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| Nikolay Cherkasov in Ivan the Terrible, Part I |
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| Nikolay Cherkasov in the color sequence of Ivan the Terrible, Part II |
Czarina Anastasia Romanovna: Lyudmila Tselikovskaya
Boyarina Ephrosinia Staritskaya: Serafima Birman
Prince Andrei Kurbsky: Mikhail Nazvanov
Czar's Guard Malyuta Skiratov: Mikhail Zharov
Czar's Guard Aleksei Basmanov: Amvrosi Buchma
Fyodor Basmanov: Mikhail Kuznetsov
Vladimir Andreyevich Staritsky: Pavel Kadochnikov
Boyar Fyodor Kolychev/Archbishop Philip: Andrei Abrikasov
Nikolay the Fanatic: Vsevolod Pudovkin
Pyotr Volynets: Vladimir Balashov
Archbishop Pimen: Aleksandr Mgebrov
Sigismond, King of Poland: Pavel Massalsky
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Screenplay: Sergei Eisenstein
Cinematography: Andrei Moskvin, Eduard Tisse
Production design: Iosif Shpinel, Sergei Eisenstein
Costume design: Leonid Naumov, M. Safonova
Music: Sergei Prokofiev
David Thomson has made a suggestion that a better film epic could be made of the life of Sergei Eisenstein than the one that was made about the life of John Reed -- i.e., Warren Beatty's Reds (1981). In fact, Eisenstein's life was so crowded with artistic and political drama that it would probably have to be an HBO miniseries like Game of Thrones (which is not a bad subtitle for Ivan the Terrible, come to think of it). The drama surrounding Ivan the Terrible alone would be enough for a whole season's episode, with Eisenstein struggling to bring his proposed three-installment film about Stalin's favorite czar to the screen while at the same time dealing with the lethal whims of the dictator himself. After Part I of Ivan the Terrible was released to great acclaim in 1945, including a Stalin Prize from the hands of the man himself, Stalin soured on the project: The mad frenzy of Ivan in Part II cut too close to the bone and it was not released until 1958 -- five years after Stalin's death and ten years after Eisenstein's. Part III had begun filming but was canceled, and what existed of it, except for some stills and scraps, was destroyed. After all this Sturm und Drang, it would be nice to conclude, as some critics have done, that Ivan the Terrible is one of the masterpieces of world cinema. But I can't go that far. It seems to me a great directorial folly, akin to Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980) in its directorial excesses, its indulgence in style for style's sake. That the style is immensely entertaining in its artistic wrong-headedness pushes Ivan the Terrible in the direction of camp, a world's fair exhibition of stained-glass attitudes, early silent film poses, great garish sets, costumes that make even the hairiest 16th-century Russians look like drag queens, and in Part II there's a sequence in the most lurid color this side of some of the ballet sequences in MGM musicals of the 1950s. The first time we see Sigismond, the king of Poland, in Part II, he's sprawled across the throne in a position that almost screams for a sign proclaiming "Careless Decadence," and really looks extremely uncomfortable. Ivan's enemy, Archbishop Philip, swans about in a billowing cloak that has no known sartorial or clerical necessity, and which allows Ivan to forestall his exit by simply placing a foot on it. When Philip does manage to leave, the cloak raises a cloud of dust that suggests Ivan needs to liquidate the housekeeping staff. The collection of poses in Ivan the Terrible is balletic and operatic in the worst senses of the words, but the film is also watchable for all those reasons. There are some redeeming values, of course. It's a window into the mind of the Stalinist Soviet Union, both in what it approved and what it banned. It has a distinguished score by Prokofiev, though unfortunately muddied by poor sound reproduction -- in restoring the film, it's too bad that as much attention wasn't paid to providing a new music soundtrack as to cleaning up the images. Visually, it's fascinating, even when the visuals are absurd.
