"Certainly the best of ahandful of infamous films Hollywood produced during the war to glorify the SovietUnion (others were Mission to Moscow and Song of Russia)-Wild East films, asBrecht called them. The direction of Lewis Milestone, a fellow traveler born inRussia, is a homage to the Soviet silent cinema." (TA, NB) Lillian Hellman'sscript portrays the resistance of the occupants of a Ukrainian collective farm tothe Nazi invasion in 1941. Losing their village to the Germans, the once-innocentpeasants return as guerrillas. Among the all-star Hollywood cast, Erich vonStroheim plays a "good" German corrupted by his Nazi colleagues.Hellman was evidently incensed by changes made to the script and bought back hercontract with Goldwyn, but those changes were nothing compared to the film'spostwar reissue as Armored Attack, re-edited to become an anti-Communist tract.