I did a review of the fantastic Foreign Legion film WE'RE IN THE LEGION NOW (HERE) a while back,  and it was so fun that I thought I'd do another one.  Today being Ronald Colman's birthday,  it seemed like a good 'two-bird + stone' choice to take a look at the incredibly fun and well-cast UNDER TWO FLAGS,  where Colman shares the screen with the burly Victor McLaglen and the two lovely actresses, Claudette Colbert and Rosalind Russell.  I'm (like most thinking people) a huge fan of Ronald,  a fan of Foreign Legion stories (also of Colman's silent legion masterpiece BEAU GESTE) and it's his birthday,  thus, is a great excuse to write!

UNDER TWO FLAGS is a 1936 production,  based on the novel of the same name by English writer Maria Ramé,  known by her nom de plume Ouida.  Ouida was a great writer of adventure novels,  many of them Orientalist swashbucklers,  and UNDER TWO FLAGS is quite that.  It shares it's fame with her wonderful 1872 novel,  A DOG OF FLANDERS.  UNDER TWO FLAGS is without a doubt her most famous novel,  having been produced as a stage play,  and four film adaptations, in 1912, 1916 (featuring the smouldering 'vamp' Theda Bara), 1922, and this Colman version.  I've read the novel in one of my several Ouida bursts,  and it's a wonderfully written and colourful taste of pre-pulp pulp fiction.

In the film Victor (in the novel Bertie Cecil) honourably takes the rap for a crime actually committed by his brother.  He takes off in a dash,  joining up and becoming a sergeant in the French Foreign Legion.   Dapper and handsome,  Victor attracts the attentions and affections of the pixie-like French barmaid "Cigarette" played with almost punky spunk by Colbert.  Sadly for Cigarette,  Victor only has eyes for the luminous aristocrat Lady Venetia,  played by Rosalind Russell.  Well,  this doesn't sit well with Sgt. Victor's commander, Victor McLaglen's Major J.C. Doyle.  The gruff Doyle is unrequitedly smitten with the impish Cigarette,  and this puts him and our debonair Sergeant on the opposite sides of a potentially dangerous divide.

Will this love triangle doom the Legion in the face of an onslaught of fierce Arab tribesmen?!?

This was an amazingly pleasurable experience.  Colman (looking quite a bit like Michael Kitchen at times) was at his best here,  with a glint in his eye and exuding charm in every frame.  Colbert was lovely,  and though she came across as mildly irritating initially,   I had the  appropriate fondness for Cigarette by the end of the film.  Victor McLaglen was both 'charging-bullish' and charming,  looking quite the big brute in this one,  and Rosalind Russell was every bit the beautiful lady.  Also in the cast was Fritz Leiber Sr. (father of the sci fi writer),   Thomas Beck (from a number of Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto films),  Nigel Bruce, Gregory Ratoff (director of the 1960 OSCAR WILDE), Herbert Mundin ('Much' from Errol Flynn's THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD), and John Carradine.  With a  crisp script and a great cast,  and with solid  direction by Frank Lloyd (THE LAST COMMAND and BLOOD ON THE SUN),  it's a rollickin' good time.  The 1930's had so many of this kind of exuberant adventure,  and the more I see, the more I love this wonderful decade.  Also,  I'm a fan of this sort of Orientalist adventure,  and this is another in my effort to document these 'wild, wild East'-type movies.

It's a perfect thing to celebrate Ronald Colman's birthday!

Having loved the fantastic 1962 version of the Nikolai Gogol novel TARAS BULBA,  I thought it would be fun to present the more recent version, in spite of my usual moratorium on reviews of modern productions.  Made by a Russian of Ukrainian descent and financed by the Russian ministry of culture,  it apparently caused a bit of a stir amongst Ukrainian nationalists for it's pro-Russian nationalist message.

