Odessa in fiamme

Certainly one of the lesser known corners of film history are the films made under Il Duce during World War II, so Odessa in Flames (Odessa in fiamme), 1942, was my first. Telling the tale of an opera singer who is left behind by her libertine husband when the Bolsheviks sweep through Romania, the film is divided into two acts as the singer tries to recover her son, who was stolen by the godless and particularly brutal Reds, and the husband who has wised up and joined the army. It reaches a climax as the characters all end up in Odessa as the fascist army prepares to take the city from the commies.

This is not great cinema, but director Carmine Gallone (a prolific if completely off the radar journeyman) does manage a degree of tension in a story that was as predictable as it was in the US versions of similar rah-rah films that were being churned out on our side of the pond. Imagine anything from the period with Paul Henreid and you've got the idea.

What is more interesting are the propagandist bits that permeate the story, starting with the reassuring opening that tells us that since Romania was founded by Trajan there should be no questioning Italy's involvement in that theater of war. Even cooler is a scene on the fabled Odessa Steps, although this is about as far from Eisenstein as you can get.

Shot in 1942, this is one of those rare wartime films that blur the boundaries between state-sponsored narrative and genuine cinematic tension. Emerging at the height of World War II from Fascist Romania-though practically an Italian production in resources, cast, and style-the film was crafted to serve a precise ideological function under Mussolini's regime. Shot almost entirely at Cinecittà, directed by one of the regime's favored filmmakers, and featuring a largely Italian cast, it represents the first collaboration between the Italian and Romanian film industries. A Romanian-language version was also shot, but what we see in the Italian version is deeply embedded in the aesthetics and priorities of fascist cinema. Yet, its technical and stylistic choices-markedly more nuanced than most Axis propaganda-invite closer inspection beyond its immediate historical function.

Visually, the film employs expressionistic lighting and restrained camera movement to cultivate a mood of inner desolation rather than nationalistic fervor. The heavy use of shadows, symbolic isolation of characters within confined interiors, and an almost tactile silence in some scenes, all contribute to an atmosphere where suffering is not just a narrative beat, but a structural element. This stands apart from the typical visual triumphalism of contemporary fascist war cinema. There's an eerie stillness, a deliberate suffocation in the frame, that calls to mind the more psychologically nuanced spaces of films like Noi Vivi (1942), albeit stripped of that film's philosophical ambiguity.

The propagandistic elements, rather than being bolted on, are embedded into the dramatic architecture. And nowhere is this more evident than in the depiction of the Soviet regime's violence against civilians. Throughout the film, the Bolsheviks are shown committing atrocities-forced deportations, executions, family separations-all staged with a theatrical realism meant to evoke horror and indignation. These acts are not sensationalized, but carefully woven into domestic scenes to rupture the emotional fabric of the protagonists' lives. The effect is intimate and devastating: the family is the locus of nationalist identity, and the Soviet threat is personalized through its destruction.

Yet for the modern viewer, these same sequences strike a dissonant chord. The very acts of terror the film attributes to the Soviet occupiers-mass arrests, disappearances, forced re-education, and political purges-mirror, almost to the letter, the methods routinely employed by the Axis regimes themselves, including Mussolini's Italy. This unintentional mirroring reveals a striking contradiction at the heart of fascist propaganda: the enemy is accused of doing precisely what the regime knows to be morally reprehensible, even as it does those same things itself. This is not a simple case of hypocrisy, but of unconscious self-indictment. If such actions are represented as evil when performed by Bolsheviks, it follows-perhaps against the film's own intentions-that their use by Fascist Italy is likewise reprehensible. In this sense, the film inadvertently confesses the ethical failure of its own ideology.

This contradiction is heightened in the mise-en-scène. Take, for instance, the depiction of the Soviet secret police. They move with clinical efficiency, faceless, bureaucratic, and brutal. The resemblance to fascist internal policing-OVRA in Italy, or the Carabinieri's political functions-is inescapable. The visual language is identical: uniforms, cold interiors, documents, and fearful glances. What was clearly intended as a denunciation becomes, for the critical viewer, a reflection-a mirror showing the regime's own silhouette in the guise of the other.

