The Fall of Berlin

In the annals of movies that afford rich entertainment in ways totally unintended by their makers, The Fall of Berlin occupies an honoured place.

The story, the vicissitudes of a soldier at the front and his sweetheart in a German forced labour camp, is juxtaposed with sequences of Stalin and Hitler conducting the war.

Stalin, wise, kind and, of course, a supreme military leader is a hoot, but it is Hitler who rivets and enthralls. In scenes overdrawn to the point of parody and beyond, all livid blues and menacing shadows, actor V. Savelyev delivers a performance that should have had him sent to the gulag for upstaging his fellow despot. In his final, hilarious scene, his dog Blondi is despached by a spiked canape delivered by Eva Braun during their wedding breakfast - surely the cinema's finest death scene!

10 out of 10!

Perhaps not the most sophisticated film ever made about World War II, but this 1949 Soviet film is a rousing, solid, popular piece of filmmaking. Reportedly made as a present for Stalin's 70th birthday, who took great interest in its production, it was made with considerable production values (for that time) and in great Agfacolor film, taken as war reparation from the Germans. It's a propaganda film alright, but is very well made. As far as I know this was also the first fiction film dealing with the fall of Berlin (though the film, despite its title, deals with all the war in the eastern front, starting from the German invasion of Russia and not just its ending). I'm sure its intended audience – the Soviet masses who just have been through WW2, appreciated the movie. Hitler and his minions (who all speak in Russian in the film) are portrayed as grotesque, pathetic buffoons – but this is not necessarily a bad thing since they are the comic relief of the movie. Also fun is the portrayal of Roosevelt and Churchill at the Yalta conference, the American president is shown as naive and slightly befuddled, the British premier a mean, conniving old man. Stalin, meanwhile, is portrayed through the film as a wise, gentle, all knowing commander leading his country into victory (never mind his well recorded nervous breakdown at the start of Operation Barbarossa). Summing up, despite some historical inaccuracies, this is a very good film, especially for those interested in World War II (note: in this review, I deal with both part I and part II, since the division of the movie in two halves is artificial).

I had the privilege of seeing the unreleased (as of this writing) DVD containing a restoration of the film utilizing the original negative. While the restoration isn't pristine (some scratches still appear), it manages to restore and maintain the coloration of the German Agfacolor stock that was used. Check out the comparison between the original and the restoration in the special features. The total film is 151 minutes long, split into two parts but I really didn't feel it bogged down too much. It is in Russian but has English subtitles.

There is some good outdoor cinematography especially in the scene that represents Germany's invasion of Russia, though most of the interior work is rather stilted with a few shots that show brilliance for its time period.

The score is brilliantly done by Dimitri Shostakovich befitting the epic scope that is presented.

As revisionist propaganda, this film was created as a valentine to Stalin for his 70th birthday presenting the Russian side of World War II and Stalin's steadfastness.For the most part though, the propaganda in the film is rather subtle in its views of the Allies, but blistering in its portrayals of Hitler, Gehring and Goebbels. Hilter is presented from the very beginning as a man who has already gone off the deep end (which I'm not sure is inaccurate). Though I must admit that it appears that the filmmaker was attempting to show that the British and the Americans did not care enough about the Russian front which was Stalin's view of their behavior in the war.

There is a framing device that drives the "story" along in a romance between a Russian steelworker and a Russian teacher. When the Nazi's invade, she is captured and taken to a camp and he joins the fight so that he can find her. We follow him through the major battles though the time line skips the negative parts of the war for the Russians and presents primarily their victories. He manages to be at every one including the Fall of Berlin which ends the film. Of course there is a happy ending as if there is any doubt about it. It appears that Russians of that time period used cliché story lines as much as Hollywood.

Most of the actors look creepily like the historical figures they are except the actor playing FDR. He was shown looking fairly frail which is not the image that we have of him in the US. The actor playing Stalin in the film had portrayed him in Russian films since 1939 and would continue to play Stalin in all but one of his films after this one. He is a dead ringer with Stalin's mannerisms down pat.

I have to admit that there were times that I laughed, especially at the portrayal of Hitler. The performance was so over the top at times that I half expected him to pull out some mustard to go with his scenery chewing.

