Padenie Berlina (1950) watch online HD

I had the privilege of seeing the unreleased (as of this writing) DVD containing a restoration of the film utilizing the original negative. While the restoration isn't pristine (some scratches still appear), it manages to restore and maintain the coloration of the German Agfacolor stock that was used. Check out the comparison between the original and the restoration in the special features. The total film is 151 minutes long, split into two parts but I really didn't feel it bogged down too much. It is in Russian but has English subtitles.

There is some good outdoor cinematography especially in the scene that represents Germany's invasion of Russia, though most of the interior work is rather stilted with a few shots that show brilliance for its time period.

The score is brilliantly done by Dimitri Shostakovich befitting the epic scope that is presented.

As revisionist propaganda, this film was created as a valentine to Stalin for his 70th birthday presenting the Russian side of World War II and Stalin's steadfastness.For the most part though, the propaganda in the film is rather subtle in its views of the Allies, but blistering in its portrayals of Hitler, Gehring and Goebbels. Hilter is presented from the very beginning as a man who has already gone off the deep end (which I'm not sure is inaccurate). Though I must admit that it appears that the filmmaker was attempting to show that the British and the Americans did not care enough about the Russian front which was Stalin's view of their behavior in the war.

There is a framing device that drives the "story" along in a romance between a Russian steelworker and a Russian teacher. When the Nazi's invade, she is captured and taken to a camp and he joins the fight so that he can find her. We follow him through the major battles though the time line skips the negative parts of the war for the Russians and presents primarily their victories. He manages to be at every one including the Fall of Berlin which ends the film. Of course there is a happy ending as if there is any doubt about it. It appears that Russians of that time period used cliché story lines as much as Hollywood.

Most of the actors look creepily like the historical figures they are except the actor playing FDR. He was shown looking fairly frail which is not the image that we have of him in the US. The actor playing Stalin in the film had portrayed him in Russian films since 1939 and would continue to play Stalin in all but one of his films after this one. He is a dead ringer with Stalin's mannerisms down pat.

I have to admit that there were times that I laughed, especially at the portrayal of Hitler. The performance was so over the top at times that I half expected him to pull out some mustard to go with his scenery chewing.

Of course, being a propaganda film, the facts are skewed to favor Stalin and the Russians and even twisted to some degree. The Yalta meeting is a good example of that. There is also dramatized scene of Stalin arriving in Berlin to great acclaim that did not actually happen.

Overall it is a rarity that is interesting to film and WWII buffs who would like to see what the Russians thought of the US and the rest of world. I've watched many propaganda films through the years (both American and Eastern Bloc) but this one is truly epic in scope.

When this is released, I would recommend if you are interested in the subject to pick it up.

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.

This monumental film in Agfacolor (ironically a German patent) was shot in 1949 to celebrate Stalin's greatest triumph, the victory over his arch-rival (and former ally) Hitler and the capture of Berlin by the Red Army in April/May 1945. The film's blatant, plump propaganda and hilariously absurd dramaturgy make it a gem of unintentional humor and thus very entertaining to watch, especially if you are aware of the true historical background behind the massive distortions.

Stalin, in fact one of history's most feared and ruthless mass-murderers, appears as some kind of benevolent, peace-loving demi-god all dressed in a white gala uniform, who never loses his temper, is always in control of the situation and stays at the same time a wise and likable grand-daddy who despite his infallible greatness has not lost his touch with the common people, who of course idolize him like crazy. In comparison to him Churchill and Roosevelt look like senile and disoriented losers, while Hitler is being portrayed as a raving cartoon maniac straight out of THE GREAT DICTATOR.

The other characters which are supposed to be "common Russian people" are nothing more but schematic cardboard stereotypes following the ideals of the communist-stalinist doctrine with unflinching enthusiasm and no real life of their own. German civilians appear only briefly in the end of the film, finally condemning their Führer. Not shown of course are the atrocities committed by the Red Army as they entered Berlin, especially the mass rapes of women and girls of all ages; Jewish victims of Hitler are curiously not mentioned at all, and neither is of course the Sowjetunion's decisive part in causing the outbreak and escalation of WWII. Mixed up in this is a kitschy love story with loads of unbelievable plot points (the hero does not only kiss the heroine for the first time exactly when the Germans invade completely out of the - literal - blue, he also rescues her from a concentration camp AND meets her again in the victorious crowd in the streets of Berlin).

