Top of Holmes – Culture – Kommersant

Igor Maslennikov, director of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (1979) and Winter Cherry (1985), died at the age of 91. It would seem that this says it all. Far from it: Igor Fedorovich was much more complex and significant than just a popular director.

Somehow Igor Fedorovich calls: they say, I heard about such a super-popular group “Hummingbird”, I want to immediately listen, find out what the youth breathes. In the yard – crazy 1993 or 1994. The Hummingbirds will perform tomorrow at midnight in a place that makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like a monastery in comparison: they don’t just inject themselves in the hall. But excuses in the genre of “Igor Fedorovich, you are unlikely to like it there” do not work: I want it, and that’s it.

No sooner said than done. The “Tambov” owners of the club show respect: they put up a table for Maslennikov almost on the stage. When madness reaches its limit, Igor Fedorovich jumps up from his seat – broad shoulders, Cossack mustaches and almost a forelock – turns to face the almost destroyed hall, raises his hands to the sky and cries out: “What beautiful, young faces you have! How I love you! How I want to shoot you!”

It is difficult to imagine any of his colleagues and peers in his place in such circumstances. How beautiful he was in his naivety, in his spontaneity, in sincere enthusiasm.

He divided directors into “architects” and “gardeners” and unconditionally referred to himself as a “gardener” a la Georgy Tovstonogov, who managed to work as a set designer in the 1960s.

And yet – on the “lyricists” and “narrators”. How touching in the mouth of such a brutal man, a reckless motorist and party organizer of Lenfilm, there was a confession: I am not a lyricist, it is embarrassing for me to talk about the innermost, I am shy, I am just a storyteller.

Well, Alfred Hitchcock also considered himself not even a storyteller, but a confectioner who baked his cream cakes for the public. Such cakes, of course, were Maslennikov’s films about Victorian crimes and about the Leningrad divorcee Olga. We take the same “Sherlock Holmes” for granted, as one of the masterpieces of the golden age of the Lenfilm Creative Association of Television Films, which Maslennikov was in charge of just then.

But “Holmes” made a real genre revolution, primarily in terms of casting. The choice of Vitaly Solomin, a kind of shirt-guy of the Soviet cinema, for the role of Dr. Watson and the equally “simple” Borislav Brondukov for the role of Inspector Lestrade – this at the same time did not climb into any gates and was a sniper director’s shot.

“Sherlock Holmes”, this unrestrained “playing for England”, was, of course, one of the manifestos of Soviet film escapism from the time of mature stagnation. Maslennikov said that he wanted to sit on a magic balloon and fly far away from reality.

He vowed not to make films on momentary topics back in the mid-1960s. Then he and Yuri Chernichenko were cut down to death with the script “Virgin Land”, a realistic description of the hardships of the virgin epic. Then, after a series of censorship scandals, Maslennikov left the Leningrad television and entered the director’s course with Grigory Kozintsev.

Didn’t come from scratch. By the mid-1960s, despite his philological education, he had already established himself as one of the pioneers of Soviet television cinema and filming on a 16-mm camera, and the author of several film performances.

On the screen, he made his debut – together with Ilya Averbakh – with a wonderful lyrical tragicomedy about the eternal repeater “The Personal Life of Kuzyaev Valentin” (1967). It would seem, where is Averbakh, a snob, esthete, poet of the Russian intelligentsia, and where is Maslennikov, the future national idol. But their creative temperaments have grown together, which in total gave one of the most charming films of the Leningrad “new wave”.

The Leningrad film school is often and rightly associated with retro style, with films about the time of life, leaving like sand through fingers.

And again: Maslennikov was one of the pioneers of retro on an all-Union scale.

His “Sentimental Romance” (1976) based on the novel by Vera Panova is one of the most subtle reconstructions of the NEP era, which usually appeared on the screen in a vulgar, cafeteria form.

He knew how to do everything. And the eccentric children’s movie Tomorrow, April 3rd (1969). And – the only custom-made film in his life – the sports drama “Racers” (1972). And a joint war drama with Norway about the Norwegian Resistance Under the Stone Sky (1974). And a groovy fantasy – and at the same time a road movie about the growing up of a young princess – on the old Russian theme “Yaroslavna, Queen of France” (1978). And at the same time, he had the creative impudence to assert: “All my life I have gone with the flow without a rudder and sails, without making any effort. I didn’t plan anything, I moved to where it seemed more interesting to me. And what happened, happened by itself.”

God grant to any director that everything works out for him as by itself, as with Igor Fedorovich.

Mikhail Trofimenkov