ for schoolchildren. Better yet, decorous public accolades tended to reflect more beneficially on their ‘majority’ bestowers than on the recipient.

Douglass Dilman (James Earl Jones) fit this stereotype in Joseph Sargent’s 1972 political thriller The Man. Jones’ Senator Dilman is an ‘articulate’ academic who can—cue the music and replay the legend—look back with richly enunciated diction and no less ostentatious satisfaction on a lifetime of rags-to-riches achievement. But day to day he pads the corridors of power to his grove of restful laurels as a do-nothing legislator.

Dilman had been exactly the right ‘note’ to strike for the largely ceremonial role of President pro tempore of the Senate after the hope of the early 1960s turned to civil strife by the end of the decade. The political establishment considered him ‘a well-dressed rebuttal’ to the race riots and protest marches. A middle-aged career politician, academic and solitary widower with an adult daughter, Dilman was a serious Negro face in a prominent place meant to mollify Negro activists and firebrands—but only a face.

'The face in the mirror won't stop': James Earl Jones in The Man 1972

A chain of unforeseen events and the constitutional protocol for presidential succession ‘pushes’ Dilman out of the corridors he had padded and ‘shoves’ him behind the desk in the Oval Office at the White House. Dilman becomes ‘The Man.’

This takes place before the title credits: the opening sequence begins with a buzz of worried activity against the background of a Washington Press Correspondents Association dinner hosted by comedian Jack Benny—and ends with Dilman picking up a telephone receiver.

Thus, less than ten years after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law (and right before the Nixon presidency’s Watergate crises), the United States has its first black president.

To define is to control. But do others’ facile definitions suit this man? Few people seem to have any idea of who Dilman is. A key to his character and the shape the story takes is something his activist daughter Wanda (Janet MacLachlan) suggests to him as he wrestles with what he thinks the country expects of him, particularly other black people.

‘They don’t want you to be humble,’ Wanda says. ‘They don’t want you to apologize. They just want you president.’

James Earl Jones and Janet MacLachlan in The Man 1972

The story anticipates history. Once Dilman gets to the Oval Office, his staff and the Washington political establishment appear to divide between those who respect the office and look to President Dilman for direction and leadership to support or oppose, and those who simply cannot abide the thought of a black man in the White House.

Dilman begins to find his footing in the ‘bully pulpit’ at his first press conference. Rather than speak from a handler’s ‘talking points,’ he opts for candor, showing that he is committed to do the job that has fallen on him. His straight talk feels more like a screenwriter’s conceit than what someone in this position might actually say, but it is refreshing and entertaining. Americans usually welcome authenticity in their presidents.

As Jim Talley (Martin Balsam), Dilman’s inherited chief of staff, tells him after the event, ‘You went in with a rubber stamp and came out carrying a shillelagh.’ Dilman’s independence surprises Talley; but once Talley sees that this president expects to do his job, Talley knows what his own role is.

Dilman’s independence also surprises Arthur Eaton (William Windom), his inherited secretary of state. Eaton had assumed that the do-nothing senator gladly would coast while Eaton and the former president’s cabal run the show. Given the new terms, and despite the barbs of his hyperambitious ‘Washington wife’ Kay (Barbara Rush), Eaton’s lawyerly pragmatism counsels him to ride out the end of Dilman’s term and best position himself to seek his party’s nomination at the coming convention.

But one man’s well-dressed rebuttal is a far cry from that same man’s president. Senator Watson (Burgess Meredith), author of the comment and the devious Senate minority leader ‘from a Southern state,’ shows his hand in an attempt to pass legislation behind the president’s back blocking Dilman from replacing his predecessor’s cabinet members. (Watson would be entirely at home in the current House of Representatives.)  

The stakes go up after Robert Wheeler (Georg Stanford Brown), a black American student activist, creates an international incident by allegedly assassinating the South African minister of defense in South Africa. South Africa demands his extradition. Wheeler appeals directly to President Dilman to intervene in his case.

The bad news about this movie is slim: it was done on a 1970s telemovie budget and the original 35mm print apparently was misplaced or lost.

The good news is that it is an efficient, well-paced, well-made political thriller.

Jones leads a terrific cast with his Orson Wellesian voice and presence. Rod Serling’s thoughtful script engages fraught race issues while keeping Dilman’s character the focus of the story and leaving out cartoon characters. Serling best exercises his self-appointed role as public conscience by placing a man among other men and women in a drama rather than trying to teach a lesson.

As The Man in the drama, Jones wholly inhabits this first black American president as a father and widower, an academic philosopher who values truth and a canny politician looking for an edge. His is a portrait in leadership. Secretary Eaton might have a more serious rival than he expects at the party’s national convention. 

Skyfall

Skyfall 2012 U.K. (143 minutes) directed by Sam Mendes; written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan, based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond; director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Stuart and Kate Baird.

