Some opinions reproaching this film with 'communist propaganda' strike me as creepily hilarious. Talk about blind determination and immutability in perception - ironically, the very thing that the movie is about after all. I would easily call 'propaganda' every other soviet or east-European war movie from the 1945-1985 period, if you like. Also, every other Hollywood movie that involves a battle scene and The Flag. But surely not this one. How many films show antagonistic parts performing the same tortuous movements of cruelty and murder, in what seems to be a state of mass hypnosis long beyond reason and ethical justification? This film must be one of the most unformulaic and most effective anti-war (i.e. anti-ideological) films ever, along with Elem Klimov's Come and See. The fact that both could be made in the Soviet Union is nothing short of transcendental.
Review of The Red and the White
