174 IVAN’S CHILDHOOD [russIAn: IVANOVO DETSTVO]
Reel History Versus Real History
Loosely based on Lord Mountbatten’s command of the HMS Kelly, In Which We
Serve is an impressively accurate repre sen ta tion of life (and death) aboard a Royal
Navy destroyer during the Second World War. The movie also offers a realistic
depiction of life on the home front, with wives missing their husbands away at
war— some never to return— and with the civilian populace coping daily with the
terrors of the Nazi Blitz. For added verisimilitude Lord Louis Mountbatten insisted
that the film’s extras be replaced with real sailors. Similarly, the troops used in the
movie’s Dunkirk evacuation scene were acted by real soldiers from the 5th Bat-
talion Coldstream Guards, some who had actually taken part in the Dunkirk evac-
uation. The scene that depicts the cowardly young stoker deserting his post was
based on a real incident that occurred on 14 December 1939 on HMS Kelly. A sailor
panicked and left his post after the Kelly struck a mine, sustaining damage to her
hull. After the ship was towed in, Mountbatten rounded up his crew and delivered
a speech that Coward enacts almost verbatim in the film. In the scenes depicting
the sinking of the Tor r in, the Royal Air Force (RAF) contributed captured German
planes flown by British pi lots, normally used for battle training.IVAN’S CHILDHOOD [RUSSIAN:
IVANOVO DETSTVO] (1962)
Synopsis
Ivan’s Childhood is a Soviet war film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Based on Vladi-
mir Bogomolov’s 1957 short story, “Ivan,” the film features child actor Nikolai
Burlyayev in the title role as an orphan boy turned Red Army soldier who is moti-
vated by a desire for vengeance after the German invaders slaughter his family.Background
When Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 a 15- year- old
schoolboy named Vladimir Bogomolov (1926–2003) joined millions of his coun-
trymen in the desperate fight to defend his homeland. Bogomolov won medals for
bravery, somehow survived the war, and went on to become a writer who special-
ized in “ Great Patriotic War” fiction. One of his earliest stories was Иван [Ivan]
(1957), a first- person Socialist Realist novella about a doomed 12- year- old orphan
who becomes a Soviet army scout to avenge the death of his family at the hands of
the Nazis. Commissioned by Mosfilm to write a film adaptation, screenwriter
Mikhail Papava made Ivan more heroic and even gave the story a happy ending.
In Papava’s screenplay, entitled Vtoraya Zhisn [A Second Life], Ivan is not executed
by the Germans—as he is in Bogomolov’s novel— but sent to Majdanek extermi-
nation camp. Freed by the advancing Soviet army, Ivan later marries and raises a
family. When film director Eduard Abalov began shooting Papava’s screenplay in
1960, Bogomolov objected to Papava’s bastardization of his story and insisted that
the script by revised to more accurately reflect the source material. The Soviet Arts
Council agreed and terminated the proj ect in October 1960. In June 1961