I was browsing Amazon last night, looking for something to watch, and came across the Russian film The Last Stand aka The Last Frontier aka Podolskiye Kursanty.

To quote the summary on IMDB, the film tells the story of the Podolsk cadets' heroic stand outside Moscow in October 1941. Cadets from the Podolsk infantry and artillery schools were sent to the Ilyinsky line of defense, fighting alongside units from the Soviet 43rd Army to hold back the German advance until reinforcements arrived. Hopelessly outnumbered, young men in their teens laid down their lives in a battle lasting almost two weeks to obstruct the far superior German forces advancing towards Moscow.

The film itself is a fairly standard WW2 fact-ion piece on a particular battle (the fiction part of the faction being a love triangle involving a rather attractive nurse - incredible eyes!) but what caught my eye, and the reason why I am recommending it here, was the look and feel of things.

First up, the kit is spectacular. When they first showed a German tank I thought “here we go, another faked up panzer something” but then I realised I was looking at a Panzer 35(t) i.e. not a German tank so much as a Czech tank in German service. There were a few of them, then some Panzer IIs, some SdKfz 251s (well, they might have been 250s) and, finally, some Panzer IVs and a cracking StuG.

Most of the heroes of the film man Soviet L-46 45mm anti-tank guns, towed by trucks and also equipped with anti-personnel rounds, and watching how they use them is fascinating. Add in the T-34s and, I think, T-60s, all the support vehicles (including some katyushas), the uniforms, small arms and the like and you have a feast of good-looking kit to look at.

God knows where they got it all from. Perhaps they just decided to re-manufacture it all. I mean, if you can make 1,800 hobbit feet for the LOTR, knocking up a few tanks and a company’s worth of uniforms shouldn’t take you long.

Watching the film (which cost me 99p to rent btw) was well worth it just for all that, but the sets are outstanding as well. The main set-piece is the defensive works on the ‘frontier’. This comprises a Soviet village split by a river…and looks just like it does on the tabletop!

I know that’s the wrong way round, but you spend a bit of time setting up for a game without really knowing how much your table actually looks like the terrain in question, so it’s nice to see that the tabletop isn’t too far from what a village might actually look like…although I do think that the set looked a bit clean and tidy.

Anyway, well worth a look, and I recommend watching it in VO with subtitles.