I watched the film Enemy at the Gates, which is a fictionalized account of the sniper Vasily Zaytsev (Jude Law) and a propaganda officer named Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) who writes articles about him, making him a Soviet hero and giving the people hope. Danilov later turns out to be somewhat of a villain, as he is shown to be using the innocent Zaytsev to help his propaganda but actually putting the man’s life at risk by making him a big hero and therefore, a big target for the Nazis.
Several reviews of the film have described Danilov as being Jewish.
There is nothing in the movie that says that he’s Jewish. Danilov is not a Jewish surname. Are some of these reviewers just assuming that the character is a Jew just because he has glasses and an education? I don’t understand. One review even accuses the movie of being anti-Semitic for portraying the “Jew” as a treacherous character, but the movie never says that he’s Jewish, so I think whoever wrote that review is just assuming that he’s Jewish just because he’s an unsavory character and projecting his own prejudices onto the guy. What is the deal here? Am I missing something?
Are people just seeing “glasses and swarthy features” and drawing the conclusion that he’s a Jew?
(Also, this movie does not even come close to actually representing how loud a Mosin Nagant rifle is.)
I don’t have a copy of the movie on me, but I seem to recall a conversation between Danilov and Tania when they first meet where it’s briefly mentioned that he is Jewish. In either case, it wouldn’t have much bearing on anything, other than to give him something in common with Tania, who identifies herself as a Jew.
It occurs to me that this would be a great thread for that Jewish smilie at some point if we still had it.
Yes, it says explicitly. There’s a scene where he brings Tania a sturgeon and she says, “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?” He replies that there’s nothing in the religion that forbids eating it. They go into a discussion about how her father knew the anti-Semitism would catch up to them.
I didn’t get that at all. Zaytsev was a portrayed as a good Soviet citizen who had no objection whatsoever to being used in that way. The worst thing Danilov did was turn his later pieces against Zaytsev for slacking off in his killing rate – and that was just because the two were rivals for Tania Chernova.
Pretty far. Genrikh Yagoda was deputy commander of the GPU and founder of the NKVD, making him the “greatest” Jewish murderer of the 20th Century. There were more than a few very high placed Jews under Stalin.
Well I don’t have the DVD cover but I looked up a picture of it, and the bolt handle is on the left side. Weird. Is that some kind of left-handed variant?
Nah. Someone could have made a custom one once upon a time, but all production models were right hand. Someone just flipped the picture when designing the cover.
There were no left-handed M91/30 rifles manufactured or used by either the Soviets or the Finns, and Major Thorvald/Major Konig was a Soviet Propaganda invention and didn’t exist IRL, either.
If you’re ever in Volgograd/Stalingrad, you can visit the Panoramic Museum Of The Battle of Stalingrad, which has Vasily Zaitsev’s rifle on display. The Russians didn’t keep serial number records of which rifles where issued to whom, but Zaitsev says it was his rifle and if he was even half as good with it as he is alleged to have been, then he’d certainly be able to recognise his own rifle from any other M91/30 sniper rifle.
The telescopic sight from Major Thornvald’s K98k Sniper Rifle is in the Armed Forces Museum in Moscow. Given that Heinz Thorvald never existed, it’s obviously just a telescopic sight from a random K98k sniper rifle put on show to gel with the “Vasily Zaitsev defeated Germany’s best marksman!” myth, and 60 years later it would be a bit awkward to say “Yeah, the Soviets made that bit up”, hence the polite fiction that the scope came from Thorvald. (It may, however, have come from another one of the German marksmen that Vasily would have shot in his time, though).
I have found no proof that he existed in real life. He was a fictional character made up for the movie. I have also found absolutely no proof whatsoever in the movie that the character is supposed to be Jewish. I’m going to assume that the reviewers who wrote that he was, simply assumed it, either because of his appearance or because he was an educated intellectual.
I believe he did, but may be a combination of people, and was nothing like the character portrayed in the film.
Unfortunately I don’t speak Russian and most of the English references to him are in relation to Enemy At The Gates, which really isn’t exactly a reliable historical source of information.
Sorry, missed that. Man, why do they always make the treacherous or weaselly characters Jewish? The character could have been just fine without any reference made to his ethnicity at all, but they just HAD to have the slimy, bureaucratic, pencil-pushing schemer be a Jew (as opposed to the angelic, fair-haired, honest peasant Zaytsev.)
And they say Jews control Hollywood. You’d think they’d take advantage of that and make some movies with Jewish characters that are actually heroic.
I never really saw Danilov as villainous or even particularly slimy, outside of the basic premise that he was a soldier who worked in PR rather than something more soldiery, which of course is never a terribly easy character to sympathize with in a war movie.
Hollywood has always sought to portray the Jewish male as being less than masculine, or somehow inadequate. He might be smart, but he’s nebbishy and weak. If he’s strong, then he’s sleazy or evil. Jewish male heroes in movies are as rare as hen’s teeth. I for one am sick of it.
The fact that the heroic Jew of the movie is a female, just confirms that. I have nothing against female soldiers - there were a lot of great female soldiers in the Russian army - but by making the Jewish female the strong one and the Jewish male the ineffectual one (at the beginning of the movie, he gives his rifle to Zaytsev because he doesn’t know how to shoot, not because he knows Zaytsev is the better shooter) is just keeping with the usual Hollywood portrayal of the Jewish male as something other than what an ideal male is supposed to be.
The Hebrew Hammer just bothers me more because the whole movie is premised on the idea that the concept of a Jewish hero is just naturally so ludicrous, that it HAS to be a joke. I didn’t find that movie to be funny.
Well, he lets his love for Tania lead him to (nearly) betray Vasily, though he sorta makes up for it, eventually.
Oy. You wanna watch such a thing? Why should you want to watch such a thing? You want maybe everybody watch this thing? Oy. You Don’t Mess With the Zohan features a heroic (if not super-heroic) Jew, so I don’t know what Argent Towers is kvetching about.
