As promised, I watched the Tarkovsky short. And so it turns out that the way they shortened up the previous feature-length film is by… just omitting the whole “investigation” part of it entirely.

We get the opening scene at the diner, where the hitmen come in; we get one of the patrons leaving the diner to go warn the Swede that hitmen are coming for him; we get his resigned fatalism; and we get the patron going back to the diner, where the owner is like “well, what can you do, that’s just how it is sometimes” and cut to black.

My first reaction is that this is the most Russian version of the story possible, just an unmotivated killing that everyone accepts with weary resignation and no investigation or follow-up whatsoever. But then I got curious what the actual Hemingway short story was, and turns out that this is a straight-up faithful adaptation of that (right down to using the n-word in dialogue, which the Hollywood version wisely excised even in 1946).

So now I instead think it’s fascinating that Hollywood folks took this dark little story about a guy being resigned to death and were like “but obviously we’ve got to solve the mystery and bring the killers to justice, right?” (Also, even more respect to the screenwriters of the 1946 version who created the elaborate backstory for all this, apparently out of whole cloth.)

As a movie taken for what it is, I think it’s… well, it’s an extremely good student film. It’s very competent and workmanlike, with some interesting shots and surprising choices. But the acting is stiff (and all the characters are very young, due to being played by fellow students, even if they’re not supposed to be), and the Soviet conception of small-town America feels not-quite-right. So, y’know, props for making a student film that’s worth watching at all, but end of the day, the 1946 movie does these scenes better, and if you can see a hint of Tarkovsky’s future style here, it’s not more than that.

This is ultimately just an interesting historical curiosity, but I don’t regret the twenty minutes.