STALINGRAD: A few words on the best action film about WW II

It seems obscene to make comparisons about war films. For one thing, as you might see in *WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN (1978), the best war films may have the blowing up of things and people only as an incident or a context, perhaps not at all.

[I suddenly think of William Saroyan's one film (directed by Clarence Brown) THE HUMAN COMEDY (1943)].

However, Joseph Vilsmier's *STALINGRAD (1994), curiously I thought, was dismissed by San Francisco movie critics BECAUSE it's war scenes were so realistic and powerful. Why show all of this to us again, they wrote? It's been done so well in All QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (Milestone, 1930) and WESTFRONT 1918 (Pabst, 1930). Paradoxically, when SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (Spielberg, 1998) came along, some critics made unfavorable comparisons of STALINGRAD with it. Our blood and guts is better than their blood and guts!

STALINGRAD, with no stars known in the United States, with no conventional Hollywood war film plot, is the best combat action theatrical film about World War II. It begins with a company of young soldiers partying, on leave, along the Adriatic Coast of Italy. They are rounded up and given their orders. They board a train and head east, most of them to their deaths. On the way, the scuttlebutt is that they are headed for a place they've never heard of, a place called Stalingrad.

Fifteen minutes into the picture, they arrive and are deployed. For more than two hours, exhorted by their officers and the Leaders of Nazi Germany, they fight a grinding, unremitting battle of attrition, in worsening weather conditions, until, cut off and annihilated, a few remaining survivors stumble into a line of freezing prisoners, most of whom will never return home.

Hitler lost over a third of a million of his best troops in this long battle for a city reduced to rubble, Stalingrad, which was crucial to securing his flank in his drive to the Russian oilfields of the Caucasus. It was this battle and British General Montgomery's defeat of Rommel at El Alamein that marked the turning point of World War II.

Originally based, possibly, on Theodore Plevier's great war trilogy (Moscow; Stalingrad; Berlin), reminiscent of Willi Heinrich's novel Cross of Iron, this film, with few stock characters, without sentimentality or false heroics, is the most terrible combat action indictment of war I have ever seen.

Of the many scenes I might present to illustrate the power and brutal honesty of the film let me cite a relatively peaceful one:

On a Sunday fall morning early in the film, the regiment is drawn up in a circle, rank on rank; men in their "Sunday Best," who have been burning, killing, pillaging all week, and will do so again next week and in the bitter months to follow. They are taking part in a Prayer Service! In the center of the circle is the Senior Regimental Chaplain. He is a magnificent example of Aryan Manhood, dressed in an elaborate, colorful uniform mixing Nazi and Christian symbols that Reinhardt Heydrich or Hermann Goering might have admired. He, too, rousingly urges his lambs to charge into Hell, for Christ and National Socialism!

It reminds me of Mark Twain's mordant "A War Prayer" and all those reassuring, quick shots of sad faced, bespectacled Chaplains lifting their eyes to Heaven in Hollywood War Movies. Here in STALINGRAD is the reality, which is Twain's, as my father often told me.

Nothing more need be said about the comparative merits of films about the insanity of war, nor of the efficacy of religion in Real Politik.

STALINGRAD is a vastly underrated film. Seek it out.

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