This version, unlike the Hollywood version,  was actually filmed in Ukraine, much of it in Zaporizhia, the homeland of the Zaporizhian Cossacks, of which the title character belongs.  It was exciting to see these characters and events depicted in the genuine lands of the Cossacks...it really added a bit of extra historical paint to a wonderful picture.  TARAS BULBA was wonderful.  It was a brutal war film;  the battle scenes were exceptionally violent,  and where torture was shown,  it was as violent and cruel as I've ever seen in a film.  That was refreshing(if one can say that about torture, hehehe).  This version followed the second, rewritten version of the novel(a forced re-write by the Russian government of the time), so the fate of Taras Bulba himself is quite gruesome,  if wonderfully noble. It doesn't shy away from it as the Hollywood version did.

Bulba was played by the famous Ukrainian actor Bogdan Stupka, who was also in the great Cossack action movie WITH FIRE AND SWORD (Ogniem i mieczem).  He has a great older-man's charisma and sense of authority,  and the grizzled quality he brought fit the character perfectly.  Bogdan Stupka,  physically,  was chosen very well;  the typical depiction of Taras Bulba in paintings and illustrations is of a hardened,  stocky,  elder man,  with a personal fire and a jaunty appearance.  Stupka's Taras Bulba is so evocative of the character as written...after a bit I forgot that he wasn't actually  Bulba himself,  which was ideal.

The rest of the casting was very good, if a tad bland in some cases;  fortunately,  as can be seen below,   great attention was made in choosing the Cossacks.  These are men who look like hardened veterans of many battles,  and they give the impression of having witnessed the worst that humankind has to offer.  I was greatly impressed by all of them.  The fight scenes were amazingly wild,  and the rough life of the Cossack was given very little of the romantic, "happy peasant" vibe that the Yul Brynner version had so much of.

               This TARAS BULBA is well worth looking for;  if you like your action hardcore, be prepared for a feast!

See also my review of the Russian film THE COSSACKS - HERE

Recently I was digging though my discs looking for something to watch.  I have tons of great stuff,  but the mood monster being what it is, my eyes rolled over the titles,  nonplussed.  They were glazing over as I passed through the genres.  Fortunately I passed by one of the best films in my collection,  if not one of the best ever made...Gunga Din! 

I snapped it up and gobbled it down like seasoned curly fries.

Sadly,  and I mean SADLY,  it was over far too soon for my movie craving.  It strikes so many chords for me;  adventure, history,  the British Empire,  Rudyard Kipling (I'm a big fan),  and more importantly,  one of the best casts of any move ever made.  The 30's, right?  Such an era...so many fantastic pictures.  I really wanted more of the same,  but really,  are there more like that?  Well,  actually there are,  and lots of them.  I went back to my shelves for another look.

Well,  I dug up a Hammer Films collection I'd picked up last year,  the "Icons of Adventure".  I'm not one who would normally buy Hammer films (too many hipsters into them for postmodernist kitsch),  but with titles like The Pirates of Blood River, and The Terror of the Tongs,  what self-respecting pulp fiction fiend could resist?  I took it out for the British Empire actioner Stranglers of Bombay.  It was perfect for my mood, according to its description;  The British East India Company of the 1830s is being assailed by wealthy landowners for the lack of protection for their convoys.  Entire convoys are disappearing,  and in fact,  so are thousands of individuals all over India.  Could the mysterious killer cult of Kali be behind it?

Uh,  there probably isn't anything in my collection closer to Gunga Din content-wise than that.

So I did my usual thing and watched the trailer clip on Youtube.  "It's true!",  the narrator exclaimed.  "It really happened!",  he said. There were lots of sharp cuts to a statue of Kali,  and to wild-eyed cultists in loincloths.  This obsession with shocking acts that we're supposed to (on some level) be titillated by, was pretty off-putting.  What can I say,  I'm old fashioned in many ways.  It seemed pretty bad...exploitation cinema at its cheesiest.  In the end, obviously,  I decided to give it a shot. I was hungry for the vibe,  and beside that,  I had actually forked out the cash for the set, right?  I'm glad I gave it a chance.

