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The film takes place in 1943, when the Germans make a last effort to destroy Tito and his partisans in the Balkan mountains. The battle scenes are pretty well made - although it's clearly the same 5 or 6 fighter planes that keep attacking the partisans throughout the whole movie. The movie's weakness is the characters (!) - the partisans are all heroes who die in the arms of their friends and lovers, and the Germans are all Germans as we know them from so many Hollywood films - speaking german with an evil nazi accent and only thinking about vengeance and destruction (they might as well be zombies or vampires!). We never really get to know anybody, apart from general Tito who is portrayed as a saint (he was still alive when the film was being made) by Richard Burton, the only star in the film. It is refreshing to see a WWII film where it's not american G.I's slaugtering nazi's. The heroes in this movie are communists with red stars on their caps fighting for their country. Too bad it's such a poor script, there is a lot of goodwill here, and it could have been a very exciting and different film about the dark years of Europe.
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