Pudovkin's last film, one of three that he made in colour at the end of his
career, is basically a hymn to mechanisation in the countryside, a
theme which almost wholly displaces the source plot about the return of
a man after his presumed death in the war. Much of the film is rather
didactic and consequently dialogue-heavy, and certainly this lacks
the cinematic imagination of Pudovkin's silent films. But the
exterior scenes are still choreographed with a certain elegance, and
display the inevitable lyricism of waving corn.