The film may also have the distinction of being the very first in the "Hitler's Last Days in the Bunker"-Subgenre. Others to follow were G. W. Pabst's DER LETZTE AKT (1955), Hitler: THE LAST TEN DAYS (1973), THE BUNKER (1981), 100 JAHRE ADOLF Hitler - DIE LETZTE STUNDE IM FÜHRERBUNKER (1989) and DOWNFALL (2004). Notable is also the wonderful score by Shostakovitch, a great artist serving once again the totalitarian lie. Of course, beyond the campy propaganda fun the underlying immense tragedy of the incredibly atrocious Soviet-German-War should always be kept in mind when watching.

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!

Perhaps not the most sophisticated film ever made about World War II, but this 1949 Soviet film is a rousing, solid, popular piece of filmmaking. Reportedly made as a present for Stalin's 70th birthday, who took great interest in its production, it was made with considerable production values (for that time) and in great Agfacolor film, taken as war reparation from the Germans. It's a propaganda film alright, but is very well made. As far as I know this was also the first fiction film dealing with the fall of Berlin (though the film, despite its title, deals with all the war in the eastern front, starting from the German invasion of Russia and not just its ending). I'm sure its intended audience – the Soviet masses who just have been through WW2, appreciated the movie. Hitler and his minions (who all speak in Russian in the film) are portrayed as grotesque, pathetic buffoons – but this is not necessarily a bad thing since they are the comic relief of the movie. Also fun is the portrayal of Roosevelt and Churchill at the Yalta conference, the American president is shown as naive and slightly befuddled, the British premier a mean, conniving old man. Stalin, meanwhile, is portrayed through the film as a wise, gentle, all knowing commander leading his country into victory (never mind his well recorded nervous breakdown at the start of Operation Barbarossa). Summing up, despite some historical inaccuracies, this is a very good film, especially for those interested in World War II (note: in this review, I deal with both part I and part II, since the division of the movie in two halves is artificial).

A Birthday Present that finally answers the age old question of what to get the man who has everything. This film was presented to Stalin on his 70th birthday and is the archtypical Stalin Film. It is intriguing insight into the mindset of the man who ruled and terrorized 1/5 of all humanity and 1//2 of Europe by the film's 1949 release date. The acting, especially the Aliosha and Natasha love plot tied in with Stalin is poorly acted but makes all sense when you look at how Aliosha looks to Stalin for advice, because truth be told this film is a romance for Stalin. The special effects and lighting are excellent for a 1940s film and it is shot in a grand scale that matched the efforts of Kolberg, Gone with the Wind, and the 1926 Ben Hur.

The best parts of this film are the impressions of Churchill and Hitler. Minus Churchill speaking Russian, they have his lisp and mannerisms done exceedingly well. Hitler and Goering provide great charictatures and are humorously well done. At best its an intriguing insight into the delusions of madness that Stalin subjected his people to and at worst its a 2 hour festival of unintentional humor. I'd recommend it for any historian.

I purchased a DVD of this film in order to see a Soviet-made WW II film made during the peak of the "Stalin cult" and during the early years of the cold war. I wanted to see the impact of Soviet propaganda on WW II films at this time and therefore found it very interesting in that regard, although the film itself is somewhat muddled. It awkwardly weaves a love story between a simple Stakhanovite (a big producer in the steel mills) and a schoolteacher with the ebb and flow of the war with Nazi Germany, and lo and behold they are reunited (she was sent to Germany as a slave laborer) at the bottom of the conquered Reichstag in the heart of Berlin at the end of the war. And Stalin arrives at the end of the battle for Berlin to receive a grateful kiss from the schoolteacher at the Reichstag and receive the adulation of both the Soviet armies and of the captives of all nations liberated by the Red Army in their various languages. In addition, there are the "stock" characters beloved in Soviet demonology: The scheming British capitalist who intends to get strategic metals to the Reich from Sweden, the Vatican emissary to the Reich in full bishop's regalia who praises Hitler, the Nazi officer who feigns surrender only to throw a grenade at his Soviet captors. Churchill at Yalta is portrayed as scheming and untrustworthy; he asks Stalin to toast George VI to which the proletarian Generalissimo refuses. Hitler is portrayed in equal parts buffoonish and crazy, so much so that we wonder, given this portrayal, how he was able to captivate and inspire, at least for much of the war, his generals and party comrades. Stalin, of course, is portrayed as calm and never fearful, and full of wisdom.