Stranglers of Bombay is 100% traditional Cliffhanger serial/B-reel in feel.  The production is very much that of the later serials,  with all the same choices that have come to embody that style.  The costuming,  the filming,  the plot,  the script,  all were just as any pulp magazine-type critter would wish them to be;  full of action,  mystery,  and exotic, far-off locales.  There were honestly moments when I expected The Phantom to burst out of the jungle,  or to see Commando Cody duking it out with a herd of Thuggee cultists! 

The cast was shockingly good, as well.  When I read that famed film baddie Guy Rolfe was our hero, I was surprised.  He's a great actor,  and some of his villains are among the best in classic film.  Was he hero material though?  As it turns out,  yes he is,  and very much so.  It shouldn't have amazed me.  He's been in some of my fave movies of all time.  Ivanhoe (1952),  King of Kings (1961),  Taras Bulba (1962),  Nicholas and Alexandra (1971, reviewed by me HERE),  were all amazing films,  and the list really does go on and on.  He brings a special kind of arrogance and class which make his villains something special, and after watching Stranglers of Bombay it seems that he had so much more in this toolbox.

His character, Captain Harry Lewis,  is very serious in this one.  He's the kind of man that thinks,  and feels,  who observes and takes part in equal measure.  It's this empathetic approach,  especially in political matters between the East India Company and the Indian people, that has him marginalised in his position.  His penchant for mixing with the people,  for treating them as fellow humans,  has created such a bond with them that, when so many go missing, he is possessed by the need to know why.  He presses his superior officer to form a team to investigate the disappearances.  It backfires when his commanding officer brings in the son of an old school chum, the mildly stalwart but priggish Captain Christopher Connaught-Smith (played perfectly by Aussie/Brit actor Allan Cuthbertson) to do the job.  Of course,  the new guy has no understanding of the indigenous culture, and on top of that,  he believes that Captain Lewis is imagining things.

He quickly found out the ghastly truth!

Ghastly it was,  indeed.  The goggle-eyed villain relished in the cutting off of hands, and the gouging out of eyes, as well as the ubiquitous stranglings that the Thuggee dacoits were so famous for.  I really did like this a whole lot,  and frankly,  I have no idea why I hadn't heard about it.  It has so much of everything that I enjoy about that genre (if stiff-upper-lip British adventuring is a genre),  and true to all such excellent things,  it left me howling for more.  It had lots surprises,  and lots of things to keep a diehard pulp addict occupied.  Speaking of addicts,  the Doctor Who fans out there will be thrilled by Roger Delgado (who played the ever-so-evil Master, of course) in the cast,  who plays the evil Hindu priest's main henchman!

I was very impressed all around.  Of course there were a few quibbles to be had if one decided to look for them,  but the fun I had made overlooking them a pleasure.  Well,  perhaps not the scene depicted here with the three Indians playing the Dholak drums.  The first guy is quite excellent,  but the other two are literally wiggling their hands anti-rhythmically over the drums.  I studied Indian and near/central Asian percussion for many years, so probably nobody will notice but me;  it's my tiny little cross to bear in regards to this film.  

I would certainly recommend it to anyone who loves this sort of thing.  I promise that it will be a pleasantly adventurous romp through Gunga Din territory,  and while lacking the epic scope and thespic virtuosity of that most revered classic, it certainly makes up for it with pulpy goodness!

It's worth mentioning here the very good 1988 Pierce Brosnan film The Deceivers, which follows a similar path. A British officer encounters the Thuggee, and in infiltrating their ranks, begins to become one of them.  It's a sort of British Raj Donnie Brasco.  It's based on the book of the same name,  published in 1952, and written by the incredible Lt. Colonel John Masters.  Masters, besides being one of my favourite writers,  was at the front lines in the enforcement of the Empire in India.  His books are unabashed in their frankness in regards to the subject,  and are incredibly well written.

