The Boy from Stalingrad (1943) is all but unknown today, which piqued my curiosity. While it’s not a major discovery, it is a provocative time-capsule piece from World War II, when Russia was our ally. This simple B movie focuses on a band of youngsters who have been left to fend for themselves in a burnt-out village as Nazis advance toward them. Forced to assume adult responsibilities, the children rise to the task: the stakes are high, and there is death in the air.
The script never rises above the level of a propagandistic B movie, and its young actors do their best with often-awkward dialogue (“All right, the house is gone, my father’s gone and all of my family. But not Russia, is it?”). As if to aid provincial American audiences, the characters repeatedly and insistently repeat each other’s “foreign” names (Kolya, Grisha, Pavel, Nadya). Still, it’s unusual to find a film that doesn’t make light of children’s courage and resourcefulness in time of war. The screenplay by Ferdinand Reyher is based on a story by Robert Arden and Robert Lee Johnson, and the film was capably directed by Sidney Salkow, the prolific B-movie and television director who attended Columbia University and Harvard Law School! Of the cast, the most familiar actors are Scotty Beckett, the former Our Gang member who had a prolific career through the early 1950s, and Conrad Binyon, who was active on radio and television as well as films, and.
I just spoke to Binyon, who was 12 when he appeared in the film. He has vivid memories of making it, but they have less to do with its content than with the particulars of its production. He did his own singing but had to pretend to play the guitar, which his character does throughout the story. One day a Russian official came to the set to pose for a publicity photo but wouldn’t appear alongside the actor portraying a Nazi officer! He also remembers that director Salkow was in the Marine Corps at the time of production and came to work every day in his uniform. Years later he caught up with Salkow when the director was teaching filmmaking at Cal State Northridge. (He teasingly asked if Salkow would have used him again had he not become a full-time pilot and the director said yes.) He has only positive memories of Scotty Beckett, with whom he also worked in Good Luck, Mr. Yates the same year—and has no inkling that he would wind up a drug addict.
Apparently the movie was too minor to cause the same kind of awkwardness as other pro-Soviet films of that period (Mission to Moscow, Song of Russia, The North Star) when Congress launched its Communist witch-hunt in the late 1940s. It rates a small footnote in the history of Hollywood during World War II, and I’m glad I got to see it.
