Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

Edwin The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Fulke Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Lars Lendale You can't hate this movie just because it was made for Soviet intent and purposes. It's a fascinating work of art. While the sotryline is lame and overwritten by the stands of historical figures, it doesn't lose much of its interest. Tchiaoureli, directs one of the very first "kolossal" productions at the time, a 2h45min long picture, depicting the war, the battlefields, the camps, the very last hours of the III Reich and the inevitable triumph of Stalin on the steps of his private jet.The cinematography is quite brilliant, the color very rich and dense, there's a lot of depth, the special effects were kept inside the picture, which gives these spectacular shots of the battlefields. Quite remarkable how Tchiaoureli modeled these decors, sound fx and the burning ruins of Berlin. You have to praise the effort (even though at times the director must've ran out of energy or money for unconvincing fights at the end and real shots of actual footage of Soviet military fanfare ) for trying to reconstitute a catastrophic moment of history into a work of art, tied up in between satire and and spectacle. Hitler's wedding is absolutely hysterical. One of the best scenes of the entire movie. You have to admit, it is hilarious to a degree to see this criminal wedding Frau Eva after being so sure, so sure he would raise Moscow to the ground, and there he is standing 6 meters underground marrying his mistress without much conviction knowing this is the end. A very, very humiliating moment for Hitler, add to that the background orchestra which intentionally makes it even more ridiculous.Many of course tried to disapprove this opposition between the hysterical one-dimensional angrily demoniac Hitler and the poised clever-thinking Stalin, but truth is at these stages of the war, it was pretty much that way. Hitler tried to blow up Germany if it could save his Empire from Soviet conquest. Hell if h ran out of population to enslave and kill, he would've attacked penguins in Antarctica that's how lunatic he was. But be there as it may, the movie is undeniably successful in the mastering of montage, the academic style, a powerful reconstruction of the context, magnificent settings, the scene where Goerring shows his gallery to Krupp quite impressive, the camps at Kalinigrad, the drowning of the German population in the metro under Hitler's orders, how despite all the devastating shooting and bombing the landscape and color are always bright which is interesting, there's an attempt to clearly show "Mother Russia" as never scorned by the War. It's funny the attempt to portray realism and sensationalism. anecdotic behavior and outrageous caricaturing (the scene where Hitler meets Orsenigo and his low humor is met with fake applause and laughs by his advisors). The moments of grave drama are never directed with a tragic tone but the satyrical ones are. It's a very interesting movie that reverses the conventional wisdoms of movie making of the time, with Soviet movie making culture. Not quite Eisenstein or Donskoï we get that, but I would say it's a good compromise between political judgment and artistic research.Also, praise the works of Leonid Kosmatov, Vladimir Kaplounovsky and Shostakovitch's music is excellent, a composer of great talent.

don2507 I purchased a DVD of this film in order to see a Soviet-made WW II film made during the peak of the "Stalin cult" and during the early years of the cold war. I wanted to see the impact of Soviet propaganda on WW II films at this time and therefore found it very interesting in that regard, although the film itself is somewhat muddled. It awkwardly weaves a love story between a simple Stakhanovite (a big producer in the steel mills) and a schoolteacher with the ebb and flow of the war with Nazi Germany, and lo and behold they are reunited (she was sent to Germany as a slave laborer) at the bottom of the conquered Reichstag in the heart of Berlin at the end of the war. And Stalin arrives at the end of the battle for Berlin to receive a grateful kiss from the schoolteacher at the Reichstag and receive the adulation of both the Soviet armies and of the captives of all nations liberated by the Red Army in their various languages. In addition, there are the "stock" characters beloved in Soviet demonology: The scheming British capitalist who intends to get strategic metals to the Reich from Sweden, the Vatican emissary to the Reich in full bishop's regalia who praises Hitler, the Nazi officer who feigns surrender only to throw a grenade at his Soviet captors. Churchill at Yalta is portrayed as scheming and untrustworthy; he asks Stalin to toast George VI to which the proletarian Generalissimo refuses. Hitler is portrayed in equal parts buffoonish and crazy, so much so that we wonder, given this portrayal, how he was able to captivate and inspire, at least for much of the war, his generals and party comrades. Stalin, of course, is portrayed as calm and never fearful, and full of wisdom.But it should be noted that much of the military history is accurate. Although the film (obviously) does not cover Stalin's decapitation of the Red Army in the great purge of 1937 and his refusal to listen to Soviet intelligence as well as warnings from Churchill that a Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was imminent in the spring of 1941, which were both disastrous for the Soviets, it does show his decision to stay in Moscow in the fall of 1941, when the Germans launched their "final offensive" against Moscow and much of his government was panicking. It's fair to say that remaining in Moscow improved the morale of the Red Army fighting only 30-40 km from the Kremlin. To expedite the conquest of Berlin, Stalin sets the demarcation line between Marshall Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front and Marshall Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front right in the center of Berlin to foster a rivalry between the two commanders in capturing Berlin. We hear the denigration of the Reich's resistance against the Anglo-American armies while Nazi Germany fights fanatically against the invading Red Army (This was only true of the last weeks of the war when the Germans were desperate to surrender to the western allies and avoid the feared Russians.) The depiction of the fighting is very good in places, but looks stilted in others. An officer tells his fighting men that wherever we go: "Stalin is with us." The director had access to some five Soviet divisions. The massing of artillery at the April 16th offensive on Berlin (from the Oder River), complete with searchlights, looked impressive. I believe the 1st Belorussian Front had something like an artillery piece every 10 meters for miles! And the final assault on the Reichstag also looked very realistic. Even though the Reichstag hadn't been used since the fire of 1933, the Red Army viewed it as the ultimate symbol of Nazi Germany whose destruction meant the final extinction of the Reich.It should be noted that Marshall Zhukov is not treated well in this film. One scene is titled "Zhukov's Error", and when Stalin makes his fictional visit to Berlin after the Reichstag's been taken, he meets three generals (Konev, Rokossovsky, and Chuikov) but not Marshall Zhukov, his most successful commander. Stalin feared Zhukov's popularity after the war, and he was subsequently demoted to minor postings by the time the film was made in 1949.The film ends with Stalin "dropping out of the clouds" from his magnificent airplane (reminiscent of Hitler in Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will", as many have noted) and spreading his benevolence to the assembled masses in the heart of Berlin. Our "Engineer of Souls" pronounces his wish for "peace and happiness" for all mankind. In actuality, at the time of the events being depicted (1945) he was preparing another repressive crackdown on individual liberties, and at the time the film was made (1949) he was close to giving his approval to Kim II Sung to invade South Korea. Khrushchev always viewed the film's director, Mikheil Chiaureli, as a hack, and the film was withdrawn from circulation during the de-stalinization campaign beginning in 1953. But 38 million Soviet citizens watched it in upon its release in 1950 and it remains an excellent example of Soviet historiography.

