Good direction, I believe, and good B/W shots and photography. It's even not the propaganda that kills this film, it's rather its unshamed use throughout the movie, with not even an attempt to radicate it in some more higher moral value. In that way "Fate of a Man" ends out to be not other than a plethora of common places, clichées, one after the other.
Nazis are evil, of course. Who can deny it? A bad Nazi kicks a Soviet prisoner of war off a cliff to his death; sterotypical scenes of prisoners ill-treated in a concentration camp; German commander playing with the life of a prisoner just for fun;... OK. Is that all the reasons Nazis were bad? Not a hint. The military valour of a Russian soldier; the Soviet pride in winning the Stalingrad battle... again, who can deny it?
Sokolov, the protagonist, returning from the war, finds out that his entire family has been slaughtered. So he kind of adopts a little war-orphan boy (some Alyosha), as a sort of replacement for the son an daughters he has been deprived of. I was going to value this film 6/10 (which is a "passing" mark, in my opinion - and which is the evaluation I give in IMDb). But, then, at the end, the audience (of which I am a part) comes to know that Sokolov has a heart disease, and it is not sure that he will live enough to care for the future of Alyosha.
Finally, a few seconds before the end, a title card reads like this (in the English translation provided by a popular online video platform): "I'd like to believe that this Russian (meaning Sokolov), this man of unbreakable will, will stick out, and that the boy will grow at his father's side, into a man that can endure anything, shall his country ever call upon him to do so." I can quite understand it in war-time movies, or in films made just a little time after 1945, But in 1959?! That made me realize that the evaluation of the film should be almost a little less from "passing".
Nazis are evil, of course. Who can deny it? A bad Nazi kicks a Soviet prisoner of war off a cliff to his death; sterotypical scenes of prisoners ill-treated in a concentration camp; German commander playing with the life of a prisoner just for fun;... OK. Is that all the reasons Nazis were bad? Not a hint. The military valour of a Russian soldier; the Soviet pride in winning the Stalingrad battle... again, who can deny it?
Sokolov, the protagonist, returning from the war, finds out that his entire family has been slaughtered. So he kind of adopts a little war-orphan boy (some Alyosha), as a sort of replacement for the son an daughters he has been deprived of. I was going to value this film 6/10 (which is a "passing" mark, in my opinion - and which is the evaluation I give in IMDb). But, then, at the end, the audience (of which I am a part) comes to know that Sokolov has a heart disease, and it is not sure that he will live enough to care for the future of Alyosha.
Finally, a few seconds before the end, a title card reads like this (in the English translation provided by a popular online video platform): "I'd like to believe that this Russian (meaning Sokolov), this man of unbreakable will, will stick out, and that the boy will grow at his father's side, into a man that can endure anything, shall his country ever call upon him to do so." I can quite understand it in war-time movies, or in films made just a little time after 1945, But in 1959?! That made me realize that the evaluation of the film should be almost a little less from "passing".