But it should be noted that much of the military history is accurate. Although the film (obviously) does not cover Stalin's decapitation of the Red Army in the great purge of 1937 and his refusal to listen to Soviet intelligence as well as warnings from Churchill that a Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was imminent in the spring of 1941, which were both disastrous for the Soviets, it does show his decision to stay in Moscow in the fall of 1941, when the Germans launched their "final offensive" against Moscow and much of his government was panicking. It's fair to say that remaining in Moscow improved the morale of the Red Army fighting only 30-40 km from the Kremlin. To expedite the conquest of Berlin, Stalin sets the demarcation line between Marshall Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front and Marshall Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front right in the center of Berlin to foster a rivalry between the two commanders in capturing Berlin. We hear the denigration of the Reich's resistance against the Anglo-American armies while Nazi Germany fights fanatically against the invading Red Army (This was only true of the last weeks of the war when the Germans were desperate to surrender to the western allies and avoid the feared Russians.) The depiction of the fighting is very good in places, but looks stilted in others. An officer tells his fighting men that wherever we go: "Stalin is with us." The director had access to some five Soviet divisions. The massing of artillery at the April 16th offensive on Berlin (from the Oder River), complete with searchlights, looked impressive. I believe the 1st Belorussian Front had something like an artillery piece every 10 meters for miles! And the final assault on the Reichstag also looked very realistic. Even though the Reichstag hadn't been used since the fire of 1933, the Red Army viewed it as the ultimate symbol of Nazi Germany whose destruction meant the final extinction of the Reich.

It should be noted that Marshall Zhukov is not treated well in this film. One scene is titled "Zhukov's Error", and when Stalin makes his fictional visit to Berlin after the Reichstag's been taken, he meets three generals (Konev, Rokossovsky, and Chuikov) but not Marshall Zhukov, his most successful commander. Stalin feared Zhukov's popularity after the war, and he was subsequently demoted to minor postings by the time the film was made in 1949.

The film ends with Stalin "dropping out of the clouds" from his magnificent airplane (reminiscent of Hitler in Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will", as many have noted) and spreading his benevolence to the assembled masses in the heart of Berlin. Our "Engineer of Souls" pronounces his wish for "peace and happiness" for all mankind. In actuality, at the time of the events being depicted (1945) he was preparing another repressive crackdown on individual liberties, and at the time the film was made (1949) he was close to giving his approval to Kim II Sung to invade South Korea. Khrushchev always viewed the film's director, Mikheil Chiaureli, as a hack, and the film was withdrawn from circulation during the de-stalinization campaign beginning in 1953. But 38 million Soviet citizens watched it in upon its release in 1950 and it remains an excellent example of Soviet historiography.

It seems almost -- almost -- unfair to judge "The Fall of Berlin" as a film. It's a piece of Soviet state propaganda that doesn't really try to masquerade as a film. Soviet cinema wasn't always straight propaganda, of course, and most films I've seen from the Soviet era had mostly ambitions that were artistic of entertaining. This is the exception. It's all about Stalin and the Soviet state (as one), and this results in a simply ridiculous film.

Stalin was, it has been said, supposed to be a man that a Soviet citizen both feared and loved with all his heart, and this film bears that out. When our hero-factory-worker-soldier Alexei meets him in an early scene he is petrified for not knowing what to say. And Stalin the all-knowing ends up miraculously solving his love life.

That love life is a wooden and perfunctory set of scenes that are also, of course, as much about Stalin as anything. They theoretically serve to get a blank hero a motivation for going to battle, and then the rest of the film meanders between scenes of battles and heads of the two sides of the war talking.

Stalin appears a lot, but not too much. He's a man-god, and if we see too much of the man-god, the polish wears off. He's played as an infallible (apart from the odd decision of doing his gardening in a bright white jacket) and imperturbable being, and by an actor covered in so much make-up that he seems to be made of wax.

