60 Days
About 60 Days
Professor Yevgeny Antonov (Nikolai Cherkasov) and Dr. Pyotr Pugachev (Valentin Yantsat) are called up for sixty days of reserve-officer courses. They already quarrel at the clinic over a new laboratory and over the assistant Lyusenka (Zoya Fyodorova). Pugachev is brisk and mocks the absent-minded Antonov. In camp Antonov insults his instructors, Major Davydov (Grigory Lyubimov) among them, and talks like a pacifist, until pride and the men beside him pull him into the work. On the final maneuvers he commands a unit, improvises, and carries a training stunt. Back at the clinic he takes a whole floor for his labs, and Lyusenka.
Cast & crew
More about 60 Days
Mikhail Shapiro directed Serafim Kananykin’s script at Lenfilm in 1940. Alexander Gintsburg and Sergei Ivanov photographed; Sergei Mitin wrote the music; Alexander Black designed the sets. Also titled Commanders of the Reserve. A Central Committee commission listing films banned in 1940 and 1941 objected that the maneuvers let Antonov win by chance after he had refused to learn. The comedy reached screens on 8 February 1943.
Themes
Background
Shot in 1940, before the German invasion, as a comedy about reserve call-ups. By the February 1943 release the Red Army was fighting at scale, and a shelved training farce was let out.
Making
The picture sat on the shelf through the first part of the war. The commission’s note says the tactical exercise is staged so that the reservist who would not study is the one who wins.
Reviews
The 1969 history of Soviet cinema treats the 1940 ban as misplaced. Yurenev, in 1964, writes up the camp as the place where Antonov stops being only a clinic joke.
Look
Alexander Gintsburg and Sergei Ivanov shot the clinic quarrels and the camp maneuvers.
Music
Sergei Mitin composed the score.
Preservation
The 1940 Lenfilm negative was released in 1943 and survives, including a print circulated under the production year.
Notes
- Boris Zhukovsky plays the institute director. Ivan Nazarov is Captain Glazatov, an instructor. Alexander Yankevsky is Busarov, the regimental commissar.
- Uncredited bits include Yevgenia Golynchik as a postwoman and Vitaly Politseymako as a reserve commander named Volkov.
- The History of Soviet Cinema volume for 1931–1941 (1969) calls the ban hard to explain, because the comedy was arguing that the country had to train for war.
- Rostislav Yurenev’s Soviet Film Comedy (1964) describes the sixty days as the scientist’s entry into a rough, joking camp.
- The Commons file is labeled 1940, the year it was shot, not the 1943 release.
Scenes
- Pugachev needles Antonov in the clinic over the new lab and the assistant.
- Antonov talks back to Major Davydov and is the company’s standing joke.
- On the last exercise he takes a unit through a training feat he was not supposed to be able to invent.
- He returns and claims a floor of the institute, and Lyusenka.
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (1940. Шестьдесят дней.webm)