The Forty-First (Russian: Сорок первый, romanized: Sorok pervyy) is a 1956 Soviet war romance film based on the eponymous novel by Boris Lavrenyov.

Tensions arise between the two: the officer is a well-educated aristocrat who is both amused and impressed by the crude attempts of Maria, a fisherman's orphan daughter, to compose Agitprop poetry.

The Red soldier treats the White officer when he catches a fever and is slowly charmed by his manners, while he is overcome with gratitude and begins to call her 'Man Friday' with affection.

In a 1956 letter to the literary historian Boris Geronimus, Lavrenyov wrote: "I never needed any documentary sources for writing The Wind [Veter, 1924] and The Forty-First.

The character of Maryutka [Maria Filatovna Basova] had been taken by me wholesale from Anya Vlasova, the real girl, who'd volunteered for the Red Army and served at the Turk[estan] Front.

Later she often visited the offices of Krasnaya Zvezda with her extremely touching, but totally ridiculous poems, one of which I quoted in the novella, without making any change.

It was conducted in the Turkmen SSR, in the vicinity of Krasnovodsk and on the Caspian Sea's Cheleken Peninsula; the latter served as the location for the island scenes.