I'm on a roll this week with great pulpy adventure pictures!  I just had the pleasure of watching the 1936 French Foreign Legion film,  We're In the Legion Now, and what amazing fun it was!  I was coming off the little buzz that I had from the 1936 William Boyd romp, Go-get-'em, Haines (reviewed HERE); I really enjoyed Eleanor Hunt's impish charm in that one,  so I went digging for another movie with her in it, and voila', here she was.  It also works out in another way,  as I was already prepping a review of a Foreign Legion film, yet another 1936 screen burner, Under Two Flags...said review coming along soon.  I've hit a Legion-type hot spot.

Based on a 1934 story by prolific pulp author J.D. Newsom called The Rest Cure (which was also apparently the American name for the film),  We're in the Legion Now stars the ubiquitous character actor Reginald Denny, sidekicked by veteran comedian Vince Barnett. In lighthearted fashion, they play Dan Linton and Spike Conover (Isadore Simonski in the original story), two former New York racketeers on the run from a former "business associate";  apparently this mobster, Al Perelli, had a penchant for murder and kidnappings, and our decent duo wanted no part of that sort of thing.  The guys were basically just good guys looking to get fashionably intoxicated during the prohibition, in the process got mixed up with the wrong crowd. Having had enough, they escape to France,  where they begin to freely imbibe on an epic scale.

During their liquor-fueled fun,  they find out that Al Perelli has come after them, which gets them to reconsider their options.  During a public drinking session they meet two English sisters,  one of whom is married to a British officer in the French Foreign Legion.  The guys express a desire to move on to greener pastures,  and the gals suggest Morocco...but the catch is, they would have to join up for a five-year stint in the Legion!  Not their first choice, of course, but fate steps in, Al Perelli shows up (with a Tommy-gun in a violin case),  and the boys set off for Morocco as Legionnaires!  There they encounter wild Arabs,  beautiful ladies,  brutal hardships, and mutiny!

It's great fun from beginning to end.

I really loved the cast.  I've always enjoyed Reginald Denny;  in spite of his being cast as a token Brit,  he always delivers the goods with class and style (If you get a chance, see him in the classic Canadian Mountie movie Fort Vengeance).  I was a bit confused by his character in this movie though, as he was ostensibly an American, but his accent vacillated between his usual classic British r.p. clip and a gobbly American-ish drawl.  Otherwise he was completely charming and appropriately stalwart.  Denny's sidekick, played by comedic character actor Vince Barnett,  was as hilarious as a wisecracking, bottle-tossing, Brooklyn drunkard should be.  He was apparently best known from the Andy Griffith Show and it's spinoff, Mayberry R. F. D..  Eleanor Hunt, as the stunning American Expat songstress Honey Evans, sizzles on an entirely new level from her role in Go-Get-'Em Haines...the gams alone definitely made the search worthwhile!

From the cultural perspective, while I don't generally judge these low-budget action frolics by their accuracy,  it's worth noting that the bit of the Islamic call to prayer was accurate,  and the music was also at least actual Arabic music,  with an Oud being played correctly (as opposed to a Hollywood orchestra playing faux-Arabic slop), and what sounded like a Raita, which is a type of shawm.  From there things go fairly wonky;  badly imitated Arabic writing on the walls (for local flavour, I assume, but there were letters from Persian that aren't found in the Arabic script),  women in Hejab wearing pantaloons, and one surreal scene in which a Berber drum & hand-clapping music party was overlaid with the Arabic Oud from the earlier scene, along with the end-blown Nai flute...a mix that would never happen.  Oh well,  a little is better than nothing, wot?  In any case, one has to set aside quite a bit in these Imperialist-type pictures (westerns, British Empire, Foreign Legion, etc.),  and the fun generally makes the hits on one's pedantry worthwhile!

