I finally obtained a video copy of this movie, and it lived up to all of my expectations. Tom Courtenay is easily believable as Ivan, and the early scene where he devours a cold and non-nourishing breakfast is a hard-hitting portrayal of what the life of a Gulag prisoner was reduced to. A horrific scene at the end of the movie (though not in the book) showing the Captain beginning his first night of ten in the punishment cells is representative of Solzhenitsyn's observation in "The Gulag Archipelago": The Soviet Union had its death camps too; it (as opposed to the Nazis) just didn't use gas.