In general, actors who look quite a lot like their real-world (I hesitate to say "historical" since the film was made so soon after the events it describes) counterparts have been found, but they aren't necessarily good or given anything halfway believable to say.

Hitler is given a lot of screen-time, and he's portrayed as a shouting, raving, rabid, loony, nut-ball. It might be the most hilariously hammy, scene-chewing performances I've ever seen. Hitler was certainly no model of reason and rationality in real life, but if he'd actually behaved like this he would have been immediately been thrown in an insane asylum instead of being put in charge of Germany. The idea is to contrast the emotional ravings of Hitler's leadership with the calm inspiration of Stalin's -- and they over-egged the pudding the point where it was mostly just eggs.

In favor of the film, it does look spectacular, and there are some inspired shots and photography. It's clear no expense has been spared, and the scenes in Berlin at the end seem quite convincing. The scenes of Hitler rolling his eyes while taking part in a crazed wedding with Eva as the Wedding March plays and he deliberately orders his own people drowned in the subways (well, he is literally Hitler) does end up being quite dramatic.

The score is by the great Dmitri Shostakovich, and even when in his mode of being sarcastically subservient to the Soviet musical establishment (as here) and writing elaborated fanfares rather than pushing formal and musical limits, his music is always fascinating and worthwhile.

The dialog is mostly unremittingly stupid, but there is a nice moment where Churchill proposes a toast to the King, Stalin professes a distaste for monarchy, and Roosevelt instead proposes one to the heath of Kalinin, the Soviet version of a nominal head of state who was really just a figurehead.

When Khrushchev denounced Stalin's cult of personality after his death, very few hesitated to sigh and denounce it with him. I suspect part of the reason was that it was built on a combination of fear and artifacts like this film, which no thinking person could find even slightly believable.

It's interesting as a historical artifact, amusing for it's woodenness, and admirable basically only for some of its visual elements.

The Fall of Berlin 1950 Get beyond the stagy acting and the cheap special effects, and this movie presents the Soviet version of how and why the Russians wound up in Berlin in April 1945. Although ostensibly a love story between a Soviet factory worker who serves in the Red Army and Soviet school teacher who is kidnapped by the Germans and becomes a slave laborer inside Germany, Stalin and Hitler are the principal characters. The contrast between the two could not more stark. Hitler is portrayed has a megalomania driven fanatic who responded to bad news, meaning the truth, with fits of hysteria while Stalin is portrayed as an all-caring leader who through steadfast leadership guides the Soviet Union to victory. Although the movie glorifies Stalin, it also honors the Red Army soldiers who fought the battles. According to the movie, Stalin decides to invade Berlin to prevent the Germans from giving up the city to the allies and then joining the allies to fight the Russians. Hitler believes that he could still win the war by breaking up the American-Soviet alliance. Stalin knows this and directs his generals to ignore German provocations. Another controversial scene is the Yalta Conference. This scene shows Stalin having taken action to relieve German pressure on the allies in 1944/1945. Other scenes show Hitler scornfully rejecting his generals' warnings not to invade Russia, and becoming increasingly despondent as the bad news keeps piling up. The movie portrays the Nazi leaders as little more than opportunistic thugs and plunderers supported by sycophants who are united by one goal: to crush communism. Those supporting Hitler include American business interests and the Catholic Church. The movie is Soviet propaganda, nonetheless, the movie warrants being taken seriously as a cinematic work. The fact is that Hitler lost and Stalin won. The Russians, and not the allies, defeated the Germans in Berlin. These facts alone give the movie's storyline some credibility. Whether it fairly and accurately portrays the role of the Allies in winning the war is another question.

You can't hate this movie just because it was made for Soviet intent and purposes. It's a fascinating work of art. While the sotryline is lame and overwritten by the stands of historical figures, it doesn't lose much of its interest. Tchiaoureli, directs one of the very first "kolossal" productions at the time, a 2h45min long picture, depicting the war, the battlefields, the camps, the very last hours of the III Reich and the inevitable triumph of Stalin on the steps of his private jet.

