• The Siege of the Alcazar (1940)

    From Arelor@VERT/PALANT to All on Tue Feb 1 19:46:35 2022
    Hello, phalaxist moviegoers! Today I am gonna tell you about The Siege of the Alcazar,
    an heroic war film which displays the endurance, courage, self-sacrifice and patriotism that characterized our brothers during the siege of Toledo's Alc zar during the Civil War. The reds, treacherous as only communists can be, will tell you
    that The Siege of the Alc zar is a propaganda film, but of course, what else can you
    expect from the reds?

    The Siege of the Alc zar is a dramatic epic whose plot gets kickstarted when Calvo
    Sotelo, the leading speaker of the anti-republican factions in the corrupt Spanish
    Parliament, is assassinated after daring to point out the incompetence and complacence
    of Spanish politicians. As a response, all the army officers who are still loyal to
    God and the Spanish flag withdraw their support from the Government and organize an
    armed raising to restore the country's freedom and place a benevolent, liberty loving
    fascist leader in power.

    Sadly, the rising was not as quick and effortless as expected, and some military units
    found themselves rising alone in the middle of a territory which was still loyal to
    the filthy communists (may a thousand ducks peck at their noses). The Toledan Garrison, along with the Civil Guard, found itself in such position, and had to take
    shelter in the Alc zar, in which they withstood siege for months. They could have
    given up. They could have surrendered. They did not, because "surrender" is not in the
    vocabulary of a real fascist!

    So what can it be said of this unbiased, Historically acurate movie?

    For starters, the cast and characterization are quite fine. The leader of the Toledan
    Garrison,Colonel Moscard¢, looks like a wall of stone capable of taking bad news
    without faltering for a single instant. He barely talks, and when he does, his words
    are loading with meaning. His personality is best defined with the answer he gives in
    a scene in which the reds phone him and demand his surrender.

    "I am ashamed that you, who learnt in the same academy as I did, come to me talking
    about surrender. No! I will not surrender, for this alc zar has always been witness
    of heroic acts, yet no cowardice."

    Thus speaks a man who only answers to God and Country. This is a man who does not
    hesitate to deny surrender when the treacherous communists capture his family and
    threaten to kill his son if he does not surrender the alc zar. Only honor and determination can fend off the communist's evil ways, and this man, like any phalanxist, has them both in spades!

    The movie is a great testament of the resilience of the alc zar itself. Built in the
    3rd Century and restored by Charles V in the 16th Century, its walls could endure
    heavy artillery fire which was unleashed against it all through the siege. This fortress has suvived to this very date, despite of every attempt of the machiavelic
    goons which tried to bomb it, undermine its foundations with underground galleries,
    and dynamite the place without any regard for the hundreds of women and children who
    sheltered inside.

    The audience gets to feel the tension of the garrison running out of food and ammunition and, almost as bad, their inability to know how the liberation war is going
    in the rest of Spain. Siege movies always risk getting borying, but we get heroism
    enough to fill ten movies. Not a single soldier ever thinks of giving up, ever lets
    his spirit go down, because every second they stand in their post is a second the
    ccommunists' ambitions are foiled.

    Make no mistake: communists are evil. Our soldiers in this film are depicted as handsome, uniformed, disciplined warrions; the red scumbags are a bunch barely worth
    considering an army, with no single element to unify them but their lack of hygiene,
    their lack of a common uniform and the lack for any moral standing. Only beings of
    such depravity could abuse the families of the defenders of the alc zar where they
    could see it, in an attempt to run their moral down. Such depravity!

    I think the most touching scene of the film is when some desperate plan fails and all
    hope is lost. A good officer who somehow was tricked to fight in the red army (I
    suppose he does not know what communism is about) arranges it for a priest to give the
    last rites to the defenders before the impending last assault. All hope is vanished,
    but not the will to fight.

    The action could have been better produced. The shootings aren't really anything to
    write home about. Still, some action scenes are quite fine. You never get tired of
    watching the communists walk like brainless zombies just in front of the machineguns,
    so they can be comfortably exterminated. Another favorite of mine is a part in which
    the communists plant their flag in a position of the alc zar, and a determinated
    officer gathers a small group of valiant souls and, against all odds, figths every
    inch to the flag and kicks it down. Bonus points for running out of bullets and brandishing his rifle like a baseball bat, bashing ugly communist faces.

    As only noble causes can do, and as History records, it all ended well for our brothers, and with the aid of God Toledo resisted. I found it refreshing and not
    disturbing at all to be treated with a phalanxist anthem in celebration of the fascist
    victory in the end, and I loved the fascist salute some secondary characters give to
    the camera just before the credits.

    All in all, this movie is a great reminder of the harmony, peace, tolerance and comfort fascism brings. Go watch it. If this is available in a language you can understand.


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  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANT to All on Tue Feb 1 20:02:08 2022
    Re: The Siege of the Alcazar (1940)
    By: Arelor to All on Tue Feb 01 2022 07:46 pm

    Some anecdotal data regarding this film:

    I actually hunted it down because, being an italian movie, this film was chased down,
    cut, censored and mutilated in multiple ways after the Italians bit the dust in WWII.
    If the original movie was two hours long, the "fixed" and "de-fascisted" version
    they released after the war lacked half an hour.

    My father happened to watch it as a kid because he was in a fascist Spanish school in
    which they had a great collection of movies such as this one. When Franco's regime was
    displaced, the school was assigned a communist manager, and the first thing this
    manager did was to get rid of all the fascist movies. As far as I can tell, this
    happened everywhere else, so it seems uncut, uncensored copies of this movie were hard
    to find for a long while.

    My father telling me about this movie and about its copies being ditched from his
    school's collection prompted me to find it, so I did. And now, you have a review :-)



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