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!
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!