directed by Aleksandr Ptushko
USSR
93 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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This got Roger Cormanized and re-released for TV as The Sword and the Dragon in 1960, and then eventually got the MST3K treatment as well, but before all of that it was Ilya Muromets, and the original Russian version is the one I'm going to be talking about here. Just because it's the original doesn't mean it's an untouchable classic, though. Old isn't always better, especially in this case.
Ilya Muromets is one of my favorite Russian folktales/hero stories/fairy tales/what-have-you, because to me it's always felt just a little more bonkers than usual, even for Russian legends. His outrageous escapades and temper make him feel more unpredictable than many hero protagonists, and a lot of the time he's depicted as an old guy instead of a brawny youth the way most heroes are. None of that is present in Alexsandr Ptushko's Ilya. This hero is a typical savior with an unstoppable drive to defend his homeland, having just enough of the wild in him to reject the materialistic, corrupt influence of the Prince and his court and champion justice over the accumulation of wealth, but never being so boisterous or contrarian as to become arrogant. Amusingly, the film repeatedly refers to him as a "youth" despite the actor playing him being obviously like 50 years old, disregarding any mention of his advanced age in the source material. Above all, Ilya is a hero of the Rus. Any nuance is stripped of him and his entire being exists solely to serve that purpose.
I know a lot of Soviet-era fairy tale adaptations are propaganda, but... some are more obvious than others, and boy, is Ilya Muromets obvious. It is also just appallingly racist, which, again, is not an infrequent theme in films like this, but even for the genre this movie is quite bold about it. The purity of the Rus is at stake and under attack from vicious, barbaric pagan Tatars, the bright and shining white faces of the beautiful Rus villagers stricken with worry as the raiders on their horses advance on them. The only people worth saving are the Rus, and the Rus are everything- all others must be struck down. The depravity of the invaders knows no bounds and they must be expelled from the motherland before they can pillage and steal innocent women. Again, no nuance to this whatsoever, just simple us-vs.-them racism. I noticed that a lot of the actors playing the Tatars seemed to be very obviously dubbed; their mouths don't sync up with their lines. This all reminds me of old Hollywood Westerns when Native actors would be told to speak their language and then the filmmakers would just write in whatever they wanted for the subtitles, because the white audience didn't know or care about Native languages. Identities other than the pure white ideal don't matter here. They are transformed into one homogenous mass of invaders.
The American re-release of this film placed a lot of emphasis on the fact that it uses a ridiculous amount of extras, even claiming it to have the largest cast of any film (which may not be accurate as of the present day). The sheer amount of people they manage to cram into this movie is very impressive, but again, that doesn't always equal better. There were some scenes during the climactic battle between all of Rus and the Tatar army that honestly just looked horrible. Huge, wide-angle shots of a featureless, unbelievably huge crowd of people trundling across a flat green field. It didn't move me, it didn't inspire awe or wonder, it just looked like a massive crowd shuffling around a football field. No trees, no foliage, just this landscape that looked like it had been razed, no characteristics, no nothing. Maybe that's what was intended: a scene purged of all that was not Rus, filled to the brim with countrymen and good cheer, all outside influence exterminated until the only thing that remained was the glory of the race.
I'm usually a fan of Ptushko, but only when I can kind of pretend he's just telling me a fairytale instead of trying to convince me of a political message. Coming from an American (as I enjoy doing, I shall link to the wikipedia article for "Military-entertainment complex" here) that's a little hypocritical, I know. Propaganda can sometimes just be fun to watch as long as you know it's propaganda. But stuff like this where it's not only propaganda but also vile and racist, aimed at wiping out a specific people and with those real-life people basically playing themselves, is very hard to enjoy or see value in at all.
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