The Red Snowball Tree

The Red Snowball Tree (Russian: Калина красная) is a 1974 Soviet drama film directed by Vasily Shukshin. It was the most successful film of that year. In total, the film sold an estimated 140 million tickets at the Soviet box office, making it the highest-grossing Soviet film of all time. German film director and screenwriter Rainer Werner Fassbinder included The Red Snowball Tree in the top ten of his favorite films.

Plot
Coming out of the penal colony, a thief-recidivist Yegor Prokudin (Vasili Shukshin) nick-named Grief decides to go to the village where the blue-eyed stranger Lyuba (Lidiya Fedoseyeva-Shukshina), with whom he corresponded by letters, lives. He needs to wait out and to look around. Lyuba appears to love him genuinely, despite his dark past and the strong misgivings of her own parents. Eventually life in the village destroys all of Yegor's plans, and he decides to break with the past forever. The villagers seem to get over their initial distrust to the former convict, and accept him as one of their own. Now he has friends, work and beloved woman. However, the criminals - former friends of Yegor - are not going to put up with his new way of life. One day three of them arrive in a car and try to persuade him to return to the old ways. When this fails, they shot him and leave. Pyotr (Aleksei Vanin), Lyuba's brother, gives them a chase and kills them, crushing their car with his dump-truck.

Cast

 * Vasili Shukshin as Yegor Prokudin, former burglar
 * Lidiya Fedoseyeva-Shukshina as Lyuba Baykalova, Yegor's bride
 * Ivan Ryzhov as Fedor Baykalov, Lyuba's father
 * Maria Skvortsova as Lyuba's mother
 * Aleksei Vanin as Pyotr Baykalov, Lyuba's brother
 * Maria Vinogradova as Zoya, Pyotr's wife
 * Euphemia Bystrova as Yegor's mother
 * Zhanna Prokhorenko as inquisitor
 * Lev Durov as Sergey Mikhailovich, ofitsiant
 * Alexander Gorbenko as Kolya, former Lyuba's husband
 * Nikolai Grabbe as chief of corrective labor colony
 * Nikolay Pogodin as diretor of sovkhoz
 * Georgi Burkov as Guboshlyop, criminal leader
 * Tatyana Gavrilova as Lusyen, criminal girlfriend
 * Artur Makarov as Buzya, criminal
 * Oleg Korchikov as Shurka, criminal
 * Natalya Gvozdikova as telegraph operator
 * Iya Arepina as Yegor's sister