Great East Front Realism but a Flawed Movie

Rating: 8/10 (6 August 2005)

Don't get me wrong, I liked the movie. By using Yugoslavia and the local army, who used vintage Russian weapons, it gave it realism that no Hollywood production could match, where Combat! or the Battle of the Bulge used American tanks painted with German crosses. The acting and stars performed well too: Schell, Coburn, Mason and Warner pulled their weight. What I hated was the plot itself: the enemy in this case was the career minded Prussian officer Hauptmann Stransky played by Maximillian Schell. For instance, he wanted to kill the Russian boy soldier prisoner but Steiner stopped him. A little background is in order, the Germans killed millions of Russian pow's, often shooting them right after they surrendered, then the Soviets threw the survivors of the German camps into their own camps after the war. Adding the million of others murdered by the Nazis, including machine gunning 2 million Jews, Stransly would be a saint. Why the filmmaker left out any references to the massive atrocities of the Germans and Russians and focused on one phony glory seeker is beyond me. Peckinpah was famous for his artistic slow mo approach to violence, like in the "Wild Bunch", but this film lacked the excitement and novelty of that one.
Obviously the German writer must have it in for officers and had a class warfare angle to the plot, the plebes versus the Prussian aristocrats. But the Nazis had that same attitude too, so hating aristocratic career Junker officers is hardly some badge of goodness. Once again, it's hard to make a movie about the East Front and ignore all the mass atrocities; that is an atrocity itself, except for the closing credits. It is a good action movie and interesting, and has a good European look so I do recommend it in spite of what I said above. Some of the action scenes are well done and have a better feel than the usual contrived Rambo-Terminator Kung Fu super hyped combat scenes we are dosed with these days.