I thoroughly recommend We're in the Legion Now;  it's top-flight b-reel action,  with a rakish edge and a cheery demeanor.  Any weekend afternoon would be perfect for it;  it's completely entertaining!

Finally, here's a taste of the kinds of Moroccan music hinted at in the film.  Enjoy!

Those are the stiff-upper-lip words that begin the brilliant novel King of the Khyber Rifles,  written in 1916 by the legendary London-born adventure writer Talbot Mundy.  Mundy was famous for his tales of the British Raj (Raj means "reign" in the Hindi language), during their occupation of the Indian subcontinent and Afghanistan during the rule of Queen Victoria.  Inspired by real-life titans, such as the polymath and polyglot, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, his books are the proto-typical ripping yarns;  his stalwart adventurers faced the dangers inherent in trying to control that wild and culturally diverse region.  Like Rudyard Kipling,  Sax Rohmer and H. Rider Haggard,  his stories are from the British perpsective,  but like Haggard,  Mundy leaned slightly more toward the east.

The protagonist of the novel is Captain Athelstan King,  an agent of her majesty in what was at that time northern India (now Afghanistan and Pakistan) during the first world war. As in reality, the war was in mid-swing during the novel,  and the Germans and Turks were determined to foster unrest in the tribal areas to further burden their British opponents.    As with such writers as John Buchan, tales of the Empire's military struggles across the globe were very popular among British youth.  That seems to be a traditional subject at the time,  as both the Boer and Crimean wars generated their own exciting literary output;  this new war, being called "the war to end all wars" did so on a grand scale, and would continue to inspire both prose and film for decades to come. 

Without a doubt Mundy's most famous and popular book,  it was first filmed in 1929 as The Black Watch,  starring Victor McLaglen and Myrna Loy (and, apparently, it had uncredited early parts for John Wayne and Randolph Scott).  It was directed by John Ford,  and though a relatively early work (he already had dozens of movies under his belt by this time),  it has all of the taut drama and action that make his stuff worth seeking out.  Initially released as a silent,  it was a talkie,  and thankfully so;  there are so many wonderful scenes that really benefit from the many regional accents in the story.  McLaglen really shines in this one, and the bravura performance that he would later bring to Gunga Din shows it's roots very clearly here.   The Talbot Mundy animus rings throughout.

Tyrone Power is the lead in the later (and greater) version of the story, appropriately titled King of the Khyber Rifles.  Though Power was on the final stretch of his career when this was released in 1953,  his vigour and intensity had diminished not even a tiny bit.  His adventure movies of this period are some of his most interesting and nuanced.  Here,  as the serious-minded (one could even say stern), Athelstan King,  Power burns like a wildfire.

Now, for lovers of the book,  it would be a mistake to come to the film thinking that they're the same animal.  Though they share some of the same cosmetic features,  the film has been altered to a pretty large degree.  It has been transformed into the film version,  which is fine,  and I believe the changes make it more suitable for the simpler needs of the cinematic experience,  where visuals and greatly delivered dialogue oftentimes do the work of a novel's detail and complexity of plot.  Apropos of my earlier comment, the film is a bit more Rudyard Kipling to the book's H. Rider Haggard,  which,  in this case,  is a good thing.

Power's King is a half-caste;  his father was English,  and his mother was an Afghan Muslim.  Thus, he speaks the Pashto language of the Afghan tribal people,  and he is friendly to them...so long as they are subordinate to British rule.  King, after all, is the Queen's man.

The villain of the story (though ENTIRELY different from the novel),  is the "fanatical"  tribal bandit Kurram Khan,  who,  along with the Islamic Mullahs in the mountain areas, is fomenting rebellion in the people of the hills...by any brutal means necessary.  He is portrayed here by the brilliant Guy Rolfe,  who, it seems,  played more villains than anything else, by far!  In fact,  in the same year as King of the Khyber Rifles,  he played the baddie in another orientalist fantasy,  The Veils of Baghdad (as the evil Kasseim),  as well as Prince John in Ivanhoe, the year before!  It goes without saying that his villain's soliloquies are maniacally well-practiced and insidious.  He's very much the Osama Bin Laden of the piece,  and much like that real Mujahid,  his martial excesses are telegraphed to the audience in the form of a goggle-eyed,  power-mad (hehehe),  inhuman monster...with no normal human reason for opposing the Empire.

