Za'am V'Tehilah

Thus film deals with the fascinating period of Israel's history, birth of a nation and moral choices of young people fighting for their ideals. However, as a film it fails miserably. It is difficult to identify with the heroes, the plot struggles to move ahead and the general atmosphere of a holy cause weights heavily over the story. One is constantly under the impression that similar stories were told numerous times before and much better. The worst thing is that, probably unintentionally, the message of the movie is undermined by unconvincing story telling. Was killing of young British soldiers, the country that just defeated Nazi Germany, really that best option young Zionists had? There is nothing in the movie that would convinced me that it was indeed the case.

Avi Nesher the writer/director was doing rather well in his native Israel, but when this movie was resoundingly unappreciated, he went off to Hollywood. There he never did rise above potboilers, and when he returned to Israel, surprise: his subsequent movies were critically and popularly embraced one after the other. His 2021 "Image of Victory," he says, tries to strike a certain balance by depicting both Israeli and Egyptian fighters as victims of political interests. "Rage and Glory," on the other hand, bluntly depicts the British as ogres in the Israeli War of Independence.

Just as the British soldiers are undifferentiated, most of their idealistic opponents in the Lehi underground are somewhat hard to tell apart. It may be a case of just too many characters and not enough time to spend on them as people. Constraints of time may also be responsible for the depiction of attacks that the protagonists carry out in complex coordination without much indication of how the planning was done.

On the positive side, there is great panache in the recreation of scenes set in the Jerusalem of 1942. A top photographer, David Gurfinkel, is behind the camera. And the suspense is dialed high (my wife stopped watching, saying it was past her limit).

Unfortunately, some of the dialogue is dubbed sloppily.

And although IMDB starts its capsule summary "An avowed anarchist and Stern Gang hitman is sent to Jerusalem to assassinate a senior British officer," that plot arc didn't even register with me. To me the plot looked like no more than "Let's attack the British" followed by "Let's attack the British again."

But Nesher cites political reasons for the film's failure. Some people blamed it for showing the Lehi underground as heroic, others blamed it for showing them as immorally violent. In any case, the film is now considered a kind of a milestone and as such, it was nicely restored in 2013.

Biased view of British mandate in Palestine. Britain was fighting the Nazis, the enemies of the Jews. This movie suggests the British were comparable to the Nazis. Nonsense! There was nothing glorious about murdering British soldiers. Britain was trying to keep Rommel and the Nazis out of Egypt and Palestine. The Stern Gang were terrorists. The actors try hard and maintain some drama. The British were not the bumbling idiots as portrayed having minimal security. Lehi sought an alliance with the Nazis and the Italian fascists in 1940 and was declared a terrorist organization by the Israeli government after it assassinated the UN mediator Count Bernadotte in 1948. Count Bernadotte obtained the release of 31,000 concentration camp prisoners and did not deserve to be murdered by Lehi (Stern Gang).

I saw this film when it was new and it left it's mark on me. It is very exciting and close to the truth about the Youngster's who joined the "Lechi" (Stern Gang) at the time of the British Mandate in Israel (Palestine) in the 40's. What I liked most is the commitment of these young people. I also saw most of Nesher's films.

The subject is the Stern Gang, a.k.a Lehi = Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, a Zionist paramilitary organization whose purpose was to evict by force the British from Palestine. This started in 1940, and the gang's resolve did not waver even In 1942 with Rommel at the gates of Egypt; at the time the British were the only obstacle to a German invasion and occupation of Palestine, which would have doomed all Palestinian Jews. Lehi became a legend for all the wrong reasons; during the war it attempted an alliance with Nazi Germany, and carried out assassinations and terrorist attacks with no concern for collateral damage. Moreover, it participated in ethnic cleansing and atrocities against Arab civilians. The Lehi was unabashedly racist and considered Arabs a "a nation of slaves."

Reprehensibly, this movie whitewashes Lehi and ignores or glosses over the negatives, so the overall picture is far from the truth.

As for the film itself, it is clumsily made. A scene where conspirators react to a knock pointing their guns at the door is repeated so many times it becomes unintentionally funny. Action scenes are at the level of an average TV movie; Lehi members seem to have an otherworldly prowess with handguns, which includes wounded fighters casually picking off sentinels protected by sandbags in high watchtowers.

We are informed that the copy available in the streaming services has been restored, but it looks worse than many unrestored movies of the period. A miss in every way.