Robert J. Maxwell When Joseph Losey gets his hands on the right material he can do wonders with it. This doesn't seem to have been the right material, or maybe Losey was just impatient with Burton's boozing or something.First, don't expect a biopic of Leon Trotsky, the stormy petrel of revolution. The title describes the assassination of Trotsky. He's a professorial sort, exiled to Mexico City after Stalin took over and betrayed Lenin's principles by playing footsies with Wall Street. It often happens with extremist ideologies that they split up, because everyone wants to be purer than the next guy. At that, Trotsky was lucky to get out alive. Stalin had ANYONE who represented a threat to his power murdered. Stalin went about, doing bad.It's an unpleasant movie. We have to sit through a bullfight and learn why movies usually don't show us the final coup, after which the bull drags himself around vomiting blood until he flops down, while the crowd cheers. I know -- the bravery and grace of the matador and all that, but why don't they just let the bull go? Sometimes there is a thin line between beauty and baseness. I understand why the scene was included. The matador does to the bull what Alan Resnais does to Burton, more or less. And instead of dying a neat Hollywood death, Burton staggers up from his chair, a hole in his skull, stares at Resnais and shrieks bloody murder.There are long periods in which we watch Mexicans doing nothing in particular. And the scenes can be confusing. It's not always easy to tell what's going on. The musical score appears to have been made by a thousand chirping electronic crickets. Lots of talent and momentous intentions gone awry.

artisticengineer I have mentioned this comment contains a spoiler. This is a tricky matter as the viewer of this film must certainly knows how it ends (much as a viewer of any film about the Battle of the Alamo or the Battle of Little Big Horn has to know, before seeing the film, the ultimate end); nonetheless, to be absolutely frank and forward I will state that my comment contains a spoiler or two.A lot of viewers of historical films complain that some (if not all) films do not show things "as they actually happened" or is "historically incorrect". Well, they are correct, but usually the changes are made in order to make the film more desirable to the audience; after all, the various films (such as "Titanic") were made not for historians but for movie audiences. Therefore, the directors of most films will take a little "artistic license" during the production of the films.This movie stays pretty much on course historically and has been criticized by a lot of people for that; people who probably would have also criticized the film had it been historically inaccurate. Sometimes you just can't win...And, that sums up the plot of this film (and historical drama). There is no way that either Trotsky or Jacson (his assassin) will win. Trotsky is convincingly played by Richard Burton. He shows Trotsky as a man who has refused to run any more from Stalin; no matter that this will inevitably doom him.Alan Deleon (the French version of Richard Gere) portrays the assassin in a way the allows the audience to sympathize with him; even if not approving of what he is about to do. Romy Schneider portrays Jacson's mistress; a fellow communist. In real life a few years before DeLeon and Schneider had been a real life unmarried couple; then, after a couple of years their relationship had ended and they went on to marry different people. Deleon did help Schneider to get some parts afterwards and this was one of them. Knowing this makes viewing this affair (of Jackson and his mistress) on screen difficult as one knows that these actors had actually been in this situation; loving and fighting. Sometimes close; sometimes hating each other. A viewer watching some uncomfortable emotionally charged performances can insulate him or herself by the fact that the performances are simply acting; not real. Yet, in this case that emotional insulation is not there. These people were playing out a true relationship on screen, and it is painfully realistic to watch.The nature of the murder is foretold in the movie by the bullfight. I have been to a number of bullfights and this one shows a sloppy end with a bloody and prolonged death of the bull. Though bullfight affecionados would like for you to believe that a bullfight ends with a skillful and swift sword stroke by the matador (such as seen in the movie "Fail Safe") the reality is that quite a few bullfights end up as little more than butchery. Which is a good reason to continue to ban those exhibitions in the United States. Well, I digress but not by much. The fact is that assassination is not a particularly noble affair and the film does leave one wondering why Jacson used a pick axe instead of his pistol. The film shows the murder in painfully realistic detail. Nothing glorified. This movie shows it like it was, and it was gruesome.It does put into perspective the nature of assassination. Some additional points about this movie: It was made in 1972 and at that time no one knew how the Cold War would end (the Communists were winning in Southeast Asia then). Trotsky is shown in this film as a Communist of a different sort; with some humanity much as we would later view Premier Gorbochev, but this was made years before anybody had heard of Gorby. Anyway, one underlying theme of the movie is how different things might be by 1972 if Trotsky had not been killed. Perhaps he would have thrown enough of a counterweight to Stalin that the Cold War might not have begun. Of historical interest is the portrayal of the American guards of Trotsky; Communists who did not have an accent! Most people do not know or remember that there were some very genuine Americans who were openly Communist before WWII and were proud of that. In fact, 1940 represented a high water mark of sorts of the membership of the American Communist Party. After WWII, when the excesses of the Stalin regime became known in the West, most of the American Communists dropped their membership in that party and joined the Democrats. The movie is painfully realistic; hence the low ratings is sometimes receives. Yet, history is painful at times and this movie does not pull punches. It does not give us a typical Hollywood sugar coated ending because, quite frankly, that was not the type of ending in this matter. Jacson was a murderer who, like most murderers, could only discover how horrible murder is by actually committing it. Painful and realistic is how I would describe this forgotten jewel.

