Odessa en flammes

"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.

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.