I have recently returned from a visit to Albania; just about everywhere I went I heard about the national hero Skanderbeg, who was King of Albania during a brief period of independence in the fifteenth century. The reason he is regarded as a national hero is because he fought valiantly to preserve the country's independence against the invading Ottoman Turks; he was successful in the short term, but the country was eventually conquered not long after his death in 1468. Although he was a Christian who was fighting against Muslims to keep Albania a Christian country, he is today, ironically, revered by Albania's Muslim majority as well as its Christian minority.
Indeed, he was even revered by the militantly atheistical regime of the country's Communist dictator, Enver Hoxha. This film was made in 1953, during the Communist era, as a Soviet-Albanian coproduction, although the Soviet contribution was the greater, unsurprisingly given the small size of Albania and its economy. Most of the film was a shot in the Soviet Union by a Russian director, Sergei Yutkevich and it was made in Russian using Soviet (but not necessarily ethnically Russian) actors; Skanderbeg himself is played by a Georgian, Akaki Khorava. The film was then dubbed for showing in Albania; it was this Albanian-language version which I recently came across on YouTube.
As a child, the young George Kastrioti (Skanderbeg's real name) is sent as a hostage to the court of the Ottoman Sultan, where he raised as a Muslim and becomes a warrior in the Sultan's army. His love for his homeland, however, impels him to return to Albania where he puts himself at the head of the nationalist cause and leads his people in their struggle for freedom.
The film was recommended to me by our guide in Albania, who described it as the Communist bloc's answer to Western films such as "Spartacus" and "The 300 Spartans". In fact, both those films were made a few years after "The Great Warrior Skanderbeg", although in its grand visual style it has something in common with earlier Hollywood epics such as "Samson and Delilah" or "Quo Vadis?"
Although it was made during the Communist period, it is not notably Communist in its themes; there is, for example, no attempt to portray Skanderbeg as a proto-socialist. It is about patriotism and national struggles rather than about class struggles, with the Albanians (apart from a few pro-Turkish traitors) heroic and the Turks bloodthirsty villains. The way in which various other nationalities are portrayed, however, may owe something to Cold War rivalries. The villains, apart from the Turks, are the Serbs and the Venetians, shown as treacherous and unreliable allies of the Albanians, whereas their true friends are the Poles and Hungarians. In 1953, of course, Italy, like Turkey, was a member of NATO and Tito's Yugoslavia, although officially Communist, was despised by Hoxha's regime as "revisionist". Poland and Hungary, however, were Albania's allies in the Warsaw Pact. After Albania broke away from the Soviet Bloc in 1960, the film continued to be shown, but now it had a different meaning. Skanderbeg became a symbol of gallant little Albania standing alone against a hostile world.
Trying to evaluate the film is a difficult task for a non-Albanian. On the one hand, it is often grand and stirring. On the other, it can at times seem static and the acting does not always seem inspired, although this may be due to the fact that I was watching it in a dubbed version. I always, however, found it worth watching of the insights it affords into another nation's culture and history. 7/10.
