Even as setup for the tragic events to come, Lillian Hellman’s it-takes-a-Ukrainian-village drama, made at the height of WWII cooperation between Allied Forces & ‘Uncle’ Joe Stalin’s Russia lays on the Happy Valley ideal of rural Soviet life, where children grow up straight & the songs are diatonic, impasto thick. Off for a summer hike all the way to Kiev, a group of high school students suddenly find themselves in the thick of the first wave of Nazi invaders by land and air. They need to either get back home or help a truckload of munitions reach partisans in the woods, awaiting their chance to attack. Political melodrama, with speeches embroidered with glorious patriotic drivel, but the drive & horror of wartime emergency comes thru in up-front acting (Anne Baxter, Farley Granger, Dana Andrews, Walter Huston), and in alarming turns from Erich von Stroheim’s civilized blood-draining vampire doctor and Walter Brennan (later an enthusiastic John Bircher) as a cuddly Communist local character. Lots of fodder for later Commie Witch Hunts in here, yet the film was reedited down in ‘57 to become the generic Anti-Communist war film ARMORED ATTACK!
DOUBLE-BILL: Lillian Hellman offered a more characteristic (and personal) response to the war effort in her play WATCH ON THE RHINE, also filmed in 1943, awkwardly directed, but often very effective; while this film’s director Lewis Milestone covered similar events to better fashion in EDGE OF DARKNESS, also out in ‘43. (both covered below)
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