The Assassination Of Trotsky (1972)

 

Picture: C     Sound: C     Extras: C-     Film: C-

 

 

Joseph Losey has had one of the most uneven careers of any major British director one can recall.  He has had his successes (like The Servant among others) and disasters.  His 1972 drama The Assassination Of Trotsky is considered one of the all-time bombs and disasters.  Intended as a critical home run, many felt the film wasted its stars Alain Delon, Romy Schneider and Richard Burton out of his element as Leon Trotsky.  The story is of course about how Stalin eventually realized he could not take total power until Trotsky was killed.

 

He landed up in Mexico trying to continue his ideas of making Communism work, but he was as doomed as the idea, Stalinism won out for about a half-century and his hopes were buried with him likely forever.  Anytime the film looks like it will pick up, something dumb happens.  This eventually is an odd bad film that will make one recommend Orwell’s Animal Farm quickly, but it cannot match Losey’s catastrophic pop art Spy disaster part-Musical Modesty Blaise as his worst film.  The fact that it was about a more serious subject is why it got more flack.

 

At the time, getting together “an international cast” was a big deal, but that was about to sadly decline in the 1970s, aided by the disaster film cycle and other factors too numerous to go into here.  The actors are even ambitious, but the screenplay by Nicholas Mosley is way too flat and melodramatic for the cats and Losey to overcome.  Since Soviet Communism and the ideology in general is dead, the lack of going into it ironically saves the film from becoming more dated.  It also makes it obvious all the more why it was a failure.  It was not even a good thriller about how it happened.  See Munich (reviewed elsewhere on this site) for how such a film should have been done.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image has detail limits and inconsistent color throughout, though it was issued originally in dye-transfer three-strip Technicolor prints in Italy, England and the U.S. among other markets.  Sometimes, the color here is good and shows how good the original prints must have been.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is also weak and second generation, made worse by obvious dubbing.  This film was originally issued by the Cinerama Releasing Corporation, a catalog now owned by ABC/Disney, whose films have usually come out on DVD from Anchor Bay, MGM and even Criterion for a brief time.  This one has reverted back to other owners at London Film and Joseph Shaftel Productions.

 

Extras include text on Losey, the stars and the history, but not much else.  There is another interesting story to be told here, but the producers are not going to dig up the dirt on what went wrong with this film.  Now with the Soviet Union long gone, it has a new amusing side to it, which might be the only reason to see it.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo