In the 1950s, it was criticized for this reason and it was re-cut to remove the idealized portrayal of Soviet collective farms at the beginning and to include references to the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.[2] The film was then retitled Armored Attack and released to American theatres, where it begins with the arrival of the Germans in the town and continues through the scenes of the uprising, with a narration tacked on praising the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.
Plot
Title card
In June 1941, Ukrainian villagers are living in peace. As the school year ends, a group of friends decide to travel to Kiev for a holiday. To their horror, they find themselves attacked by German aircraft, part of the Naziinvasion of the Soviet Union. Eventually their village itself is occupied by the Nazis. Meanwhile, men and women take to the hills to form partisan militias.
The full brutality of the Nazis is revealed when the Germans send Dr. von Harden to use the village children as a source of blood for transfusions into wounded German soldiers. Some children lose so much blood that they die. When Dr. Pavel Kurin, a famous Ukrainian doctor, discovers this and informs the partisans, they prepare to strike back. They launch a cavalry assault on the village to rescue their families. Kurin accuses von Harden of being worse than the ardent Nazis, because he has used his skills to support them. He then shoots him. The peasants join together, and one girl envisions a future in which they will "make a free world for all men".
The extent to which the film incorporated official Soviet propaganda about collective farms prompted British anti-communist writer Robert Conquest, a member of the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (an anti-communist propaganda unit)[5] in the 1950s, to later write "a travesty greater than could have been shown on Soviet screens to audiences used to lies, but experienced in [collective-farm conditions] to a degree requiring at least a minimum of restraint".[6]
Recut
The film was rereleased in 1957 under the title Armored Attack. This edited version opens with the entry of a German column marching into a village and concludes with narration praising the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. It was released together with Fred Zinnemann's 1950 film The Men which was also renamed to Battle Stripe.[7]
In later years, the original version was made available on home video restoring segments removed for the 1957 re-release.[8]
The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine, Conquest, page 321, Oxford Press, 1986; see Chapter 17 for detailed information on the efforts of pro-Soviet Westerns to help the regime cover up the true conditions on the collective farms.
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