The French-US actor, director and producer George Paul Breakston (1920-1973) entered Hollywood as an uncredited bus passenger in Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), then performed as side character Beezy in a total of seven Andy Hardy entries. His solo career ignited with credits including Tokyo File 212 (1951)—touted as America’s first feature recorded entirely in Japan—and schlockers such as The Manster (1959), also a runaway picture. After stints in Brazil, Congo and Kenya, Breakston reached Yugoslavia in what was then a burgeoning ecology of visiting cineastes (Claude Autant-Lara, Giuseppe De Santis, Armand Gatti, Helmut Käutner and Gillo Pontecorvo among countless others), idiosyncratic multinational deals and dime-a-dozen location shooting. With Avala Film, he devised two youth-centered thriller-tragedies, both starring English-Australian child thespian Fraser Macintosh. The earlier of these is The Soldier, in which the exigencies of an eleven-year-old trapped under Wehrmacht terror in 1942 are represented through generic, conventional narrative means. But the film (projected here from a dubbed 16mm version that aired on North American television) is significant for its symptomatic condition as one in a bouquet of fascinating guest directorships then enabled by Yugoslavia. Macintosh appears side by side with Olivera Katarina and Rade Markovic, both screen titans in the making.