The cinematography is quite brilliant, the color very rich and dense, there's a lot of depth, the special effects were kept inside the picture, which gives these spectacular shots of the battlefields. Quite remarkable how Tchiaoureli modeled these decors, sound fx and the burning ruins of Berlin. You have to praise the effort (even though at times the director must've ran out of energy or money for unconvincing fights at the end and real shots of actual footage of Soviet military fanfare ) for trying to reconstitute a catastrophic moment of history into a work of art, tied up in between satire and and spectacle.

Hitler's wedding is absolutely hysterical. One of the best scenes of the entire movie. You have to admit, it is hilarious to a degree to see this criminal wedding Frau Eva after being so sure, so sure he would raise Moscow to the ground, and there he is standing 6 meters underground marrying his mistress without much conviction knowing this is the end. A very, very humiliating moment for Hitler, add to that the background orchestra which intentionally makes it even more ridiculous.

Many of course tried to disapprove this opposition between the hysterical one-dimensional angrily demoniac Hitler and the poised clever-thinking Stalin, but truth is at these stages of the war, it was pretty much that way. Hitler tried to blow up Germany if it could save his Empire from Soviet conquest. Hell if h ran out of population to enslave and kill, he would've attacked penguins in Antarctica that's how lunatic he was.

But be there as it may, the movie is undeniably successful in the mastering of montage, the academic style, a powerful reconstruction of the context, magnificent settings, the scene where Goerring shows his gallery to Krupp quite impressive, the camps at Kalinigrad, the drowning of the German population in the metro under Hitler's orders, how despite all the devastating shooting and bombing the landscape and color are always bright which is interesting, there's an attempt to clearly show "Mother Russia" as never scorned by the War. It's funny the attempt to portray realism and sensationalism. anecdotic behavior and outrageous caricaturing (the scene where Hitler meets Orsenigo and his low humor is met with fake applause and laughs by his advisors). The moments of grave drama are never directed with a tragic tone but the satyrical ones are. It's a very interesting movie that reverses the conventional wisdoms of movie making of the time, with Soviet movie making culture. Not quite Eisenstein or Donskoï we get that, but I would say it's a good compromise between political judgment and artistic research.

Also, praise the works of Leonid Kosmatov, Vladimir Kaplounovsky and Shostakovitch's music is excellent, a composer of great talent.

One must accept this film as extremely political because of the time period it was produced(Cold war era)1949.Making fun of the Nazis in motion pictures was a game both sides of the Iron curtain played.In this movie the tactic of depicting them as mentally crazed by using actors that match their historical counterparts in "looks" works pretty well in the make believe category!! Indeed most of the leaders portrayed here are reminiscent of their true life counterparts for example Stalin,Molotov,Goering,Zhukov,Hitler(GEEEE I wish I had Mr V.Savelyev to play me a fuhrer in a more honest depiction because this guy really does have his appearance),the intention of their "look alike ness" being to rub in the victorious Soviet view at the time by making the events and people seem factual.For example,the idea of introducing an Englishman named "Bedstone" organizing deals with Goering is pure Communist fantasy,the idea of this scene being to show us a heartless "Western power" collaborating with the Reich in their common ideological struggle against Bolshevism,not true,just another Russian excuse for opposing the "Capatilist Imperialists".But OK being an Soviet propaganda movie made for Stalins birthday we must not judge it the way we should a modern/honest documentary dealing with ww2!!For those buffs out there who like the authentic war gear of the period you'll be pleased when viewing "The fall" as its crawling with it.Romance is also featured in this epic with big guy Aliosha clearing enemy territory by scaring the Nazis back to Berlin using his PPSH mg while searching for his stolen Natasha,giving the viewer all the more reason to cheer for the Reds no matter how much one might dislike them.An pretty love story that meets an happy ending with the defeat of Nazi Germany and the sudden unexpected visit by Stalin The Great(butcher) next to the Reichstag.All in all its a great movie loaded with nice scenes(some laughable),one that made beautiful use of color and lighting.I had the benefit of English subtitles when I watched it on Youtube so gone are the days when Russian seemed such a complicated language!!!!Great film

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.