Skyfall is a heck of a good action thriller that gets back to basics to reboot the James Bond legend.

The latest Bond movie is unusual in that while it plays on a theme of doing things ‘the old-fashioned way,’ it also considers whether public and private organizations are better off when they rely on sophisticated technical means to do humans’ jobs.

Cash-strapped governments no less than profit-plush private enterprise revel in each technical marvel that lets them retire another idiosyncratic and expensive pair of boots pounding pavement—until those boots come pounding to their rescue. 

Nor does this fifty-year-old franchise’s latest entertainment pause on a boring plateau before the dénouement. The usual pattern would be that a fast-moving plot gets needlessly sidetracked by the exposition either of a romance going nowhere or the bad guy’s equally futile and rococo scheme to do away with Bond. More than two hours of this movie scoot by with scarcely a stop for a breath. 

However, the reviews are mixed. Anthony Lane noted that it is a good movie, just not a good Bond movie. This of course depends on what one means by ‘Bond movie.’

Ian Fleming’s novels are the pulp fiction cousins of Mickey Spillane’s brood, the former informed by the harsh realities of Britain’s receding empire during the Second World War and the Joseph Stalin-era Cold War.

Fleming remade the doughty gentleman soldier of an earlier generation of thriller writers, such as John Buchan’s Richard Hannay of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), into a tough, capable, and solidly middle class male fantasy. He gave Bond a pastiche of knowing the value of things for which the target audience could be relied upon to know the prices. Fleming’s Bond is a Mike Hammer with a BBC accent.

In the hands of moviemakers, Sean Connery and the Bond screenwriters and directors cut capers round the male fantasy. They created the polished, wise-cracking lady-killer and the female and technical toys without which no Bond picture could be complete. Connery’s Bond was a tough act to follow. At best, his successors have given the fantasy their own distinct flavor.

Craig’s Bond is closer to Fleming’s original, a capable killer with more pluck than polish. Skyfall, Craig’s third crack at the role, is his best, after a promising beginning with Casino Royale (2006) and the disappointing and morose Quantum of Solace (2008).

In Skyfall, a suspected act of international terrorism turns out to be the handiwork of a former MI6 ‘double 0’ operative seeking revenge against M (Judy Dench), his former boss, for ‘giving him up’ to the Chinese.

Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a perverse, cackling bottle blonde roué with dental issues, is a master computer hacker. His ‘enterprise’ apparently made him a liability to MI6 and the British government in the run-up to the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. Back at large, Silva turns his devious tradecraft against his former employer.

Meanwhile politicians at Whitehall conduct high profile inquiries into the relevancy and cost effectiveness of the secret services. Bond, trying to get a line on the hacker, tracks the assassin who tried to kill him in the opening sequence in Istanbul to the blue neon, other-worldly instant megalopolis which is the new Shanghai.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that while Bond watches the assassin set up to shoot a man identified as a ‘Shanghai art collector,’ we see the target appraising Amedeo Modigliani’s La Femme à l'Éventail (Lunia Czechowska) (1919). This painting was one of several masterpieces stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in May 2010, none of which have been recovered.

Bond subsequently encounters Sévérine (Bérénice Lim Marlohe), a mysterious Eurasian beauty with a checkered past and a Beretta strapped to her thigh, in a floating fleshpot in Macau, the Chinese Las Vegas. In Mondo Bond this usually means an express ticket to the big bad wolf. Enter Silva.

Before long, Silva brings the whole show home to old-fashioned London.

M and MI6 get political support from old fashioned Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee and a former British Army officer with field intelligence experience in Northern Ireland.

The new Q, whom Ben Whishaw plays gamely as a callow computer geek, seems more like a throwback to the Ultra people at Station X at Bletchley Park. At outset, Q supplies Bond with two items: a high tech Walther PPK pistol which only the authorized user’s palm print can activate to fire, and a simple radio transmitter that Q branch could have issued in Goldfinger (1964). This will be all that Bond needs.

In a sense, using a straight razor to stand for doing things the old-fashioned way seems to translate as applying William of Occam’s shaving implement to get to ‘the British way.’ The dénouement is right out of Buchan.

Bond leaves behind the flash and dash to spirit away M as bait to the Scottish highlands in the iconic silver-birch gold 1964 Aston Martin DB5 (which first appeared in Goldfinger), to draw Silva to his home turf. The Scottish highlands prove to be good country for old men, especially a gillie like Kincade (Albert Finney), though perhaps a bit too hot for one old lady.

Director Sam Mendes ties his movie with a bow where many Bond films start: a fresh Bond with a new Miss Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), every bit as bright and sexy as the young Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny from 1962-85), outside the oak of M’s inner chambers; a new assignment awaits within.

All of which leaves no doubt that JAMES BOND WILL BE BACK: orbis non sufficit.