Two fighters

It was 1941 . It was a year of heavy and intense fighting on the Leningrad Front . A strong comradely spike helped the fighters in difficult moments of fierce battles. Deep fighting friendship connected the machine gunner Arkady Dzyubin, a welder from Odessa, with the Ural steelworker Sasha Svintsov. But once friends seriously quarreled: having received the next one-day vacation, they walked around Leningrad. A little embarrassed, Sasha confessed to his friend that in the city he had a friend, Tasya, who invited him to her place. All evening, while his friends were visiting Tasi, Arkady did not fall silent for a minute. He told funny stories, joked and sang, and Sasha sat silently all the time.

When Arkady and Sasha returned late in the evening to their military unit, it turned out that during their absence there was a hard battle, and many of the fellow soldiers died. To raise the mood of the fighters, Arkady tells his comrades the story of “unhappy” Sasha’s love with his usual wit. Lead is deeply offended by a friend’s joke, and they quarrel, but this quarrel separates friends for a short time. A hot battle begins to boil, and Dzyubin protects the bunker from the attacking enemy.

The fighter performs the task, but he is seriously injured. At the risk of his life, Sasha takes a wounded friend from the battlefield ^[1] .

• Mark Bernes - Arkady Dzyubin
• Boris Andreev - Sasha Svintsov
• Vera Shershneva - Tasia
• Ioannina Zheimo - nurse
• Maxim Strauch - professor
• Ivan Kuznetsov - Galanin
• Stepan Krylov - Major Rudoi
• Lavrentiy Masokha - Okulita

• Script writer: Evgeny Gabrilovich
• Director: Leonid Lukov
• Operator: Alexander Gunzburg
• Artist: Vladimir Kaplunovsky
• Composer: Nikita the Theological
• Lyricist: Vladimir Agatov
• Sound: Arnold Shargorodsky

Director Leonid Lukov , whom we know from his previous work and especially from the talentedly made Big Life , this time created a fresh and interesting new picture. The whole film is imbued with bright humor, and even in the “sad” scenes, “a twinkle of humor” illuminates events with a gentle pleasant light.

- Grigory Alexandrov . "Two fighters." " Labor ", September 21, 1943

There is no doubt that the film will be warmly received by the viewer. There are some flaws in the picture - the combat episodes were filmed by the authors somewhat naively. The Germans, for example, advance in the film in a dense crowd and dutifully fall as a whole unit from the first stage of the Soviet machine gun. But, in my opinion, in this case, the success of the main poetic design far exceeds the meaning of individual shortcomings.

The plot of the picture is extremely simple. Two fighters - one blacksmith from the Urals (actor B. Andreev), the other - a welder from Odessa (actor M. Bernes) - are connected by friendship, wonderful, deep, gentle and faithful, such as often occurs between good people in a difficult military situation. This friendship is pure, devoid of any calculation and full of natural optimism. It resembles the friendship of young schoolchildren who spontaneously believe in themselves and in each other and in their future happy life. Already this organic, deep optimism that flourishes in heavy military labor, in my opinion, constitutes the first most beautiful success of the picture.

- Vsevolod Pudovkin . Pravda , October 6, 1943

The songs “ Dark Night ” and “ Scamps Full of Mullet ” (music by Nikita Bogoslovsky, verses by Vladimir Agatov), ​​performed in the film by Mark Bernes, gained wide popularity.

• "Two fighters" on the site "Encyclopedia of Russian Cinema"