by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
A few nights ago Charles and I watched a movie called Enemy
at the Gates, which imdb.com identified as
a British movie even though it’s about the World War II Battle of Stalingrad,
fought in the title town on the Volga River in Russia that turned the tide on
the Eastern Front; its cast is mostly British (except for Ed Harris as the
leading German character) but its director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, is French and
so was the writer with whom he co-wrote the script, Alain Godard (no
information on whether he’s a relation of the legendary — and still living —
French director Jean-Luc Godard). Charles picked out this movie hoping it would
be a psychological study of war, but when we started watching it there was so
much war-porn gore both of us were put off from it, Charles a bit more than I.
The biggest problem with Enemy at the Gates is that though it’s billed as a movie about the
battle of Stalingrad, we actually get to see almost nothing of the battle —
certainly nowhere near enough to tell how well the battle is going for each
side. Indeed, if you watch the early scenes — in which Russians are being sent
into battle with rifles against a German enemy that has machine guns, and not
all the Russian soldiers are even given rifles (they’re told that the man
without a rifle will stand behind the man with one and pick it up if the front
man gets killed) — it’s going to be totally unbelievable, unless you already
know something about the history of World War II, that the Russians eventually
won. Instead of showing us the entire battle Enemy at the Gates personalizes it and focuses on just four people:
Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law, looking surprisingly pretty for
someone who’s supposedly been fighting in a hell-hole of a wrecked city for
months); Commissar Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), a “political officer” with the
Soviet army who seizes on Vassili and builds him up as a hero to inspire the
other Russian soldiers to keep fighting; and the woman they both love (there had to be a romantic triangle!), Tania (Rachel Weisz),
as well as German sniper Major König (Ed Harris), who engages in a
cat-and-mouse duel with Vassili which seems to be designed to represent the
entire battle.
It’s an interesting movie in some respects but a surprisingly
mediocre film in another — it’s well acted and well staged (though, ironically,
they built the reproduction of Stalingrad in the “enemy” country, Germany,
where the film was shot) but it’s really a pretty generic war movie. Sam
Fuller’s The Steel Helmet remains
my favorite among this sub-genre
of war film — the kind that focuses on just one or a handful of soldiers and
their struggle to survive themselves and knock off some of the enemy if they
can — and though you don’t have
to have had actual combat experience to make a great war film, Fuller’s
knowledge of what happens in combat from having been there and done it informs
his war movies even though he admitted to making one compromise. He said that
in his war films, when people are shot, they just keel over, fall down and
register being dead — in reality he’d seen soldiers get shot by the enemy and
they often literally blew up, but neither he nor most other war-film directors
ever dare show that. (In Enemy
at the Gates the soldiers who are supposed
to be killed in battle register that by simply falling over and not moving.) I
also noticed that, at least in the early scenes, the actors playing Germans
were speaking German but the actors playing Russians were speaking in their
normal British-accented English — though later Ed Harris showed up, and while I
liked his intensity (in this role he reminded me a great deal of Richard
Widmark) he never really convinced me that he was German — I guess I’m still
spoiled by The Longest Day, in
which the actors playing Germans spoke German, the actors playing French people
spoke French, and only the actors playing British or American characters spoke
English. (Alas, this led to another problem: the subtitles that were supposed
to tell us what the non-English speaking actors were actually saying were frequently
white-on-white, and almost totally illegible.)
Enemy at the Gates also intriguingly featured Nikita Khrushchev as an
on-screen character — played by Bob Hoskins, whose return to a major role after
the disaster of Super Mario Brothers
(where he played a part that compromised his reputation in a flop film that
didn’t give him the mass-audience career boost he was hoping for) was
especially welcome — and gave him a speech in which he attempts to rally the
Russian troops by invoking the name of the city where they’re fighting and the
head of state it’s named after: “This city... is not Kursk, nor is it Kiev, nor
Minsk. This city... is Stalingrad. Stalingrad! This city bears the name of the Boss. It’s more
than a city, it’s a symbol. If the Germans... capture this city... the entire
country will collapse.” The irony is that in 1961, five years after Khrushchev
became leader of the Soviet Union and stunned the Communist Party Congress with
a speech denouncing Joseph Stalin as the bloodthirsty, paranoiac tyrant he was,
Khrushchev ordered the city renamed “Volgograd” (a reference to its position on
the bank of the Volga River) as part of his attempt to rid the Soviet Union of
Stalin’s poisonous legacy. Also, imdb.com lists the date of Enemy at
the Gates as 2001 when the copyright notice
on the closing credits says “MM” — i.e., 2000 — and according to their
contributors the whole business of the Russian army sending men into battle
without arms and shooting anyone who tried to desert (leading to some early scenes
in which the Russians who are
fighting find themselves caught in a cross-fire between the Germans shooting in
front of them and the Russians shooting behind them) was more appropriate to
the First World War, when some
Russian companies were sent into battle with wooden rifles (and of course were
sitting ducks for the German solders who had real rifles), while the business of shooting would-be
deserters in mid-battle had been tried by the French in 1916 and hadn’t worked
for them any better than it does for the Russians here.
