Why American films ignore life under Communism.
Every so often someone in Hollywood uses his power to break the movie colony’s rules. Consider this year’s “Total Eclipse.” Odd as it may seem, this is the first serious American film set against the background of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, the deal that allied Europe’s two totalitarian powers against the West and helped plunge the world into war. With an ally on the Eastern Front, Hitler sent his Panzers west while Stalin helped himself to the Baltic states and invaded Finland. A film like this could have been as big a didactic dud as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s 1982 bomb, “Inchon,” with Laurence Olivier as Gen. Douglas MacArthur. But this time the verisimilitude of the script, carried by some outstanding performances, is the source of the film’s dramatic power.
