It's 1943, and Hollywood decides that a good 'educational' drama is needed to reassure an American public that is somewhat conflicted on being allied with Soviet Russia for the Second World War. Thus we are treated to this picture, one of the most scurrilously evil films that has ever had wide release. Yes, I said evil. No, there's no gratuitous sex or violence or bad language in the film. Just a wholesale haigiography of history's most prolific mass murderer, and the mendacious celebration of a regime whose primary accomplishment was to torture and/or murder tens of millions of people. Other reviewers have compared it as a propaganda piece akin to "Triumph of the Will" or "Battleship Potemkin", but this shameful film has none of Riefenstahl's artistic direction or Eisenstein's imagery. Just one monstrous lie after another served up to justify aggression, war-mongering, totalitarianism, secret police tactics, repression and every other evil of the 20th century. In a just world the makers of this film, if they were not duped into believing it themselves, should have been consigned to the Gulag that they glorified with this hateful piece.