I was very impressed by the detail of the film,  and by the nods to local colour and detail.  The Pashto language, like Dari,  the other most common language in Afghanistan,  is  somewhat similar to the Farsi language spoken in Iran.  I understand a good deal of Farsi, as well as urdu and Arabic,  and it seems to me that the dialogue of the tribal characters in the film was appropriate,  if not entirely correct.  I also noticed a few regional colloquialisms used, which were gratifying;  King says of a defector from Kurram Khan's ranks as wanting to "eat British salt",  meaning that he wished to earn his sustenance in the service of the Empire...a folk expression heard as far away as the Punjab.

I was also impressed by the philosophical challenges to imperialism throughout the movie.  Athelstan King, as the son of a Muslim woman,  is treated quite poorly by the political infrastructure and by it's agents.  He's denied invitations to officers' parties, and even loses a roommate when a fellow officer learns of his racial (and possibly spiritual) mix.   The positive portrayals of Muslims in this film are a pleasant surprise, in spite of some stereotyping,  as well as the complexities of the local political perspective.  Not to drag contemporary politics into a simple movie review,  but the moral problems raised by this simple adventure story are very timely to the issues that the United states and Britain still face in that part of the world.  It shows how the presence of a foreign element, determined to change and control an area, can create increasingly more hostile insurrections and challenges to that outsider influence.

Still,  King of the Khyber Rifles is very much,  in the end,  a tale of the Empire; it stands firmly in the tradition of films like the afore-mentioned Gunga Din, Oliver Reed's The Brigand of Kandahar (1965), Rock Hudson's Bengal Brigade (1954), Gary Cooper's Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Raymond Massey in The Drum (1938), and of course, Errol Flynn's 1950 classic,  Kim.   Like the western film, which shares many of the same sociopolitical issues,  we manage to set aside our problems with the reality of the thing,  and get into some great action well told!

The director of this amazing picture is the somewhat ironically-named Henry King.  King was an amazing critter in his own right, having over a hundred acting roles under his belt from the early days of film, as well as a long and prolific career as a director.  Besides King of the Khyber Rifles,  King directed Tyrone Power in such amazing movies as The Untamed (1955),  Prince of Foxes (1949),  The Black Swan (1942),  and  The Sun Also Rises (1957),  as well as such great actors as Errol Flynn, Eva Gardner, Spencer Tracy,  Gordon MacRae, Cameron Mitchell, and (in my opinion) most effectively with Gregory Peck, who did many of his best films with King.

Honestly,  with the possible exception of Errol Flynn,  I can't think of a more well-rounded actor for action pictures of his era than Power;  his gravitas, masculinity and charm are possessing,  and that leadership vibe, so often lost to today's actors, are his in spades.  His characters are people that one would follow "once more, unto the breach",  and his King of the Khyber Rifles is no less so.  It's a Powerhouse film that you shouldn't live without!

Also, for them that are interested both in the regions of India and Pakistan as well as in detective fiction,  I have an article about the various home-grown sleuths from various South Asian countries.  You can read it HERE.

I feel compelled to start this review of the 1962 Russian film THE COSSACKS with a simple statement:  it's a beautiful experience.  If there was not a scrap of dialogue in the entire thing,  the pleasure of looking at each scene would have left me satisfied;  the beauty of the people and the scenery is stunning by itself...add to that a wonderful script and a stunning cast of actors,  and you have a classic movie on your hands.

