Cinema: The War of Heroes

To Die in Madrid is a 90-minute documentary knit into a tragedy—the story of the Spanish people during the scarring years (1936-39) of the civil war. To make it, French Producer-Director Frédéric Rossif drew on English, French, Russian, German and U.S. newsreels, molding his material into an elegiac whole, a powerful work of art.

Rossif is plainly with the Republicans. As the film opens the camera moves slowly over the land, while the commentary, narrated, among others, by John Gielgud and Irene Worth, begins: "Twenty-four million people ... 12 million illiterate . . . half of Spain is owned by 20,000 people." Scenes of old farmers and young boys, clumsily drilling in work clothes, grinning with hope as they go to the front, running helter-skelter into battle, are intercut with shots of Franco's disciplined soldiers and Hitler's crack Condor Legion. At war's end, boys and grizzled men are marched off by the victorious Nationalists to be shot, and the sound track quotes French Novelist Georges Bernanos: "They seized them each evening in remote hamlets, at the hour of return from the fields. They departed on their last journeys with their shirts still wet with the sweat of their backs."

But To Die in Madrid is no one-sided polemic; one of its most touching moments is a depiction of the last conversation between the proud Nationalist defender of Toledo's besieged Alcazar and his young son, who is about to be executed by the Republicans because his father will not surrender. It was a "war of heroes," notes the commentary, "because there were Spaniards on both sides."