Of course, being a propaganda film, the facts are skewed to favor Stalin and the Russians and even twisted to some degree. The Yalta meeting is a good example of that. There is also dramatized scene of Stalin arriving in Berlin to great acclaim that did not actually happen.

Overall it is a rarity that is interesting to film and WWII buffs who would like to see what the Russians thought of the US and the rest of world. I've watched many propaganda films through the years (both American and Eastern Bloc) but this one is truly epic in scope.

When this is released, I would recommend if you are interested in the subject to pick it up.

The Fall of Berlin 1950 Get beyond the stagy acting and the cheap special effects, and this movie presents the Soviet version of how and why the Russians wound up in Berlin in April 1945. Although ostensibly a love story between a Soviet factory worker who serves in the Red Army and Soviet school teacher who is kidnapped by the Germans and becomes a slave laborer inside Germany, Stalin and Hitler are the principal characters. The contrast between the two could not more stark. Hitler is portrayed has a megalomania driven fanatic who responded to bad news, meaning the truth, with fits of hysteria while Stalin is portrayed as an all-caring leader who through steadfast leadership guides the Soviet Union to victory. Although the movie glorifies Stalin, it also honors the Red Army soldiers who fought the battles. According to the movie, Stalin decides to invade Berlin to prevent the Germans from giving up the city to the allies and then joining the allies to fight the Russians. Hitler believes that he could still win the war by breaking up the American-Soviet alliance. Stalin knows this and directs his generals to ignore German provocations. Another controversial scene is the Yalta Conference. This scene shows Stalin having taken action to relieve German pressure on the allies in 1944/1945. Other scenes show Hitler scornfully rejecting his generals' warnings not to invade Russia, and becoming increasingly despondent as the bad news keeps piling up. The movie portrays the Nazi leaders as little more than opportunistic thugs and plunderers supported by sycophants who are united by one goal: to crush communism. Those supporting Hitler include American business interests and the Catholic Church. The movie is Soviet propaganda, nonetheless, the movie warrants being taken seriously as a cinematic work. The fact is that Hitler lost and Stalin won. The Russians, and not the allies, defeated the Germans in Berlin. These facts alone give the movie's storyline some credibility. Whether it fairly and accurately portrays the role of the Allies in winning the war is another question.

This of course is a pro-Stalin Russian film, but it has other values.First of all, for occidental public, and as many other Russian films of the 40's and 50's, it shows us the almost never watched Russian-side of the II World War.For them it was the "Liberation War", where they lost 18 to 21 million people, more than all the other nation's loses.Something we often forget or simply ignore, so this is an opportunity, from a mere historical view, to look at that "ignored" side of the big war. Keeping Stalin speeches, his battle planning and his final and incredible arrival to Berlin apart, the movie shows good epic moments:the final battle for the Reichstag, the surrender of the German troops in the streets of Berlin, the dialog between the "good worker and soldier" Aloisha with a German officer explaining how they will destroy his city and house as they did with their houses and cities, the final celebration before the(real)ruins of the Reichstag...And also the Hitler's scenes, which constitute a kind of "grand guignol", another movie inserted in the epic film.It's also interesting to see the theories (wether they be only partly true)about Nazis relations with English industrial trusts in the middle of the war, or Hitler's hope of an agreement with Anglo-Americans against Russians, anticipating the Cold War.We the Spanish know something about this, as the fascist Franco was kept in power by the allies, taking advantage of this cold war. "Padeniye Berlina", sometimes boring and a bit theatrical, contains these and many other good scenes, an attractive photographic work (with those Agfa color negatives, so different, but not less fascinating, from the accustomed American technicolor of the time), and a good score. And then , the Stalin omnipresence. But, sceptical as I am in relation to all political regimes, I don't think this propaganda film to be so different from other occidental films of the kind (war, patriotic ones). For me, it's good to get now the opportunity to watch many soviet films we couldn't even know of before the "DVD-era" arrived.They show less propaganda than we could expect (not in this film, of course)and let us know of their daily stories, or their war epics and miseries, so similar to the hundred of stories of American cinema with which we grew up.