Padeniye Berlina

Plot synopsis:
=== Part 1 ===
Alexei Ivanov, a shy steel factory worker, greatly surpasses his production quota and is chosen to receive the Order of Lenin and to have a personal interview with Joseph Stalin. Alexei falls in love with the idealist teacher Natasha, but has difficulties approaching her. When he meets Stalin, who tends his garden, the leader helps him to understand his emotions and tells him to recite poetry to her. Then, they both have a luncheon with the rest of the Soviet leadership in Stalin's home. After returning from Moscow, Alexei confesses his love to Natasha. While they are both having a stroll in a wheat field, their town is attacked by the Germans, who invade the Soviet Union.
Alexei loses his consciousness and sinks into a coma. When he awakes, he is told that Natasha is missing and that the Germans are at the gates of Moscow. In the capital, Stalin plans the defense of the city, explaining to the demoralized Georgy Zhukov how to deploy his forces. Alexei volunteers for the Red Army, takes part in the parade in the Red Square and in the Battle of Moscow. At Berlin, after receiving the blessings of his allies – Turkey, the Vatican, Romania and Japan – and watching a long column of Soviet slaves-laborers, Natasha among them, Adolf Hitler is furious to hear that Moscow has not fallen. He dismisses Walther von Brauchitsch from his office and offers the command of the army to Gerd von Rundstedt; the latter refuses, saying that Stalin is a great captain and Germany's defeat is certain. Hitler orders to attack Stalingrad. In the meanwhile, Göring negotiates with British capitalist Bedstone, who supplies Germany with needed materials. After the Soviet victory in Stalingrad, Vasily Chuikov tells Ivanov that Stalin is always with the Red Army. The storyline leaps to the Yalta Conference, where Stalin and his Western Allies debate the future of the war. The treacherous Winston Churchill intends to deny the Soviets access to Berlin and almost manages to convince the gullible Franklin Delano Roosevelt to accept his plans. And the war rages on toward Moscow, with Alexei in the midst of battle and Natasha trapped in the concentration camp.
=== Part 2 ===
Stalin asks his generals who will take Berlin, they or the Western Allies. The generals answer that they will capture the city. Alexei's Guards Army advances towards Berlin, while Hitler has a nervous breakdown and demands that his soldiers fight to the end. The Germans plan to execute the inmates of the concentration camp in which Natasha is held before the arrival of the Red Army, but Alexei's unit liberates the prisoners before they carry through their design. Natasha faints, and he does not find her. Hitler and the German leadership fall into despair and lose their grip on reality the closer the Soviets get to Berlin. Hitler orders to flood the subway stations as the Soviets approach, drowning thousands of civilians. He then marries Eva Braun and commits suicide. Gen. Hans Krebs carries the news of Hitler's death to the Red Army and begs for a ceasefire. Stalin orders to accept only an unconditional surrender. Alexei is chosen to carry the Victory Banner, alongside Mikhail Yegorov and Meliton Kantaria. Their division storms the Reichstag and the three hoist the banner atop of it. The Germans surrender and Red Army soldiers from throughout the USSR celebrate victory. Stalin's plane lands in Berlin, and he is greeted by an enthusiastic crowd of peoples of "all the nations", holding posters with his picture and waving various nations' flags. Stalin carries a speech in which he calls for world peace. Standing in the crowd, Alexei and Natasha recognize each other and are reunited. Natasha asks Stalin to let her kiss him on the cheek, and they hug while prisoners praise Stalin in numerous languages. The film ends with Stalin wishing all peace and happiness.