hte-trasme It seems almost -- almost -- unfair to judge "The Fall of Berlin" as a film. It's a piece of Soviet state propaganda that doesn't really try to masquerade as a film. Soviet cinema wasn't always straight propaganda, of course, and most films I've seen from the Soviet era had mostly ambitions that were artistic of entertaining. This is the exception. It's all about Stalin and the Soviet state (as one), and this results in a simply ridiculous film. Stalin was, it has been said, supposed to be a man that a Soviet citizen both feared and loved with all his heart, and this film bears that out. When our hero-factory-worker-soldier Alexei meets him in an early scene he is petrified for not knowing what to say. And Stalin the all-knowing ends up miraculously solving his love life.That love life is a wooden and perfunctory set of scenes that are also, of course, as much about Stalin as anything. They theoretically serve to get a blank hero a motivation for going to battle, and then the rest of the film meanders between scenes of battles and heads of the two sides of the war talking. Stalin appears a lot, but not too much. He's a man-god, and if we see too much of the man-god, the polish wears off. He's played as an infallible (apart from the odd decision of doing his gardening in a bright white jacket) and imperturbable being, and by an actor covered in so much make-up that he seems to be made of wax. In general, actors who look quite a lot like their real-world (I hesitate to say "historical" since the film was made so soon after the events it describes) counterparts have been found, but they aren't necessarily good or given anything halfway believable to say. Hitler is given a lot of screen-time, and he's portrayed as a shouting, raving, rabid, loony, nut-ball. It might be the most hilariously hammy, scene-chewing performances I've ever seen. Hitler was certainly no model of reason and rationality in real life, but if he'd actually behaved like this he would have been immediately been thrown in an insane asylum instead of being put in charge of Germany. The idea is to contrast the emotional ravings of Hitler's leadership with the calm inspiration of Stalin's -- and they over-egged the pudding the point where it was mostly just eggs. In favor of the film, it does look spectacular, and there are some inspired shots and photography. It's clear no expense has been spared, and the scenes in Berlin at the end seem quite convincing. The scenes of Hitler rolling his eyes while taking part in a crazed wedding with Eva as the Wedding March plays and he deliberately orders his own people drowned in the subways (well, he is literally Hitler) does end up being quite dramatic. The score is by the great Dmitri Shostakovich, and even when in his mode of being sarcastically subservient to the Soviet musical establishment (as here) and writing elaborated fanfares rather than pushing formal and musical limits, his music is always fascinating and worthwhile. The dialog is mostly unremittingly stupid, but there is a nice moment where Churchill proposes a toast to the King, Stalin professes a distaste for monarchy, and Roosevelt instead proposes one to the heath of Kalinin, the Soviet version of a nominal head of state who was really just a figurehead. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin's cult of personality after his death, very few hesitated to sigh and denounce it with him. I suspect part of the reason was that it was built on a combination of fear and artifacts like this film, which no thinking person could find even slightly believable. It's interesting as a historical artifact, amusing for it's woodenness, and admirable basically only for some of its visual elements.

hdm93050 A Birthday Present that finally answers the age old question of what to get the man who has everything. This film was presented to Stalin on his 70th birthday and is the archtypical Stalin Film. It is intriguing insight into the mindset of the man who ruled and terrorized 1/5 of all humanity and 1//2 of Europe by the film's 1949 release date. The acting, especially the Aliosha and Natasha love plot tied in with Stalin is poorly acted but makes all sense when you look at how Aliosha looks to Stalin for advice, because truth be told this film is a romance for Stalin. The special effects and lighting are excellent for a 1940s film and it is shot in a grand scale that matched the efforts of Kolberg, Gone with the Wind, and the 1926 Ben Hur.The best parts of this film are the impressions of Churchill and Hitler. Minus Churchill speaking Russian, they have his lisp and mannerisms done exceedingly well. Hitler and Goering provide great charictatures and are humorously well done. At best its an intriguing insight into the delusions of madness that Stalin subjected his people to and at worst its a 2 hour festival of unintentional humor. I'd recommend it for any historian.