Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev releases Andrei Sakharov and his wife from internal exile in Gorky.
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Here is an extended excerpt from the New York Times review of that TV movie:
Essential biographical details are taken care of in the very first scene as a Soviet official lectures an unidentified group, who may or may not be members of the K.G.B., about Dr. Sakharov's background: born in 1921, a doctorate in physics in 1953, the year he also became the youngest member ever to be elected to the Academy of Sciences. As the physicist credited with developing the hydrogen bomb for the Soviet Union, Dr. Sakharov is one of the country's elite. He is a respected academician and, as another dissident later explains, more than that - ''You're one of them, not a Jew.''
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Portrayed powerfully by Jason Robards, whose lean and craggy face comes closer to resembling Boris Pasternak, this Sakharov is a quiet, rather dour man who insists that he doesn't always seek out trouble. Yes, someone agrees, but ''you don't always avoid it either.'' When approached to sign a petition for an arrested dissident, Sakharov tells his first wife (Anna Massey), ''If I was in a prison camp, wouldn't you want people signing petitions for me.'' As he drifts slowly but unhesitatingly into more unpopular causes, his privileges are cut back and eventually he loses his top position as a teacher of physics. After the death of his wife, he sits alone on a park bench, still being watched by the authorities from a distance.
Through his association with dissident causes he meets Miss Bonner, a divorced woman with grown children. She is played by Glenda Jackson, whose special chemistry with Mr. Robards gives their scenes an extraordinary weight. Half-Jewish and long an active Communist, Miss Bonner becomes the driving force in Dr. Sakharov's life. When they eventually marry, he acquires the family he never had and becomes dedicated to its survival, especially when it becomes apparent that the Bonner children are being threatened and punished for the supposed transgressions of their parents.
It is Miss Bonner's elderly mother who prophetically warns her son-in- law that things are not so different from what they were under Stalin. Today they don't need terror, she observes, they have other ways, such as marshaling ''world opinion'' and having colleagues denounce you. ''They'' are not different, she insists, only smarter.
Why does Dr. Sakharov resist? He tells Western journalists that he has a need to create ideals. No ideals, no hope, he says, ''and then one is completely in the dark, in a hopeless blind alley.''
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Writing up this piece only makes it more imperative that I finally get myself a scanner for Toobworld Central. I can't find a single decent photo or video clip from that TV movie online, but I do have one in a massive book on TV movies in the Great Library. Oh well. I'll post it eventually, so that anybody else who might find themselves in need of a picture of the televersion of Sakharov can find one......
BCnU!
Toby O'B
BCnU!
Toby O'B
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