This is a great example of a film that really has to be in black and white, that has to be somber toned, and that has to end ambiguously. You can’t impose your single favourite methodology and attitude on every text. The barbed-wire/clothesline shot (you’ll know it when you see it!) induces agonized, empathetic gasps in hardened audiences of crass college undergraduates. Here is villainy, and of a thoroughly ideological variety. Have you ever felt sentimental about socialism, or the Communists, or even outright Bolshevism? I know I have, and don’t necessarily repudiate the impulse. Careful, though. This film is a good counter to all that. Propaganda? Yes, sir: http://theatln.tc/1IKPTnH