The Red and the White on AllMovie

Miklos Jancso has said, "To show things in bright colors is devastating." In Csillagosok, Katonak, he examines Hungarians fighting in the Red Army in 1918 during the bloody civil war in Russia. Utilizing horizontal compositions of vast landscapes and lateral tracking shots in a widescreen frame to depict the spaces between two great armies massed against each other, he makes no value judgments for a war in which guilt is shared by both sides in the conflict. The film details a Hungarian unit supporting the Red Army against the counter-revolutionary White army on the banks of the Volga. Jancso adds distinct touches like a White army officer casually tweaking his nose before ordering a mass execution and a doomed romance between a Magyar and a Polish nurse. Through all the confused violence and conflicting emotions, a stoical head nurse must tend to both Red and White army wounded.