Excerpt from “Best Films about the Great Revolutionary War”, episode of “PopCul”, a radio program on IBS-3, aired Feburary 28th, 2020
_PopCul (shortened from “Popular Culture”) is a pop culture focused radio show and podcast, airing on IBS-3 (operated. The hosts (Soviet screenwriter Sergei “Kal” Kalgonoff*, Chinese-American pop culture scholar Sonny Lim*, Asian British critic Vineetha Bethanabotla* and Mexican-American film critic Jose Alexandra Lenina*) discuss a topic dealing in any media from film to TV to books to video games.
The following deals with international films about the Great Revolutionary War._
JOSE: One of the great Latin war films is La Resistance from 1981 . A Mexican-Argentinian co-production, it deals with the Magonista Regiment…
SONNY: Very famous regiment from the Mexican Army of National Liberation.
J: Right, and it follows them as they attempt to stop the Brazilian invasion of the Peru-Chile border in 1941. Believe it or not, it was one of John Huston’s last movies. Now he served in the Motion Picture Brigade during the war itself, and he used his experience to make the films a lot more realistic.
S: Which is why the film tended to be very intense in its battle scenes.
KAL: Historians were upset at the historical inaccuracies?
VIN: Yes, apparently the film overemphasized the threat the Brazilians posed to the Pacific Coast, but the Pan-American Army loaned some period equipment.
K: The film was one of the biggest Spanish language films released that year.
J: And of all time!
K: To go on a different path, away from the very bombastic, is a personal favorite of mine: 900 Days in Leningrad. Directed by the great Sergio Leone, director of great spaghetti westerns like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West, and eventually of various other genres films, like Once Upon A Time in America, Flash Gordon, and The Phantom, this is regarded as his greatest film. An epic romance starring Robert De Niro and Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė, with the most haunting images of the Siege of Leningrad.
S: And one of Ennio Morricone’s best scores.
V: A lot of competition there. (laughs)
J:It’s interesting with his later films, they were mostly Comintern or Comintern co-productions. He was never officially a defector, but he increasingly worked with American and Soviet studios and not as much on his spaghetti westerns.
K: He felt trapped by the capitalist machinery, and saw communist filmmaking as freer, especially for the big budget movies he wanted to make. They weren’t as risk averse to experimental blockbusters.
S: And it comes out in this film! The sheer scale of it is astounding! Lavish battle scenes, large explosions, immaculate set design! It is probably his biggest film.
J: A lot of passion and romance, too! De Niro and Dapkunaite just going at each other every scene! A perfect Valentine’s Day, if not for all the death.
V: As an Indian, I have deep affection for the film Bridge over the River Ganga.
S: The first sort of big international Bollywood film, along with Panther Panchali.
V: Well, that’s Bengal, but it’s a whole different thing. But yeah, this started off the international Bollywood machine that is now in its seventh decade of global influence. IS Johar and Raj Kapoor, two of the biggest stars of the period, are prisoners of war for the Azad Bharat, forced to work building a railroad over the Ganges. Kapoor, a light skinned Hindu, is given preferential treatment, while Johar, a Muslim, is forced into very hard labor. Kapoor seems to be converted, but ends up sabotaging the railroad at the very end. Mehboob Khan, the director, said that he wanted to create a “unifying” film that would show the “moral” strength of the Indian nation. It defined Bollywood filmmaking for generations.
S: It was the first international film dealing with the Swatantra Bharat?
V: Yes, but even this big epic couldn’t shake the stigma of discussing it in media for decades. The presence of low-level collaborators in Bengal prevented these sorts of talks from happening.
K: The main exposure we in the Red world had to Azad Bharat prior to this film was “The Hunt”.
S: The first Rachel Stern book.
K: Yes, the adaptation of Maxine Kaplan’s book by the legendary noir pair of Howard Hawks and Leigh Beckett. Lauren Becall is Section 1 agent Rachel Stern, attempting to foil a scheme by Nikolai Balabos, played by Boris Karloff, to arm a small Azad Bharat delegation in Tibet and prevent Tibet from allying with them.
J: There were several adaptations of Kaplan’s book.
K: Yes, but I still hold a great deal of affection for this original. Hawks is able to give the story a scale and danger that you never really saw in espionage films prior to that.
V: You saw that scale with the Franco-British films of the time. Particularly The Guns of Navarone , one of my personal favorites. David Niven (fresh off his three film stint as the first James Bond) leads the international cast, who are a group of British, American, and Soviet soldiers attempting to make a last stand against a Turkish offensive on the fictional island of Navarone.
K: That film is often compared here to the Battle of Neretva , another international film from the Balkan Federation. The legendary Sergei Bondarchuk and Yul Brynner are the leads of that, focusing on the partisans resisting the Nazis but it’s set in the same region, but has a lot more of an … American “oomph” to it.
V: And both were cross-bloc co-productions. As was the excellent film Intifada, British-Palestinian movie
S: And the unofficial sequel to Lawrence of Arabia.
V: Well, sort of official (laughs). Peter O’Toole reprises the role and he references the events of the first film several times. Based partially on Lawrence advising the Palestinian resistance to the Italian occupation, it was kind of a deconstruction of Lawrence and the whole myth the real TE Lawrence projected to the end of his life.
S: I think Roger Ebert called it “Lawrence of Jerusalem”.
J: A bit of a sausage fest here, why don’t we talk about some of the more female centric movies.
S: Thank you! I was thinking of the 1992 Soviet film Nightflyers about a squadron of female pilots during the war. Very suspenseful, but a lot of fun moments as well.
J: I also love Libertarias, a film about an all-women’s anarchist guerrilla group fighting both Sanjurjists and Nazis, just as the most horrific parts of the war began.
V: Of course, earlier than that, in a strange way, the 1981 Suprema movie, with Lynda Carter, features some of the Amazon Battalions during the war, and shows how heroic they were.
K: How can you forget Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS!
S: We haven’t forgotten. (Laughs) I’ve seen some amazing Nazisploitation movies. Like Brave Women of the Red Army vs. Blonde Nazi Superwomen.
K: Classic.
S: Especially all those lingerie fights in black-and-white. A real camp classic.
J: Another camp classic, the 1990 Captain America from Vertov and United Artists. Horrible film, but a lot of real iconic moments. Easily one of the most fun of the Vertov-produced Marvel movies, especially the appearance of Natasha Romanov and her Howling Commandos.
V: As a Brit, I feel we’ve focused a bit too much communist productions or co-production. Let me highlight some ones from the Franco-British Union.
K: Alright.
V: We have the wonderful comedy Dad’s Army , based on the television series in 1971. Another 70’s comedy in the same vein, 1942 in 1979, about the Nazi bomb scare in Portsmouth.
J: That was one of the last Franco-British films directed by a Canadian before the Red Turn.
V: Yes, Norman Jewison, who had already moved on to American films, but did this as a last favor to Paramount. And for dramas, there’s Judgment at Nuremberg , based loosely off the Scientists Trial, where von Braun, Heisenberg, and other scientists were put on trial for their role in the Nazi death machine. And there’s the excellent Trial of the Century , about the first Nuremberg Trial, focusing primarily on Hitler and his trial. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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