La Guerre d'Hanna

I'm sorry to disagree because I really love the story and the heroine. The movie tells a spectacular story. It's hard to make a movie as good as the story of Hannah Senesh, so it is understandable that it falls a bit short. It is worth watching and could be a good tool to teach children with. There is a scene or two of brutality but the honor of this young paratrooper, a model for feminism decades before there was such a thing as politically correct, comes through despite the failings of the director and writers.

Hanna's War is the true story of Hanna Senesh, a Hungarian-Jewish WW2 resistance fighter, who would become Israel's "Joan of Arc. As a young person, she fled Nazi-occupied Hungary for Palestine, where she was recruited and trained by the British to serve as a commando.

After completing her training in Britain, she parachutes into Yugoslavia with a commando team to establish escape routes across the Hungarian-Yugoslavian border for downed British pilots. Her attempts to save Hungarian Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary, however, leads to her capture, torture and demise at the hands of the Gestapo and the Nazi-controlled Hungarian police.

The movie is based on the "The Diaries Of Hanna Senesh" and the book, A Great Wind Cometh, by Yoel Palgi. The scenes of Hanna being sadistically brutalized by the Gestapo and the Nazi-Hungarians is absolutely heart-wrenching and difficult to watch. Think of a cross between Joan of Arc and William Wallace of "Braveheart," and you have Hanna Senesh.

Maruschka Detmers renders an outstanding portrayal in this movie, although she is a little bit too pretty to come across convincingly as a resistance fighter and martyr.

This is a movie in my lifetime, that truly left a mark. For the passion of life, and the evil that works to prevent it.

The cinematography is brilliant, some of it (the seashore scenes in Israel) visual poetry. Donald Pleasance is superb as the smiling villain, a character he has done so well in other films. But on the whole, this movie is overwrought, overly long and a bit over the top. I've seen operas where people don't take as long to die as they do here. Are these real people and is this a true story? The closing credits lead you to believe that. But I was a little suspicious. It wouldn't be the first time Hollywood has used phoney "what happened to them" capsules in the closing credits to enhance a fictional story. I'm also impressed how Hanna keeps her lipstick perfect right through basic training, a parachute jump into enemy territory, riding with the partisans and being tortured. But then thats Hollywood I guess. Overall it's quite a watchable film despite these criticisms.

This is one of the best war movies I've seen. This movie shows how much some people had to fight for their people during the war. Good movie to watch.

-MICHAL