Counter-Attack

So you find yourself trapped in a bombed-out building with a peasant girl and 7 members of the enemy. Luckily, you hold the gun.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, East European sources began putting World War II stories on film. And, some movies that had been made since the 1970s were being released in the West.

Counter-Attack, a film celebrating the Russian contribution to the victory of Nazism, earned a place in history for the blacklisting of screen writer John Howard Lawson, member of the Hollywood Ten and a guy who really was a Marxist. He never denied it during his lifetime.

An astringent war film atmospherically shot by Oscar-winning cameraman James Wong Howe with an attention to detail it doubtless owes to its stage origins.As befits a film scripted by one of the Hollywood Ten, one of the Russians is a noble-looking young woman with a rifle, while the Nazis are an even more than usually devious and shifty bunch.

COUNTER-ATTACK is a WW2 movie with a unique perspective; the hero is a Russian soldier, played by Hollywood star Paul Muni, best known for his turn in the original SCARFACE. The setting is a bombed-out basement, where Muni takes refuge among a group of German soldiers, one of whom he suspects is a disguised officer; he must seek to identify the man to learn of Nazi plans.

It's 1942 and the Soviets have fallen back under German attack. The Soviets are secretly building a bridge to launch a counter-attack.

...for a film.

I was 7 years old when I saw this movie in 1945. the war swirled around me and this was a movie about success against an enemy of America.

Not much a "counter-attack" but a "stuck behind enemy lines" movie. I also saw this on Turner Classic Movies and that's probably the only place you'll ever see this movie as it has little main stream appeal.