The Childhood of Maxim Gorky

This haunting, unforgettable film, based upon Maxim Gorky's 1913 autobiography, My Childhood and shows a twelve-year-old's journey in life against the tumultuous backdrop of 19th century Russia. With tableaux beautifully vivid and forceful, it recounts the touching relationships which develop when Gorky is put into his grandparents' custody. His grandmother, the consummate incarnation of good and truth, is a simple woman who knows how to make people laugh. She presents the genuine beauty of optimism in the direst situations, of honesty in a world of deceit, of unselfishness and total sacrifice around treachery and hatred, of fighting spirit in defense of values and dignity. His multi-faceted grandfather, who can be fiercely brutal and childishly tender, senile one moment and wise the next, etches another indelible memory.
Gorky's poverty-stricken childhood formed his life-long compassion for the underdog, and the film is filled with powerful portraits of lower-class people whose qualities of integrity and dignity shine through their hopeless circumstances.

The memoirs of the great Russian writer Maxim Gorky come to pungent life in part 1 of a prewar Soviet trilogy (it was followed by My Apprenticeship and My Universities). Director Mark Donskoy creates the endless hardships of Gorky's adolescence in small, precise scenes, orienting us in the 19th-century "lower depths" of czarist Russia. Refreshingly, the movie has no "great literature" grandness about it, but an abrupt, episodic grit. Dominating Gorky's Dickensian youth are his grandfather, a mean bantam with a fondness for whipping his underlings, and his grandmother, a kindly storyteller (vividly embodied by the goodhearted Varvara Massalitinova). The extraordinary faces of the actors (even in tiny roles) speak volumes about the Russian spirit; it's hard to forget the gypsy laborer who dreams of being a singer, or the little lame boy who keeps a zoo of insects by his bedside. --Robert Horton