I stumbled upon this movie several years ago at a gun show in Sherman, Texas. (For those unfamiliar with gun show culture, particularly readers from other countries, the non-gun-related products hawked at these shows can be quite intriguing, a slice of kitsch Americana often untempered by notions of high culture, good taste, or political correctness... but I digress.) I didn't buy a copy at the time, but I did put it on my To-Do list, and finally got around to ordering the DVD.
The film is a story of persecuted Jews in Ukraine, spanning decades from the Russian Revolution to World War II, encompassing Nazi invasion, partisan persecution, and subsequent flight to Israel. Here's the clincher: It was filmed in North Texas on a near-zero budget! Given the inclusion of the epic 1943 Kursk tank battle, this film has possibly the most extreme ambition-to-budget ratio of anything in recent cinema history.
But does it work as a film? No, not really.
The film supposedly follows the memoirs of the real-life Liza Kharacter Spigel.
The story starts in 1917 in Ukraine. The Bolshevik Revolution occurs, and a Czarist general (hence the movie's name) abandons his house to the Jewish Kharacter family. Bohemian Abrasha and Noah Minkin move in to escape persecution in their homeland of Latvia. Liza and Abrasha begin a relationship, as do Noah and opera singer Gitel Polovoya. Then the war breaks out, the Jews start being rounded up by the Nazis, and the family is broken up. A Nazi general moves into the house. Much drama and battle footage ensues.
If this sounds complex for 111 minutes, that's because it is. The faithful retelling may underlie the movie's major stumbling block: an apparent unawareness of the maxim that the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. The film has too many characters (no pun intended) and too many parallel narratives to stay coherent. It's riddled with plot cul-de- sacs such as the seemingly irrelevant inclusion of a Nazi massacre of American troops in Belgium. (Weren't we just watching a movie about Ukrainian Jews?) There are enough good ideas here for several more thoroughly fleshed-out scripts, but the film doesn't keep moving in one direction long enough for any of the ideas to work.
And then we get to the film's technical execution.
The movie features a large cast that includes some veteran character actors (albeit in bit parts), good costumes, a large number of filming locations, and the use of real vintage military armored vehicles. However, several lead roles are filled by people with no other film credits, and the movie is badly hamstrung by community-theater-level acting. This is compounded by consistently muffled sound, unconvincing Ukrainian accents, and tinny droning synthesized soundtrack music. The cinematography and editing are serviceable but artless, with the look of a small-town TV production. Despite the dense plot, the film frequently drags, and feels longer than 111 minutes. For a historical drama, it contains several asinine historical mistakes, such as placing the Bolshevik Revolution in the wrong year! Lastly, the special effects are simply laughable, particularly the crude CGI and the unconvincing and obvious miniatures seen throughout the battle sequences; this would be funny if the film were about people fighting giant monsters, but it's annoying in a movie with serious subject matter.
It's unsurprising that the film has been ignored by the press and has no apparent distribution outside of mail-order DVDs. Since the plot sounds thoroughly depressing (the film probably would be if it were more coherent), it would need at least decent acting and production values before most people would pay attention.
Perhaps a reboot is in order.