Tags: romantic

Review:
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
Despite its propaganda intentions, a solid, popular, entertaining movie about World War II.
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.
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).
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.
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)..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This scene shows Stalin having taken action to relieve German pressure on the allies in 1944/1945.
What is ludicrous about this movie is not so much its stilted portrayal of Adolf Hitler but the fact that anyone would even want to go out of their way to try to reduce Adolf Hitler to a caricature and an item for derision.
Treating Adolf Hitler and the Nazis as a joke is historically unsupportable.
By reducing Hitler to a mere caricature of a dictatorship undermines the basic premise of the movie, that the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin was a strong, viable and credible nation, for how strong does a country and the political leadership need to be to defend itself against somebody that according to the movie is nothing more than a pathetic joke?
Hitler was already dead, World War Two was already history, Nazi Germany had already been defeated and obliterated from the political map, yet the Soviet Union decided to produce what has to be one of the worst movies ever made, which is saying a lot in a era of bad movies stretching back to the dawn of the age of Holloywood.
There is nothing funny about Hitler's decision to go to war and invade the Soviet Union.
Nor is the portrayal of Adolf Hitler as some kind of screaming, argumentative hysterical malcontent historically accurate or dramatically strong.
To mock and deride at Hitler four years after the end of World War Two and Hitler's death seems rather pointless and a mere exercise in displaced rage.
But for a movie company to actually spend time and money to produce a movie that portrays Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cronies as corrupt, effete, irresponsible sycophants isn't saying anything that was not already public knowledge and merely confirmed the obvious.
This monumental film in Agfacolor (ironically a German patent) was shot in 1949 to celebrate Stalin's greatest triumph, the victory over his arch-rival (and former ally) Hitler and the capture of Berlin by the Red Army in April/May 1945.
The film's blatant, plump propaganda and hilariously absurd dramaturgy make it a gem of unintentional humor and thus very entertaining to watch, especially if you are aware of the true historical background behind the massive distortions.Stalin, in fact one of history's most feared and ruthless mass-murderers, appears as some kind of benevolent, peace-loving demi-god all dressed in a white gala uniform, who never loses his temper, is always in control of the situation and stays at the same time a wise and likable grand-daddy who despite his infallible greatness has not lost his touch with the common people, who of course idolize him like crazy.
In comparison to him Churchill and Roosevelt look like senile and disoriented losers, while Hitler is being portrayed as a raving cartoon maniac straight out of THE GREAT DICTATOR.The other characters which are supposed to be "common Russian people" are nothing more but schematic cardboard stereotypes following the ideals of the communist-stalinist doctrine with unflinching enthusiasm and no real life of their own.
Mixed up in this is a kitschy love story with loads of unbelievable plot points (the hero does not only kiss the heroine for the first time exactly when the Germans invade completely out of the - literal - blue, he also rescues her from a concentration camp AND meets her again in the victorious crowd in the streets of Berlin).The film may also have the distinction of being the very first in the "Hitler's Last Days in the Bunker"-Subgenre.
Of course, beyond the campy propaganda fun the underlying immense tragedy of the incredibly atrocious Soviet-German-War should always be kept in mind when watching..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One must accept this film as extremely political because of the time period it was produced(Cold war era)1949.Making fun of the Nazis in motion pictures was a game both sides of the Iron curtain played.In this movie the tactic of depicting them as mentally crazed by using actors that match their historical counterparts in "looks" works pretty well in the make believe category!!
Indeed most of the leaders portrayed here are reminiscent of their true life counterparts for example Stalin,Molotov,Goering,Zhukov,Hitler(GEEEE I wish I had Mr V.Savelyev to play me a fuhrer in a more honest depiction because this guy really does have his appearance),the intention of their "look alike ness" being to rub in the victorious Soviet view at the time by making the events and people seem factual.For example,the idea of introducing an Englishman named "Bedstone" organizing deals with Goering is pure Communist fantasy,the idea of this scene being to show us a heartless "Western power" collaborating with the Reich in their common ideological struggle against Bolshevism,not true,just another Russian excuse for opposing the "Capatilist Imperialists".But OK being an Soviet propaganda movie made for Stalins birthday we must not judge it the way we should a modern/honest documentary dealing with ww2!!For those buffs out there who like the authentic war gear of the period you'll be pleased when viewing "The fall" as its crawling with it.Romance is also featured in this epic with big guy Aliosha clearing enemy territory by scaring the Nazis back to Berlin using his PPSH mg while searching for his stolen Natasha,giving the viewer all the more reason to cheer for the Reds no matter how much one might dislike them.An pretty love story that meets an happy ending with the defeat of Nazi Germany and the sudden unexpected visit by Stalin The Great(butcher) next to the Reichstag.All in all its a great movie loaded with nice scenes(some laughable),one that made beautiful use of color and lighting.I had the benefit of English subtitles when I watched it on Youtube so gone are the days when Russian seemed such a complicated language!!!!Great film.
Does the public really need the Soviet Union, with its GULAGS, denial of due process, the building of the Berlin Wall, the purges, conspiring with Nazi Germany to commit an unprovoked attack upon Poland and then illegally invading Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and also committing aggression Poland, poking fun at Adolf Hitler and the Nazis?
Who the heck was the Soviet Union, with its NKVD and brutal one-party rule, to mock Adolf Hitler?
If you want to watch movies mocking Adolf Hitler, check out the The Three Stooges and Charlie Chaplin.