The Black Battalion

Those foreign legions were shit, weren't they? Imperialist frog eaters, retired SS men, murderers, thieves, a few Czechoslovaks who willingly served them... And to make sure that this was known, another film was made to order that tried to hide what it was. The script confronts the main character (Jaroslav Mareš, who either doesn't act at all or disgustingly overacts) with the "reality" of the legions, and you wait to see what happens. You wait for a quarter of an hour, you wait for half an hour, then you see a village scene and a tragically filmed "action" in the jungle that shows the soldiers as incompetent idiots that a couple of five-year-old boys with slingshots would dare to take on, and you wait some more... The plot follows this sad path until the last shot, in which a monkey plays the main role. Well... The only things to admire about The Black Battalion today are its technical aspects, especially the work of the architect Zázvorka, the cinematography and the fact that a fairly realistic jungle environment was created in the Czech Republic. And that’s it. Neither the muscularity of František Peterka nor the divine music in the last jungle scene can save it. (05/15/2011)

If you turn your back on your country, then you will walk with evil, your character will spoil and you turn into a “disgusting" person. So much for the ideological declaration, which luckily forms just an inconspicuous frame for the story and does not blur the otherwise purely adventurous format of this picture. Despite undeniably reflecting the time it was made, The Black Battalion is a pleasant movie. If only because, in terms of topic and genre, this movie is an island of light in the gray uniformity of nineteen-fifties Czechoslovakia. In many respects it is lacking something and the theatrical dying scenes are, with all due respect to the filmmakers, preposterous, but even despite that, this picture is good. Especially thanks to the ending and several powerful scenes. A good, wrongly forgotten genre piece, the likes of which are few and far between. (12/23/2007)