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"From this moment on, I will be just what you say I am. I will be terrible." The tsar (Nikolay Cherkasov) is as angular as Rasputin and twice as scraggly, once upon a time he was a boy whose feet dangled on the throne, his stare of moist innocence like nothing so much as Bambi. (While the first part was founded on The Scarlet Empress and The Passion of Joan of Arc, Disney looms over Part II.) The Polish monarch lolls in a court designed like a vast chessboard, mainly the intrigue unfolds in palatial caverns adorned with distorted murals and head-bumping doorways. "Beware of poison. Beware of the boyars." Chief among potential usurpers is the glowering aunt (Serafima Birman), who warbles lullabies about skinned beavers to the hapless scion (Pavel Kadochnikov) she wants to seize the crown. Unfinished yet not incomplete, Sergei Eisenstein's medieval-modernist opera on the unifier's metamorphosis into dictator, not the mirror Stalin hoped for. The extravagant pantomime of curdled power, a viper's nest churning with jack-o'-lantern close-ups. Back from exile, Ivan cleans house with arrests and decapitations, "not nearly enough!" Nebuchadnezzar redivivus as recognized by cherubs at the mystery play, where Kabuki grimaces reflect the style with consequences for Kurosawa (Throne of Blood). "All plotting and executions," moans the dainty simpleton to the cousin he's meant to overthrow, he just wants to be left alone and is instead covered in royal regalia in order to fool the assassin's dagger. (Around him are frenzied Oprichniki dancers in a color interlude somewhere between Powell and Anger, a riot of red and gold and black plus a certain greenish tinge.) "The heavenly tamarind outshines the earthly oak," thus cinema's monstrous final form—a magnificent dead end, or merely a new beginning for Eisenstein? Visconti in Ludwig pushes the analysis as far as it can go. Cinematography by Eduard Tisse and Andrei Moskvin. With Mikhail Nazvanov, Amvrosy Buchma, Mikhail Zharov, Mikhail Kuznetsov, Aleksandr Mgebrov, Andrei Abrikosov, Vladimir Balashov, and Pavel Massalsky. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |