| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Review

The Rosenberg File: Case Closed. Prod. by Jan Legnitto. Discovery Channel, 1997. 53 mins. (Films for the Humanities and Sciences, Box 2053, Princeton, NJ 08543-2053; 1-800-257-5126; <custserv@films.com>; <http://www.films.com> [Sept. 23, 2002])

This is a video that gets more sophisticated as it moves along. It opens with broad strokes of the filmic brush. They paint a scene of 1940s Cold War tension, of a band of Communist conspirators who spied for the Soviet Union, and of a remorseless process of detection by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its helpers that led to the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on a charge of having betrayed atomic secrets to the Russians. These introductory scenes are simple, even simplistic. In a crude ploy, Alexander Feklisov, the film's leading actor, is identified as a "KGB colonel" who can now tell a story never before told. Narrating against the clichéd background of the Statue of Liberty, Feklisov notes that he is in the evening of his life and intones, "My morals didn't give me the right to remain silent." According to this latest version of Feklisov's confessions, when Ethel Rosenberg was executed along with her husband in 1953, even his colleagues in MVD-MGB were upset (the KGB proper was not formed until March 1954). This does rather strain the viewer's credulity—had Feklisov's colleagues wept when Joseph Stalin killed his millions? . . .

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