If international film aficionados are familiar with Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov at all, it is probably due to his 1957 Oscar-winning Best Foreign Film Letyat Zhuravli [English title: The Cranes Are Flying]. But he has also secured a place for himself in cinema history for his 1930 documentary Jim Shvante (Marili Svanets) [English title: Salt for Svanetia] and the visually dazzling, anti-American propaganda epic, presented in four vignettes, as I Am Cuba (1964). Often overlooked or ignored is Neotpravlennoye Pismo [English title: Letter Never Sent, 1960], which was criticized by some Russian critics as unnecessarily arty and underdeveloped in terms of its characters. Yet, seen today, the film works as a stirring, lyrical portrait of man vs. nature where the innovative black and white cinematography of Sergei Urusevsky overwhelms any agitprop messaging. Instead, the viewer is transported to a wild landscape where four explorers fight for their survival against the four unpredictable elements of nature – wind, water, fire and earth.
The setting is somewhere in central Siberia and our protagonists are a team of geologists who have come to this region convinced that raw diamonds are buried within the soil. Sabinin (Innokenti Smoktunovsky), the team leader, has led several previous unsuccessful missions searching for gems and is determined to succeed this time. Initially he planned to send his wife a letter before arriving at his destination but decides instead to document his experience as an ongoing journal (we hear some of these excerpts in voice-over narration).
Sabinin is accompanied by an experienced guide, Sergei (Yevgeny Urbansky), and two former university students, Audrei (Vasili Livanov) and Tanya (Tatiana Samoilova) who are romantically involved (Samoilova had previously appeared in the director’s The Cranes Are Flying).
Tensions arise when Sergei’s intense infatuation with Tanya is accidentally discovered – a secret written confession about her falls out of his coat pocket and is read by Audrei. As the alpha male of the group, Sergei overreacts to this incident and attacks Andrei physically and verbally. “How can Tatiana be in love with an insect like you?” Their fight for Tanya’s affections, however, is soon forgotten when diamonds are discovered during a deep excavation. The group celebrate their find and inform their Russian sponsors via a two-way radio.
Suddenly disaster strikes in the form of a raging forest fire and Letter Never Sent quickly transitions from being an adventure epic into a survival thriller. While the first part of the film shows the geologists interacting with and enjoying their natural surroundings, the second half depicts the protagonists as victims, cut off from radio contact and trapped in a punishing landscape of flaming trees, thick smoke, torrential rains, overflowing rivers and snow. All of it is captured by the fluid, constantly-in-motion cinematography, which utilizes hand-held camera footage, unusual angles and viewpoints, claustrophobic close-ups and breathtaking overhead panoramas that make you wonder how the filmmakers achieved such effects.
Although some scenes were shot in the Mosfilm Studios in Moscow, Kalatozov filmed several sequences in the wilds of Siberia where the actors were subjected to real danger such as the raging forest fire where falling trees barely missed some of the cast and crew. In the scenes with Sabinin trying to navigate the icy Yenisei River, the actor actually suffered a concussion from the rough waters.
You can probably tell from the title that Letter Never Sent will not end well for most of the geologists. There have been other survival dramas that have subjected their characters to harrowing circumstances and even death and audiences may end up feeling just as hopeless and exhausted while experiencing the ordeal. Still, Letter Never Sent does end on a hopeful note and pulls back from being a total downer in the same vein as J.C. Chandor’s All is Lost (2013) starring Robert Redford or Joe Penna’s Arctic (2018) with Mads Mikkelsen.
Kalatozov’s film also has some odd moments of humor (Tanya and Audrey doing a spontaneous dance of joy during a rainstorm) as well as a sense of irony. In one sequence, the explorers hear the Russian authorities praising their efforts on the radio as they try desperately to make contact with them and ask to be rescued. There is also the scene where Sabinin has a delusional fantasy about his diamond discovery and envisions how it will contribute significantly to Russia’s future progress.
Letter Never Sent garnered Kalatozov a Best Director nomination for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival but the film received mixed notices from many high profile critics such as Jonas Mekas of The Village Voice who called it “Overacted, overdramatized, overstylized, oversimplified…the film is difficult to sit through. It’s too heavy….Historically, the film is important: it helped the Russian cinema to start moving away from the Stalinist monumental cinema.”
It is true that the human drama on display is often highly exaggerated but think of it as a survival drama designed as a grand opera and the passionate emoting, melodramatic film score (by Nikolai Kryukov) and awe-inspiring settings and cinematography make something poetic and lyrical out of a disaster genre cliché.
Contemporary reviews have been much more favorable toward Letter Never Sent than critics from its era. Brad Weismann of Senses of Cinema describes the movie as “as a kind of anti-Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It is a quest that intends to reveal the nobility of the human spirit rather than, as Madre did, revealing man’s inherent weaknesses and murderous greed.” The film also displays a highly romanticized depiction of geologists in Russian culture.
In an article for the Turner Classic Movies website, critic Michael Atkinson wrote, “The real star is the film’s torrential visual texture; it may have only the team’s other films as rivals to being the most dazzling black-&-white films ever shot… The films he [Kalatozov] made with Urusevsky…are remarkable for how they ignite even the systemized sentimentality of Soviet propaganda with unique and unalloyed formal pyrotechnics. Letter Never Sent might be pure film – if you went to Siberia, it wouldn’t look like this. No other film would, either. It’s a self-contained, utterly miraculous vision.“
Kalatozov would follow The Letter Never Sent with 1964’s I Am Cuba which was disliked by the Russian authorities for its free-wheeling, sensual approach to Communist iconography. It became a major discovery when it was later restored for repertory screenings in the U.S. in the early 1990s where it was championed by filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Kalatozov’s final film was The Red Tent (1969), an international all-star epic about General Umberto Nobile’s ill-fated 1928 expedition to the Arctic. The cast included Sean Connery, Peter Finch, Claudia Cardinale, Hardy Kruger, Mario Adorf and Nikita Mikhalkov but it was a box office disappointment and reviews were mixed.
Letter Never Sent was released on Blu-Ray by The Criterion Collection in March 2012 but is a bare-bones release with no extra features except for an insightful essay by Dina Iordanova.
Other links of interest:
https://www.atinati.com/news/6605ed31fe5c0700382882d7
https://theyshootpictures.com/kalatozishvilimikheil.htm
https://klassiki.online/cranes-are-flying-i-am-cuba-kalatozov-urusevsky-soviet-cinema
