“The Rainbow,” a Russian film adapted from a Stalin Prize Novel written by Wanda Wasilewska, shows as little tolerance, love, mercy, dignity, breadth of understanding or nobility as any work of art I have ever seen. It treats the most common movie story of this war, the one that shows the brutal way Nazis ruled the people in conquered countries (in this case the people of a Ukrainian village), how they failed to get the people to collaborate with them, and their final defeat by soldiers of the people; but it treats it with a mad-eyed simplification unsurpassed in war films.
The Nazis are shown only as craven murderers, who confine their killing to babies, children, mothers and wounded prisoners. In one case the reason given for the murder is the refusal of a Partisan woman to give information; but all the rest of more than a dozen crimes are done completely without provocation. “The Rainbow” suggests that most of these Nazis are fools, but doesn’t bother to explain them any further; they are hardly even placed as Fascists. By carefully spreading the outrages throughout all types and ranks of German soldiers shown and implying that there are no exceptions, the movie suggests that all German soldiers are hopeless psychopathic killers, and by carefully planting a sentence at the beginning of the film—“These Germans behaved as Germans”—the movie also implies that their brutality is the trait of a nation. The characters of the Russians are taken just as coarsely for granted: they are given one characteristic—fearlessness, one face—hateful, and one desire—to revenge themselves on the Nazis.
It ends with the most cruel-minded episode since the hero in “Passage to Marseilles” machine-gunned some Nazis who were asking to be taken prisoner. The scene is one in which a peasant heroine stops the other women of her village from clubbing the Nazi prisoners to death, by screaming that they should not give them so easy a punishment as quick death, but should let them see their armies starved and beaten, their cities destroyed, and have them “answer for their wrongs before a People’s Court; then kill them.” This scene suggests, among other things, that all prisoners be killed, since the prisoners referred to are the total number of those taken in the capture of the town, and would presumably include guilty, less guilty and simply prisoners of war. The woman’s speech also implies that the courts for trying war prisoners after the war will simply be places for prisoners’ confessions to be heard before the inevitable verdict of death.
Since the Russians and their country have felt Nazi cruelty as much as anyone, it is understandable that their movie makers see the war almost wholly as an affair of killing, cruelty and revenge. But their method, in this film, of showing it only as that is the narrowest possible and one that results for the audience in no understanding of the problem of the Nazis beyond the fact that vengeance must be taken on them. Also, by cutting out of its Russians any response to the war except an unyielding determination to kill every Nazi, the movie leaves its audience with the idea that there is only one thing the Russians want to do about Nazism—kill the Nazis. And the facts themselves of cruelty, killing and revenge are so oversimplified that one is left with the idea that anybody can become cruel and can kill, given the provocation, without any complication, and without, presumably, experiencing any effects in himself.
“The Rainbow’s” way of showing its viewpoint turns up some creditable things but more sterile ones, because of one-trait characterization, an uninspired use of disparate and worn-out movie devices and a basically puerile romanticism. A couple of actors, G. Klering and Natalia Alisova, strain the straitjacket character of their roles (as Nazi Commandant and kept woman) with a likably ham style of acting, which is about all they could use on two roles that were first thought up about the time of Griffith and have been seen ever since in German, Russian and American sex films. “The Rainbow” always has a determination to say something, no matter what, that is more vigorous than is usual in movies these days. This determination leads, midway in the picture, to a couple of situations that are developed in a full, firm way and produce some genuine movie meaning. One is a description of a childbirth that pulls in scenes of the environment and alludes in a crude, pleasant way to the birth of Christ, in a nearly successful, emotionally moving scene. The other expresses the moronic quality of a Nazi by showing his bewildered, ineffectual attempts to communicate with some unpleasant children. It is the one place in the picture where human activity is seen without complete simplification.
November 6, 1944