Chetniks (1943) DVD-R

Starring Philip Dorn, Anna Sten, Shepperd Strudwick, Virginia Gilmore, Martin Kosleck
Directed by Louis King

Print: black/white
Runtime: 73 min.
Genre: drama

Subtitled The Fighting Guerillas, Chetniks tells the story of Yugoslavian guerilla fighter General Draja Mihailovitch. Based on the General's own memoirs, the film depicts Mihailovitch (played here by Philip Dorn) as a selfless idealist, leading his resistance troops, known as the Chetniks, on one raid after another against the Germans during WW II. The best scenes involve the deadly clashes between Chetniks and Germans in the treacherous mountain regions of Yugoslavia. Anna Sten, Sam Goldwyn's 1930s "answer" to Greta Garbo, co-stars as Mihailovitch's self-sacrificing spouse. Initially, some dismissed this movie because of the mistaken belief that the Chetniks collaborated with the Nazis during WWII, but as Michael Lees unequivocally proves in his book The Rape of Serbia, this was actually a myth fed to Churchill by the Communist partisans of Josip Broz Tito, to convince the British prime minister to shift Allied aid away from the Chetniks. The events in this film are thus factual.