Mikheil Chiaurelli | War drama 167’
At the conclusion of ‘The Fall of Berlin’ (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) the Soviet leader’s plane lands in Berlin (an extremely unlikely occurrence since Stalin – portrayed by Mikhail Gelovani as a genial, pipe-smoking old cove in a gleaming white uniform – was afraid of flying) and a woman promptly rushes up to him, puts her arms around him and gives him a hug; when in reality she wouldn’t have got five feet before being clubbed to the ground. Which gives you a pretty good idea that this film should to be taken with a considerable pinch of salt.
Not long before Goebbels, after screening his recently completed Napoleonic epic ‘Kolberg’ to his bemused staff famously declared that a hundred years from now another fine colour film would be made commemorating the terrible times Germany was then going through. The Doctor’s prediction was answered far more swiftly than he could possibly have imagined since only four years later he featured as a limping caricature in the Soviet Union’s seventieth birthday present to their Dear Leader, resplendent in captured Agfacolor and with a score by Shostakovich (who later said that the assignment saved his bacon since at a critical moment he was engaged upon valuable work for the state) and by the look it probably consumed most of the Soviet Union’s GDP for 1949. @RichardChatten
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