Mashenka
About Mashenka
Masha Stepanova works as a telegraph operator and trains as a nurse. During a practice alarm she meets taxi driver Alexei Solovyov. He reads her verse and asks her to the theater, then does not come. She finds him and helps him recover. They fall in love. He is careless with her, takes up another girl, and she breaks it off. Years and the Winter War separate them. They meet again at the Finnish front. He understands what he had walked away from.
Cast & crew
More about Mashenka
Yuli Raizman directed. Yevgeny Gabrilovich and Sergei Yermolinsky wrote the script. Yevgeni Andrikanis photographed and Boris Volsky composed the score. Valentina Karavayeva plays Masha and Mikhail Kuznetsov plays Alexei. Mosfilm released it on April 10, 1942. It runs 77 minutes.
Themes
Background
The film opened in April 1942, during the German war, and looks back to a love story that ends on the Finnish front.
Making
Raizman shoots a romance across a missed date and a war, with Karavayeva carrying the years between the taxi and the front.
Look
Yevgeni Andrikanis shot the city meetings and the later front reunion.
Music
Boris Volsky wrote the score.
Preservation
A print survives.
Notes
- The second meeting is on the Finnish front, the Winter War of 1939–1940, not the German front.
- Vera Altayskaya, Georgy Svetlani, and Dariya Pankratova are in the cast.
- Masha's two jobs at the start are the telegraph and sanitary training.
- The missed theater date is the first break in the courtship.
- The Russian title is the diminutive Mashenka.
Scenes
- Alexei invites her to the theater and fails to appear.
- She breaks with him after the other girl.
- They meet again on the Finnish front.