There are certain subjects that do not lend themselves to mockery. One of those subjects is Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Any movie that tries to treat Hitler and the Nazis as a bunch of buffoons is a movie that is destined to fail dramatically, and thus this movie is a supreme failure. What is ludicrous about this movie is not so much its stilted portrayal of Adolf Hitler but the fact that anyone would even want to go out of their way to try to reduce Adolf Hitler to a caricature and an item for derision. Hitler's career is a matter of historical fact which requires no further literary embellishment. Hitler's policies of deceit, aggression, war and genocide speak for themselves. What more can be said or added about what he said and did or the havoc and suffering he caused?

Treating Adolf Hitler and the Nazis as a joke is historically unsupportable. It would be like mocking a serial killer. Mock all you want, the killer is still a killer. To reduce the personality of Adolf Hitler to the level of audio and visual clichés simply does not convey his cunning, his destructiveness, his demagoguery and depravity. Adolf Hitler was anything but a joke. Any person who could smile and laugh around children, extend the most gracious courtesies to his personal guests, laugh and joke with his closest staff, indeed, even root for his favorite team in the Olympics, while AT THE SAME TIME plotting to start a war and exterminate millions of people is the kind of chilling personality that defies superficial treatment on the screen, or anywhere else for that matter. Hitler ranting and raving? If this was all that Hitler was about, then maybe it would be funny, but Hitler was no mere screaming buffoon and to try to pass him off as being that does not do justice to the millions of victims who succumbed to his policies. A screaming buffoon could have never done what Hitler did. To lead an entire nation to war and to pursue policies that directly affected the course of history required a degree of determination and self-control that this movie fails to attribute to the Fuhrer. By reducing Hitler to a mere caricature of a dictatorship undermines the basic premise of the movie, that the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin was a strong, viable and credible nation, for how strong does a country and the political leadership need to be to defend itself against somebody that according to the movie is nothing more than a pathetic joke?

This has to be one of the worst propaganda movies ever made. Hitler was already dead, World War Two was already history, Nazi Germany had already been defeated and obliterated from the political map, yet the Soviet Union decided to produce what has to be one of the worst movies ever made, which is saying a lot in a era of bad movies stretching back to the dawn of the age of Holloywood. The acting is poor, the story is pure Soviet propaganda bombast, the cinematography is almost laughable. But what is particularly annoying is its portrayal of Adolf Hitler as a caricature. The portrayal of Adolf Hitler is so ridiculously superficial that it reduces Hitler to an item of mockery and derision which is neither necessary or true. There is one thing that can be said about Adolf Hitler: what he did and what he stood for inspires contempt, scorn and outright rejection, but not derision. There is nothing funny about Hitler's decision to go to war and invade the Soviet Union. Nor is the portrayal of Adolf Hitler as some kind of screaming, argumentative hysterical malcontent historically accurate or dramatically strong. Historical evidence seems to suggest that Hitler was no more prone to fits of anger than anyone else and that he followed a plan of action that was well thought out and meticulously implemented with the full support of the entire Nazi Party and an entire nation, including its army, naval and air force, whose resources were mobilized to achieve what Hitler wanted. In Mein Kampf Hitler put the whole world on notice as to what he intended to do if he had the power and that the nobody took him seriously is anything but funny; it is tragic. This movie makes fun of Hitler but what Adolf Hitler did inspires anything but laughter. He wasn't funny when he was alive and to make fun of him after he's dead is more of a reflection of the mentality of whoever made this movie than on the Adolf Hitler himself.

One question this movie raises is why would anyone even want to make such a movie? To mock and deride at Hitler four years after the end of World War Two and Hitler's death seems rather pointless and a mere exercise in displaced rage. By 1949 the career of Adolf Hitler was already well documented and spoke for itself. The whole world knew what he had done and was still in the process of recovering from the consequences of his actions. But for a movie company to actually spend time and money to produce a movie that portrays Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cronies as corrupt, effete, irresponsible sycophants isn't saying anything that was not already public knowledge and merely confirmed the obvious. Now if this movie was intended to be a satirical comedy or a farce, then there might be a valid place for a goofy, campy portrayal of Hitler. However this movie apparently was not a comedy or a satire, which makes the movie completely irrelevant and an exercise in cinematic mediocrity.