Only Old Men Are Going to Battle (1974) on Netflix
Late summer, 1943. Captain Aleksei "Maestro" Titarenko commands the 2nd Squadron, which sings between missions, and three new pilots ask to join. The veterans fly; the newcomers wait.
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Plot summary
In the late summer of 1943, the 2nd Squadron of a Soviet fighter regiment fights over the Dnieper and, in its free hours, performs as an amateur orchestra under its commander, Captain Aleksei "Maestro" Titarenko. Reinforcements reach the regiment, and Second Lieutenant Aleksandrov with Third Lieutenants Shchedronov and Sagdullayev ask to serve in the 2nd, the Singing Squadron. Titarenko tests their musical abilities, and Shchedronov sings "Darkie," which becomes his nickname. When the veterans go up against German bombers, the new pilots stay on the ground, their shortened course leaving them unready for combat. Aleksandrov, who has no liking for music, is given a tambourine and takes part in the squadron's rehearsals.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Only Old Men Are Going to Battle (1974)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
While rehearsing the final scene, in which Maestro, Makarych and Grasshopper find the graves of Masha and Zoya, actor Aleksei Smirnov grabbed his heart and had to be taken away by ambulance; he returned days later saying he could not do it a second time, so Leonid Bykov kept that take in the film.- In May 2011 the District Court of Kyiv ruled that the 2009 colorization of the film breached copyright and could not be shown or rented in Ukraine; Bykov's daughter and the Dovzhenko studio had sued because Bykov deliberately shot in black and white to match newsreel footage.
- The film draws on fighter ace Vitaly Popkov's memoirs of a real singing squadron with its own amateur choir, which toured the Soviet rear and received fighter planes bought with money donated by Soviet star musicians; in 1944 in Kramatorsk, teenage Bykov attended one of its concerts and was part of the local teenagers' choir.
- Bykov told actor Vladimir Talashko that he had wanted "Darkie" in the film since childhood, when he rode the running boards of freight wagons and in one saw a pilot, an infantryman and an artilleryman travelling home through the Donbass and singing it.
- For the dogfight scenes a real pilot wrote "barrels" and "dead loops" in the sky while director Leonid Bykov, camera running, shouted into the lens "Serega, cover me! I'm attacking!"; after each take the plane landed, the film cassette was changed and the aircraft took off again, and at day's end Bykov fell out of the plane onto the grass.
- Air Marshal Alexander Pokryshkin, three times Hero of the Soviet Union, at first treated Bykov's request for wartime aircraft warily, wary of the many "passing" war films then being made, but after reading the script overnight he ordered five planes given to the film crew at once.
- Captain Titarenko had several real prototypes at once: Major Vasily Merkushev of the 270th Fighter Aviation Regiment, aces Vitaly Popkov and Ivan Laveykin, while his surname and the call sign "Maestro" were taken from Dmitry Titorenko, wingman of the thrice Hero of the Soviet Union Ivan Kozhedub.