THE COSSACKS is based on the 1863 Leo Tolstoy novel Young Manhood which was renamed to Казаки, or Kazaki, which is Russian for 'Cossack'. Apparently the story is semi-autobiographical,  believed to be based on Tolstoy's experiences in the Caucasian war.   I read the novel many years ago, so when I saw the movie was available,  I leapt at the chance to see it.  It was made in the Soviet era by Mosfilm, the studio responsible for such Russian classics as THE BATTLESHIP POTEMPKIN,  ALEXANDER NEVSKY, and ANDREI RUBLEV.  Interestingly enough, the iconic Communist statues in the Mosfilm logo of that time are lying dismantled in an unkempt warehouse,  though the company itself has continued on...albeit with a different logo.

As the story begins, Young Dmitri Olenin, played by Leonid Gubanov,  is a young aristocrat living an unsatisfying life.  He has ended a romantic relationship for lack of love,  and has come to the realisation that his entire existence is basically full of staid situations and obligatory conversation.  In a brash move,  he signs up as a private in the military,  and requests a post 'defending' the remote border territories against incursions by the Chechens.  His plan?  To get as far away from that shallow life as he possibly can.

Though Dmitri has a servant, money, and status as a member of the aristocratic elite(his family knows the Tsar personally), life in the border regions is a rustic affair.  The village he takes up residence in is populated by farmers and soldiers,  and the wild ways of the Cossacks are in every aspect of life.  These are the Grebensk Cossack tribe,  who settled the region by the Terek river in the northern Caucasus.  The Grebensk Cossacks adopted the ways of the Chechen and Nogai peoples in the area, and though they kept the Russian language, they also have the spoken Nogai language, which is a Turkic language, called 'Tatar' in the film.  Dmitri is taught the Tatar greeting "Koshkildi" upon his arrival,  which I was pleasantly surprised to recognise as comparable to the Turkish "hoş geldi",  meaning,  "pleasant arrival".

This is exactly what our young idealist had been hungering for;  fresh air,  freedom,  and a chance to grow and to prove himself.  He takes up his post with relish.  He finds lodging with a  old cossack named Eroshka,  called "Daddy Eroshka" by the villagers, and they immediately form a father/son-type bond.  Daddy Eroshka takes up the task of acclimating Dmitri to Cossack life.  Very soon the beautiful Muslim village girl Maryana comes into the picture, as well as her Cossack suitor, Lukashka.  Maryana is considered the most beautiful (and inaccesible) girl in the village;  headstrong, impetuous, sure of herself and her self-worth.  Dmitri is immediately drawn to her, even as he works to form a strong friendship with the brave  fighter Lukashka...it's this love-triangle that defines the character of the story. 

I loved everything about this movie.  Zinaida Kiriyeno is amazing as the stunningly beautiful Maryana,  and Eduard Bredun(who reminds me of a young Orson Welles), gave an excellent performance as Lukashka.  They, along with Boris Andreyev as the melancholic Daddy Eroshka,  were so charismatic,  yet none of them overshadowed the others.  Leonid Gubanov,  more than any other actor in this type of role,  really brought a genuine sense of youth and romantic vision to this character.  I've met many young people like him,  who have yet to taste the realities of life in any firm way,  who see the future as full of limitless possibility.  I found myself both feeling somewhat paternal about his naivete, and perhaps a bit inspired by that hopeful spirit.

Though this film is an oversimplification of the story in some ways,  I think that it captures the essential spirit of it;  everything is distilled into it's basic components to drive each aspect home.  I was inspired by that desire for a new and fresh life,  and I found myself longing for an earthier, more grass-roots culture to learn about and to grow into.  The contrasting reality of the situation here was also a good warning against romanticising daily life;  it made me wonder how things would have turned out if Dmitri Olenin had come with a more realistic set of expectations.

If you can find THE COSSACKS, and I hope that you can,  prepare yourself for an experience equal to any of the equivalent Hollywood classics.  I found myself wanting to watch it again, even as the final credits were rolling.

At the time of this writing,  the film can be found on Youtube HERE