Anniversary of the third Soviet Oscar winner

 On February 11, 1980, the USSR premiered the film by Vladimir Menshov, “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears”. 

 
A week later, the film took part in the Berlin International Film Festival. The film was nominated for the main award of this festival - the Golden Bear. But the jury of the festival, chaired by the Swedish actress Ingrid Tulin, awarded this prize to two other films: American - "Heartland" and German - "Palermo or Wolfsburg". Honestly, I have not seen these films, but judging by their ratings on IMDB and Kinopoisk, films are, to put it mildly, average. 

 
It would be interesting to know the opinion on this matter of Alexander Mitta, who was a member of that jury. Just because three months later on the screens of Soviet cinemas Alexander Mitta’s film “The Crew” was supposed to be released. And I'm not the first to think about this issue. Even 10 years ago, our famous film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev was concerned about this issue. 

 
However, literally a year later, the film of Vladimir Menshov achieved success at another, no less prestigious film forum. "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" won an Oscar in the nomination Best Foreign Language Film. Moreover, in the competition for this award, Menshov’s film went around Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Kagemusha the Shadow Warrior. Menshov's picture became the third Soviet movie, after "War and Peace" by Sergei Bondarchuk and "Dersu Uzala" by Akira Kurosawa, to win an Oscar in this category.

The fact that the American film academics preferred Vladimir Menshov’s film to Kagemusha the Shadow Warrior, and to François Truffaut’s film “Le dernier métro (The Last Metro)” as well, simply outraged The New York Times film reviewer Vincent Canby, who wrote in his review that "Mr. Truffaut and Mr. Kurosawa have have each made better films than the ones by which they were represented in this year's Oscar contest, but both "The Last Metro" and "Kagemusha" are superior to most films made by anybody in the last several years. In such company, "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" looks like hack-work."..- By Vincent Canby, May 8, 1981, The New York Times

 
Well, hack-work or not hack-work, this must be decided by the one for whom the films are made - the moviegoer. And the cinema viewers decided as follows: 84.4 million viewers watched this film in the first year of its demonstration. And this is every third resident of our country in 1980, including infants. Well, it was then - 40 years ago, before the advent of the Internet era. And today - 79% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users around the world give this film a rating of 8 to 10. Such a "hack-work".

 
However, what do you take from film critics, especially American ones, even if Roger Ebert attributed the film "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" ... to Hungarian cinema. And this is a critic who is considered to be a guru in their field. What can we expect from the rest?

 
We will not write much about this film, because, we suppose, in connection with its anniversary there will be many various publications. Not to mention that a lot has been published over the past 40 years. After all, the film takes second place in the history of Soviet film distribution in terms of the number of viewers, second only to "Pirates of the 20th Century." And besides, in the history of Soviet cinema there were only 4 films awarded the Oscars. And one of them - "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears". 

 
Taking into account all the above, according to FilmGourmand’s version, “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears” has a rating of 9.081 and ranks 146th in the Golden Thousand.