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6 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :- A classic of its kind, 21 February 2003 Author: Ian Chapman from London, England
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. In scenes overdrawn to the point of parody and beyond, all livid blues and menacing shadows, actor V. Savelyev delivers a performance that should have had him sent to the gulag for upstaging his fellow despot. In his final, hilarious scene, his dog Blondi is despached by a spiked canape delivered by Eva Braun during their wedding breakfast - surely the cinema's finest death scene!10 out of 10!
USSR propaganda, but worth seeing, 22 December 2007 Author: ffgomezforever from Galicia
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. "Padeniye Berlina", sometimes boring and a bit theatrical, contains these and many other good scenes, an attractive photographic work (with those Agfa color negatives, so different, but not less fascinating, from the accustomed American technicolor of the time), and a good score. And then , the Stalin omnipresence. But, sceptical as I am in relation to all political regimes, I don't think this propaganda film to be so different from other occidental films of the kind (war, patriotic ones). 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.
1 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :- Ugh., 14 March 2008 Author: PWNYCNY from United States
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
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? For the Soviet Union, which gave Germany the green light to invade Poland, to make such a movie attains a height of hypocrisy that is almost breathtaking. Who the heck was the Soviet Union, with its NKVD and brutal one-party rule, to mock Adolf Hitler? And how dumb were the Soviets to act like Operation Barbarossa was a complete surprise? How could they fail to notice the amassing of four million soldiers and thousands of airplanes, tanks and cannons on the their western border? If you want to watch movies mocking Adolf Hitler, check out the The Three Stooges and Charlie Chaplin. Unlike this Soviet propaganda fiasco, they lampooned Hitler while Hitler was still alive.
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