Under the sound of wheels

Student Egor, who arrived in his native village, sat on a train to Leningrad, recalling under the sound of wheels:

As a friend of a neighbor’s girl Nastya from an early age, as a schoolboy went to the blacksmith’s grandfather Ilya as a henchman, and, dreaming of building ships, he left to enter the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute . He failed the exam, however, did not return home - at the Baltic Station he prevented the thieves from stealing the suitcase of one passenger, for which he was beaten, got into the police, but with the help of a sergeant who believed the guy, he went to work at the Baltic Shipyard . And a year later he was nevertheless admitted to the institute.

But for the year he, although he constantly wrote letters to Nastya, did not receive a single answer from her.

And he came to the village to find out why. It turned out that Nastya did not go to study after school, but began working in the local Recreation Center, contacting the collective farm culturator, and when he left her, with vacationers. Seeing that Nastya got confused in life, Yegor wants, as in childhood, to take her hand and lead her away from trouble. But this is not that little girl, and young people quarrel.

Nastya replies to Yegor that after all, he probably also met girls in the city, and she knows how, saying that she knows all the guys are “like that”, but Yegor replies: “I wasn’t like that, I was just friends,” and leaves.

And now on the train, thinking about how it happened, blames himself - that having left then left Nastya, and now he did not find the right words.

Feeling that he is responsible for the fate of Nastya, Yegor jumps out of the car on the move and returns to the village on the railroad ties.

• Iya Arepina - Nastya
• Pavel Kashlakov - Egor
• Alla Firsova - Nastya in childhood
• Victor Adeev - Egor in childhood
• Ivan Selyanin - Stepan Redkin, Nastya's father
• German Khovanov - Pyotr Pozdnyakov, father of Yegor
• Galina Inyutina - Pozdnyakova, mother of Yegor
• Igor Dmitriev - Vasily Kovalsky, a cultural worker in a rest house
• Arkady Trusov - Uncle Ilya, blacksmith
• Lilia Gurova - Polina, Nastya's friend
• Mikhail Dubrava - policeman
• Alexey Pavlov - policeman

The debut film directed by Mikhail Ershov is his thesis at VGIK (workshop of S. I. Yutkevich ). ^[one]

Ershov was one of the first diplomats who defended themselves with feature films shot at large film studios and then released. Later it became the norm, and in our time it was still rare in VGIK, it was new (earlier the course was defended on paper - by the directorial projects of his films not taken).

- A. N. Medvedev ^[2]

The film’s debut was the role, and immediately the main one, for the actor Pavel Kashlakov - a graduate of the Theater School. M.S. Shchepkina. ^[3]

The criticism of the director’s debut work was perceived differently.

So, if in one review the ability of the director and cameraman to work with the camera was noted:

In the film “Under the Knock of Wheels” there is neither eye-catching beauty, nor elongation, nor illustrativeness. The way of depicting reality in the first film by director M. Ershov testifies to his understanding of the nature of cinema. The young director is constantly looking for opportunities to present the contents of the script in the language of an expressive frame. And in many ways he succeeds. The screenwriter and director find a solution in which everything they want to say appears before the eyes of the viewer, passed through the thoughts and memories of the hero. The director not only knows the price, but also knows how to truly use the dynamic camera, the expressive capabilities of rhythm, close-ups, sharp unusual angles.

- Young directors of Soviet cinema: collection of articles, 1962 ^[4]

That the magazine " Art of Cinema " the authors were pointed out the abuse of large plans:

In the film “Under the sound of wheels”, the abundance of close-ups led to the fact that many events and the environment in which they occur are perceived as something abstract and unreal. Striking a completely unprincipled approach to the use of close-ups. The authors show on a somewhat enlarged scale not only the hero and heroine (this can somehow be explained), but even the barmaid, uttering one meaningless phrase, the harmonist of the rest house, Nastya’s girlfriends, whom we see only once during the film. There are scenes that almost entirely consist of portraits - for example, an episode in the police. The intrusively repeated close-ups give the impression of the imaginary significance of the narrative. And no matter how many wheels knock, they cannot accelerate the slow, viscous, uniform pace of the film.

- magazine "The Art of Cinema", 1959

The work of the composer and choreographer of the film was highly appreciated:

I remember that Demin and I watched "Under the Pounding of Wheels" and agreed that the composer Oleg Karavaychuk and the choreographer who performed the dances did a lot for the picture.

- A. N. Medvedev , film critic, chairman of the Russian State Film Committee, the magazine “Cinema Art”, 1999 ^[2]

• 2586. The sound of wheels // Soviet feature films: 1958-1963 - All-Union State Film Fund, Moscow - M .: Art, 1968 - p. 75