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The nature of the guerrilla band is stated early and bluntly, "we hunt and are hunted." The camera in the Russian woods is a rifle scope on a Nazi rider, the sniper (Maria Palmer) is part of a miniature underground community. Professor (Lowell Gilmore) and brooder (Edward Durst), jolly sot (Alan Reed) and ponderous blacksmith (Hugo Haas), haunted teenager (Glen Vernon) and resourceful sister (Dena Penn), all comrades holed up in the crumbling monastery. The outsider is a dancer from Moscow (Tamara Toumanova), "a person of life in this region of death" and a balm to the soul of the hardened leader (Gregory Peck). Earnest ode to Soviet gallantry, cf. Milestone's The North Star, deepened by the cool beauty of Jacques Tourneur's deep-focus arrangements. The subterranean hideout is a compact space where verses from a folk song pass from character to character, briefly an imaginary ballet stage, a zone of suspense where an enemy soldier is met with a vat of boiling soup. Outdoors, Tourneur pays striking tribute to Dovzhenko with war's intrusions into the natural world—flaming debris from a dynamited train falling amid trees, a grayish cloudy sky peppered with black explosions, a rebel's hanging under heavy snowfall. Battling comes easy to the builder, the engineer turned fighter laments the irony: "You destroy something you greatly love, you learn to love to destroy." A romance amid the explosions of the Great Retreat, the couple's consummation is expressed as patriotic ecstasy before an advancing tank. Aldrich takes note of the filming for Attack. With Igor Dolgoruki, Lou Crosby, and Ivan Triesault. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |