Only Old Men Are Going to Battle (Russian: В бой идут одни «старики», Ukrainian: В бій ідуть лише «старі») is a 1973 Soviet film about World War II fighter pilots, written and directed by Leonid Bykov, who also played the lead role as the squadron commander. The story is based on the memoirs of Russian fighter ace Vitaly Popkov.
The title comes from two scenes in the film, where the squadron is facing very hard dogfights with German fighter planes, so only "old men" (i.e. veterans) are sent up, while those fresh from flying school have to wait on the ground together with the mechanics. Soon, of course, the newcomers have replaced most of those veterans and have become "old men" themselves, taking to the skies while a new group of newcomers wait on the ground with the mechanics...
The film won the first prize in the 7th All-Union Film Festival in Baku in 1974.
Screenplay by Leonid Bykov, Yevgeni Onopriyenko and Aleksandr Satsky.
Original music by Viktor Shevchenko, cinematography by Vladimir Vojtenko. Runtime 92 min. Production by Dovzhenko Film Studios.
In 2009 a colorized version was released for TV and DVD, which resulted in a legal battle in Ukrainian courts between the copyright owners, Leonid Bykov's daughter and Ukrainian Dovzhenko Film Studios, and the company behind the colorization, as the copyright owners claim that the colorization has been done against the wishes of Bykov, who intentionally chose to do the film in black and white, in order to match newly shot scenes with the newsreel material in the film. In May 2011, the District Court of Kiev ruled that the colorization was a breach of copyright and that the colorized version can't be showed or rented in Ukraine.[1]