#601: KALATOZOV, Mikhail: Letter Never Sent (1959)

KALATOZOV, Mikhail (Soviet Union)

Letter Never Sent [1959]

Spine #601
Blu-ray

The great Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov, known for his virtuosic, emotionally gripping films, perhaps never made a more visually astonishing one than Letter Never Sent. This absorbing tale of exploration and survival concerns the four members of a geological expedition, who are stranded in the bleak and unforgiving Siberian wilderness while on a mission to find diamonds. Luxuriating in wide-angle beauty and featuring one daring shot after another (the brilliant cinematography is by Kalatozov's frequent collaborator Sergei Urusevsky), Letter Never Sent is a fascinating piece of cinematic history and a universal adventure of the highest order.

96 minutes
Black & White

Monaural

in Russian

1:33:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2012

Director/Writer

Based on the story by Valeri Osipov.

Screenplay by Grigori Koltunov, Osipov, and Viktor Rozov.

Mikhail Kalatozov was 56 when he directed Letter Never Sent.

Other Kalatozov films in the Collection:

#146: The Cranes Are Flying (1957)
#1215: I Am Cuba (1964)

The Film

Sabinin (Innokenti Smoktunovsky)

Tanya (Tatyana Samoilova)

Andrei (Vasili Livanov)

Sergei (Yevgeny Urbansky)

Vera (Galina Kozhakina)

Photography by Sergei Urusevsky. Music by Nikolai Krlyukov.

The director’s earlier film The Cranes Are Flying (1957) (Spine #146) is a much better film than this effort from two years later.

Soviet realism at its best, though. Bare-bones and incredibly photographed by Urusevsky, the plot is simple: Four geologists make their way through hostile Siberian nature to establish the existence of diamonds there. (At one point, one of them comments on the similarity to the geology of South Africa, where diamonds are plentiful!)

Bleak, unrelenting — sometimes a bit silly (weak romantic plotting) — and with great cues of Soviet music by Krlyukov (not quite up to Shostakovich standards), Letter is generally fine cinema, with a few missteps (like the obvious studio inserts) ... there is a suggestion that Kalatozov was not quite finished, as he withdrew it from Cannes in 1960.

Film Rating (0-60):

50

The Extras

The Booklet

Twenty-page booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Dina Iordanova.

Commentary

None.

Hard to give much of an extras rating to a disc with only a booklet — which contains an excellent essay by Iordanova.

Extras Rating (0-40):

30

50 + 30 =

80

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