Tomka and His Friends

The latest selection that's been sitting on my DVR for quite some time is Tomka and His Friends, a movie that TCM ran back in the fall of 2020 as part of the Women Make Film series.

The movie is set in Berat, a provincial town in Albania, during World War II some time after the Italians have abandoned their occupation of the country. (I don't think the movie says specifically when it's set; I couldn't find information about that on the internet; and my knowledge of that portion of the war is a bit hazy. But I do recall that Hitler made the fatal mistake of sending troops to the Balkans to help out Italy in the spring of 1941 just before his invasion of the USSR, so it might be then.) Tomka is a young boy who does the sort of things that young boys like to do, like have made-up adventures with his boyhood friends or play soccer. And with abandoned military materiel there's definitely enough stuff to have made-up adventures.

But they're about to have a real-life adventure. As they're coming down the hill from their latest day out, they spot a column of vehicles on the main road going along the river. That column is the German Wehrmacht, who have come to keep Albania docile now that the Italians have left. As you recall from any World War II movie you've seen, having German occupation troops in your town is no fun, even if you're a child with a tendency not to grasp the full gravity of what's going on.

For the boys, however, it's about to get personal. When they go out to play soccer the next day, they find that their soccer field has been occupied by the Nazis as it's a nice, large, flat place for them to set up camp, which means not only makeshift barracks but a munitions dump as well. Now they want to do their part to help in the resistance effort. And in some ways, it might be easier for them to do it than for the grown-ups, especially the Italian man they meet who claims he's a partisan.

This kids look like they're playing -- and part of the time, it really is just harmless play, which is why it's so tough for the Nazis to figure out how to handle the situation. But they also have a key role in enabling the adults to carry out their mission, which is to blow up the munitions dump.

Tomka and His Friends was made in 1977, during the Communist era. Communism was gray and bad for most of the Warsaw Pact, but the other countries had the sense to realize they were going to need to deal with the West. Albania's dictator, Enver Hoxha, was much more fanatic, closing off the country and getting out of the Warsaw Pact, allying with China during the Cultural Revolution era instead of the USSR. And that's a big reason why a movie like this would remain so unknown outside of Albania. It's also why the movie has at times a more patriotic undertone even than the war movies Hollywood was making during the war, although the propaganda is less overtly pro-Communist than pro-solidarity and collective action, which seemed to me like a remarkably subtle message to be able to make with a leader like Hoxha.

In fact, Tomka and His Friends would fit in reasonably well with, if not the Hollywood war movies, the British ones, which seem rather less studio-bound than their Hollywood counterparts. It's extremely well made, telling a story that's pretty much universal and easy for anyone to understand. I'm somewhat surprised that Criterion hasn't been able to get the rights to put this out on DVD, as it seems like it would be a natural for them. The restoration, however, seems to have been done by the Library of Congress.