Where are the kids who inched bellyflat, elbow-knee-elbow, across The Sands of Iwo Jima, who left Loew’s in close formation, covering each other between parked cars with wet bbbrr-up/wham sounds? I’ll tell you where they are: in Leningrad, in Moscow, unashamed, refighting Yuri Ozerov’s WW II memoir, The Great Battle. You can’t go Back to Bataan again, though John Wayne, anachronistic as a monitor lizard, tried it with the Green Berets. Errol Flynn and Audie Murphy had sense enough to drop dead in time. Today we battle acronyms like SPECTRE, nationless figments. There will never be another American war film, and while the art stands to lose little or nothing, we have been diminished. What Hollywood won’t touch, the nation has long ago refused to consider. Meanwhile Russia, by some unnatural braking action, remains in the McCarthy era, brash and enthusiastic, but equipped with the offensive hardware of 1974.
Ozerov directs as if he’d just discovered realism. Whole villages, triple span bridges are written off on the expense account; shots enough of downtown Kiev in flames to make an urban relocation director homesick. The un-squeamish camera plays tenderly over amputated limbs, gutted half-tracks. There’s a child’s honest joy in pure destruction; Ozerov is having fun. The Great Battle is single minded as a May First parade in Moscow. Three Russian divisions were conscripted for the film: it’s not exactly what you’d call an independent production. Ozerov’s second unit alone could have defeated half the world’s armies.
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