The most symbolically charged moment comes in the brief scene on the Primorsky Steps, the same location immortalized in The Battleship Potemkin (1925). The film does not attempt Eisenstein's dynamic montage or revolutionary energy. Instead, the steps are subdued, almost reverent, serving as a backdrop for the suffering of innocents under Bolshevik cruelty. Whether these are the actual steps or a recreation on Cinecittà's lot remains uncertain, but their inclusion is ideologically charged. The fascist film attempts to overwrite the revolutionary symbolism of the space, turning a site of uprising into one of martyrdom. Yet even here, the historical irony presses in: Fascist Italy, no less than the Soviet regime it decries, had used public space for theatrical displays of control and punishment. The same steps that symbolize repression in this film would not have looked out of place in the spectacle of fascist Rome.

The performances follow a melodramatic register, consistent with the film's operatic tone. The central figure-a mother searching for her lost son-embodies national suffering in a way that blends private anguish with patriotic allegory. Her restrained but emotionally potent performance gives the film much of its resonance. The supporting cast, however, often lacks subtlety, falling into stiff typologies meant more to transmit ideology than to evoke empathy. This tonal imbalance, between personal realism and ideological caricature, is perhaps the most revealing flaw in the film's construction-it exposes the tension between cinema as art and cinema as instrument.

Cinecittà's technical resources are fully on display. The set design is meticulous; interiors are crafted with a richness that conveys the emotional and material stakes of loss. Editing is measured, preferring long takes to rapid cuts, privileging reaction over action. Compared with more militaristic fascist war films like Giarabub (1942), Odessa in Flames (Odessa in fiamme) seems deliberately introspective, focused less on battlefield heroism than on the ideological purification of domestic suffering.

Indeed, its portrayal of war is not triumphant but sacrificial. This is a war in which civilians, especially women and children, bear the burden. But again, the contradiction surfaces: the suffering is blamed entirely on the enemy, as if Axis forces-whose own campaigns in Yugoslavia, Greece, and North Africa were marked by widespread reprisals and civilian massacres-were above such conduct. This rhetorical strategy only reinforces the sense that the filmmakers, and the regime that supported them, knew precisely what cruelty looked like. They had, after all, the vocabulary ready to condemn it.

All of this makes Odessa in Flames a uniquely revealing cultural artifact. Not simply because of its artistic merits-which are considerable in places-but because it exposes, inadvertently and unmistakably, the moral logic of fascist cinema. The crimes of the enemy are depicted with visceral conviction, precisely because they are so familiar. The film's horror is effective because it is honest about what horror looks like-only dishonest about who commits it. This is what gives the film its unsettling power: beneath the rhetoric, beneath the patriotic framing, it knows, and shows, what evil looks like. And it cannot help but show us the face of its own regime in the mirror.

"It is us and our world, not the ideas, who have created so many murderers."

Odessa in Fiamme is a Romanian and Italian movie that was made during the second World War. It tells about the events that happened between the Axis powers (Germany and Romania) and the Soviet Union in the early 1940s in Odessa.

If you judge this movie by the historical accuracy, it can be thrown into the trash can without any regrets. However, accuracy wasn't at all what the movie was aiming at, just like any other film made during the second World War.

The plot is rather simple. It tells about an opera singer, who is separated from her husband and child due to the terrible deeds the Bolshevik soldiers are doing in Bessarabia. Odessa in Fiamme shows how Soviet soldiers terrorize innocent people and poison their youngsters by trying to spread their communist ideology.

Rather than trying to convince the viewer that all the Bolsheviks were trying to damage the world's lives and ideals, it promoted some sort of heroism on a local level for Bolsheviks who redeem themselves by standing up against their regime, which is really interesting and unusual for that time period. This is something I definitely haven't expected from the film and I give it some credit for that.

I also give Odessa in Fiamme some credit for its allusion to Eisenstein and his Odessa steps. That I have expected even less than the soft propaganda that they have used.

Odessa in Fiamme was a pretty average piece of propaganda cinema for its time with some remarkable things. I'd recommend watching it if you're interested in the Axis' propaganda and allusions to Battleship 'Potemkin'. Otherwise, definitely a skippable film. 6/10.