Many people are pleased to think that the pearls of Soviet cinema are the property of an exclusively domestic audience, which no one in the West is able to appreciate. In fact, despite the Iron Curtain, a huge number of Soviet films reached foreign audiences and gained wide recognition. Some films have reached cult status - they are being revisited even many years after the premiere.
"The Cranes Are Flying" (1957)
Mikhail Kolatozov's tape "The Cranes Are Flying" is the only Soviet film that won the Golden Branch of the Cannes Film Festival. And at the same time the highest-grossing film, which was awarded the Grand Prix of this festival.
In the foreign box office, the film was a huge success - in France, according to polls, it is still in the top 100 films. The director received many letters from abroad with arguments about the "mysterious Russian soul." Seductive offers for filming in Hollywood also fell on the actress Tatyana Samoilova.
However, in the USSR, the international success of the tape was not to everyone's taste. The Soviet press reported without much detail about the triumph at Cannes. The reason was simple - "at the top" the content of the film was considered questionable. Nikita Khrushchev compared the main character Veronica, who abandoned her front-line boyfriend by marrying another, to a corrupt woman. Tatyana Samoilova was in disgrace - the actress was not allowed to go abroad. And Mikhail Kolatozov made only three films after 1957.
"Frost" (1964)
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Released in 1964, the color film-tale by Alexander Row "Morozko" is traditionally shown in the Czech Republic and Slovakia on New Year's Eve (as in Russia "The Irony of Fate"). True, in the Czech version the title of the film is not very euphonious for the Russian ear - Mrazík.
The popularity of this story was not affected either by the cooling of the attitude of the Czechoslovakians towards the Russians after the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, nor by the farewell to socialism that happened in 1989.
Indeed, there is no communist propaganda in the film. Morozko is, first of all, a kind children's fairy tale, although in an attempt to unravel its popularity in their own country, Czech critics recruit psychoanalysis and plunge into the depths of Slavic mythology. However, it is possible that the Czech dubbing of the film was better than the original. In 2000, a computer game "The Adventures of Santa Claus, Ivan and Nastya" was published in the Czech Republic in the quest genre from Bohemia Interactive Studio. And in Bratislava, based on the film, the ice musical "Morozko" with the participation of figure skaters is traditionally staged.
"Mom" (1976)
The film "Mama" with Mikhail Boyarsky and Lyudmila Gurchenko in the lead roles is a joint Soviet-Romanian-French project. It was directed by Elisabeth Bostan, based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale "The Wolf and the Seven Kids" (there are five of them in the film) with a modern twist. In terms of genre, it can be called a children's rock musical.
During the filming, the actors spoke and sang in three languages at once, and perhaps that is why the rolling fate of the picture turned out to be bizarre. In the Soviet Union, "Mama" passed without a stir, later it was rarely shown on TV, and now not everyone remembers this film. As Mikhail Boyarsky said, the smallest number of takes was spent on the Russian version during filming.
But in other countries, the film (called Rock'n'Roll Wolf in the English version) was a huge success. "Mama" is an obligatory part of the New Year holidays in Norway. For the first time in this country, an English version with subtitles was shown in 1984, and the Norwegian viewers liked the film so much that they began to write on television asking them to repeat the show. Since 2003, the Norwegian state TV channel has been broadcasting the film regularly, so Norwegian children celebrate Christmas "in the company" of Boyarsky and Gurchenko.
"Moscow does not believe in tears" (1979)
In 1981, Vladimir Menshov's film, which headed the Soviet distribution, won the Oscar as the best foreign film. This happened against the background of a significant deterioration in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union (a year earlier, the Americans boycotted the Olympics in Moscow).
The international success of the film, as in the case of the film "The Cranes Are Flying", was a surprise to the leadership of the State Film Agency. Director Menshov was not even allowed to attend the awards ceremony. According to film critic Jane Franklin, American theaters were packed to capacity. The film refuted the idea of the Russians as “communist robots”, imposed by the US conservative forces, which were especially powerful at that time. Instead, the tape showed ordinary human feelings and addressed the perennial issues of the relationship between a man and a woman.
In the era of Perestroika, the film received a new round of popularity. It was "advertised" personally by American President Ronald Reagan, who, before his visit to the USSR, reviewed the tape several times in order to better imagine how ordinary Soviet citizens live.
Christina Rudic