THE first part of the newsreel-assembly called “The City That Stopped Hitler: Heroic Stalingrad” is identical with any preceding battle-front portrait containing Fitzgerald-travelogue views of a city, the pastorals of harvesting farmers, and the blitz roaring down someone’s highway in captured enemy newsreels. But in the latter half of the film is an irony that will make it one of the more grimly poetic descriptions of the war, as different from the usual war documentary as the battle of Stalingrad was from any other battle of the war. It is an irony occasionally intended but mainly the result of the inveterate Russian sense for cinema realism at work on the material of Stalingrad, the very nature of which would make any film of it a kind of Bible in the extremes of fighting techniques, destruction, death and heroism.
Scorn, irony and satire have usually been rendered in war movies as meaningless and embarrassing devices of name-calling (like the continual reference to the Japanese as rats). But in this film there is an unmistakable, grim savor, implicit in the visual content, and its effect would be there, with or without Mr. Donlevy’s narration. For instance, the mockery is Breughelesque when the most unfortunate, stricken German prisoner, an Ichabod Crane of a person whose frozen feet are burlesqued by the enormous woolen bundles wrapped around them, is walked off into the barren Russian landscape as a symbolical allusion to what awaits the ambitious army that invades Russia. There is a similar shot of a decapitated, frozen body at the very edge of the Volga, showing that the Germans actually did reach the river, as they swore they would, but in an utterly useless condition. The entire sequence at the end, which juxtaposes examples from the most glorious moments of goose-stepping German militarism in the West, with its frozen, humiliated and hopeless state after the surrender at Stalingrad, is a valid monument in scorn.
This Amkino-film is not as lucid, clean and exact as the British film of the North African campaign, “Desert Victory,” but it is closer to the actual grain of war. It treats of two factors—death and destruction—which are usually glossed over in movies for the more successful details of a battle, such as the raising of the conquering army’s flag over the conquered town, or for the more active periods, such as airplane dogfights. The fact of death in movies is seldom equal to the solemn look and stance of the spectators at the funeral, the words of the preacher, and the little Passion Play that the director has figured out to make you cry. But here death is treated as a physical, visual fact, with unusual curiosity and quiet. The person’s deadness and the condition he was left in by the bullet, bomb, or in this case the freezing cold, are the most important elements of the death scenes and achieve, as a result, the strength of compassionate dignity. I can remember no American or British film which expressed the destruction of war so honestly and well. Some of the most important contributions of this movie are the comparisons it repeatedly makes between the peacetime city and its present ruins. There is a sardonic reality in views of the rubbled city behind a gaunt, rickety horse, in Apocalyptic reference, and again behind a statue, somehow left standing in all the ruins, of a frolicking circle of children. Even a view of the victorious Russian army marching through the beleaguered city after the siege had been broken was made less romantic than usual by the grim nature of the scene around the marchers, who are indeed victorious but not in the deathless, destructionless vistas conquering movie armies usually march through.
Completely contrary to the existing, close-mouthed war-document tradition is the appearance here of a new secret weapon called “Katushka,” which was first used by the Russians to relieve the siege on Stalingrad and which I find impossible to describe except by saying that it is a series of multiple cannon which explode a ceaseless, spraying avalanche of rocket charges. Finally there is the climaxing scene in which the Soviet armies of the north and south joined at Kalach, trapping the entire German siege force of 330,000 men around Stalingrad. Their meeting has been somehow completely caught on film, two white-clad armies approaching each other in a line stretching for miles, and finally falling joyfully into one another’s arms. (It is an inspiring scene which could make Eisenstein’s or Griffith’s mouth water, with their love of crowds or armies which move in lines and, if possible, come together.)
After the war all but a few war films will be permanently retired because they were too pretty. Because it contains more sides of the war and more humanity, “Stalingrad” will be an important record. Its candor and simplicity make its account of the battle so moving as to be a rare experience in documentaries.
October 11, 1943