General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Cranes Are Flying (Летят журавли)

The Cranes Are Flying (Летят журавли) is a 1957 Soviet war drama directed by Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm, based on Viktor Rozov's play Verno zhivye (Вечно живые, "Forever Alive"), about a young couple, Veronika and Boris, separated by World War II¹. It won the Palme d'Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival and is described as the only Soviet or Russian feature to have done so²^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Production	Mosfilm, 1957; director Mikhail Kalatozov, screenwriter Viktor Rozov, cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, composer Moisei Weinberg¹^•⁴
Source	Adapted from Viktor Rozov's play Verno zhivye ("Forever Alive")¹
Lead cast	Tatyana Samoilova (Veronika), Alexei Batalov (Boris), Vasily Merkuriev, Aleksandr Shvorin¹
Cannes	Palme d'Or, 1958 Cannes Film Festival; described as the only Soviet or Russian feature to win it²^•⁵
Format	96 minutes, black and white, 1.37:1, in Russian, Criterion Spine #146²
Historical role	The film that announced the post-Stalin cultural Thaw to the world, told through a flawed, forgivable heroine on the home front³
Samoilova's prize	Special diploma for the lead role at the XI festival in Cannes¹

Spoilers

Story

The film follows Veronika (Tatyana Samoilova) and Boris (Alexei Batalov), lovers whose happiness is broken when Boris volunteers for the front in the early years of World War II². With Boris away, Veronika must ward off spiritual numbness and defend herself from the increasingly forceful advances of his draft-dodging cousin Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin)². Under the pressure of bombing, displacement, and grief, Veronika enters an unwanted marriage to Mark out of guilt and shame after he apparently forces her to have sex, while believing Boris is missing in action; she learns of Boris's death later.⁶^•¹⁴. In the closing scenes, Veronika returns to Moscow amid the mass return of soldiers and finally comes to terms with Boris's death³. The title's image of flying cranes appears at the end, symbolizing hope and the souls of the fallen⁷.

The Thaw context

Stalin's death in 1953 opened a "thaw" in Soviet society, made explicit after Nikita Khrushchev's February 1956 speech at the Twentieth Party Congress denouncing Stalin and his cult of personality⁸. The Cranes Are Flying was produced at Mosfilm in 1957, at the symbolic midpoint of that period³. Where the Stalin-era war film monumentalized the state, the army, and the leader, this film relocates the war to the home front and the wounded individual, and tells the sacred war story through a heroine who is flawed and forgivable³. At a prerelease screening it produced what the Criterion essay describes as a collective ecstasy among film professionals; the director Mikhail Romm confessed that he had sat through the whole movie in tears⁸.

The film was not the first Soviet work to re-evaluate the war from a personal perspective, but contemporary scholarship rates it the most daring and the most successful of its moment, paving the way for Grigori Chukhrai's Ballad of a Soldier (1959) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (1962)⁹.

Cinematography

The film's reputation rests heavily on the camerawork of Sergei Urusevsky, Kalatozov's regular collaborator, whose handheld, gravity-defying camera turns Veronika's distress into visual experience². Kalatozov called the method the "emotional camera": elaborate handheld takes that put his characters' feelings in purely visual terms¹⁰. A custom spinning elevator camera rig was used to film a bravura staircase sequence¹¹. Critics have compared the camera's movement to techniques that anticipated drones by decades¹², and the film's fluidity has been read as prescient of the French New Wave of the early 1960s³.

Urusevsky was a perfectionist on set: a crew member recalled that he once canceled a full day's shoot because the right shaped cloud failed to materialize¹². According to later scholarship, Urusevsky himself was not fully satisfied, complaining that editorial influence produced a series of "conversational" and "prosaic" scenes that diluted the poetic principle¹³.

Reception and legacy

The Cannes triumph ensured the film a cultural impact, by one Criterion account, arguably greater than that of any Soviet film since before the war⁸. It enjoyed extensive distribution in Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia, and placed Soviet cinema back at the center of the art-film conversation just as the European new waves were forming⁹^•³.

Contemporary critics have continued to rate it highly. Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times that Kalatozov's direction and Samoilova's performance produce "a tremendous feeling of sympathy... that has no awareness of geographical or political bounds"⁶. Slant Magazine calls it one of the greatest films of the Soviet era⁶. The Criterion Collection released it as Spine #146, with a 2K digital restoration and supplements including a 1961 audio interview with Kalatozov and the 2009 documentary Hurricane Kalatozov on the Georgian director's complicated relationship with the Soviet government². In recent years the film's standing has been partly shared with Kalatozov's rediscovered 1964 film I Am Cuba¹⁰. The Criterion essay concludes that, tested by time, the film endures as a classic of Soviet cinema⁸.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › War action and adventure › War action films released through 1999 › Released 1934 to 1962

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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