esteban1747 Stalin hated Trotsky for many reasons, one among them is that Lenin in his famous testament strongly criticized Stalin as a tough and badly educated leader while recognized Trotsky as the most intelligent politician among the Bolcheviks. In that way Trostky was a kind of impediment for Stalin to seize the whole power in Soviet Union. The party trusted Stalin and the first thing he did was to start a snare campaign against Trotsky among the high bosses of the party as Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, who finally supported Stalin in this deed. As a result Trostky was declared a traitor and expelled from USSR, living first at the border of USSR, then in Turkey and finally in Mexico. He continued writing and had an increased number of people following him, a fact enough for Stalin to order his assassination. To this end Stalin and his KGB tools used Mexican communists led by the famous muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. They attempted to kill Trostki once unsuccessfully, then decided to change for another way, i.e. to introduce the agent Jacques Mornard, who in fact was not from Belgium as he claimed to be, but Spanish citizen Ramón Mercader del Río, son of mother born in Cuba. Mornard or Mercader finally killed Trostky, but not his ideas. In fact Stalin made a big mistake because trostkism increased and gained a lot of popularity in several countries after the death of Trostky. The present film is just an effort to show something of this fatal happening, but it is not the best in my opinion. There is no introduction to Trostki, how he was expelled from USSR, why this happened, how he arrived in Mexico. Not knowing the history, it will be very difficult to guess that Stalin was behind this assassination. The relationship of Trostki with some communists, as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, is neither shown at all. The role of Trostky is played well by Richard Burton although he looked fatter than the real Trostky, but Alain Delon as Mornard or Mercader did not play this role convincingly. Mercader was a Stalinist fanatic, and this characteristic is not seen in the role played by Delon. He looked as schizophrenic rather than a man with political convictions.

Varlaam The one thing that everyone already knows about the assassination of Trotsky is that he was killed with an ice pick. Well, in this film, he is killed with an ice axe. An ice pick, an ice axe, they're not the same. To be precise, he is killed with the pick side of a two-headed ice axe, but even then, that's still not an ice pick, which is something entirely different. So which was it really?The only reason I'm belabouring this very trivial point is that it results in the single decent piece of acting in this film, the reaction of Richard Burton as Trotsky as he is hit in the head with the axe. As you would probably imagine, you have to wait quite a while to get to this moment in the film.Other than Burton, the film's leads are Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. Neither one is comfortable speaking in English, the language they are required to use here. Most of their scenes are together. Why weren't their scenes done in French instead?Since the presumable market for a film about that old villain Trotsky would have to be the European Left, why was this film made in English in the first place? Why not French, the language of the leads, or Italian, the language of the crew? Burton's bits in English as the self-important Trotsky could have been interpolated later while everyone else could have acted in a language in which he could show a little expression. As it is, no one would ever guess that Delon and Schneider are major stars under different circumstances. Schneider seems to be here mostly so she can stand and/or lounge in lingerie, but even that appetizing opportunity goes underexploited since, as a self-respecting Trotskyite gal, she doesn't wear any make-up.There are several "characters" in this movie who in any normal film would have speaking parts, but since they never did settle the matter of what language they were shooting in, these people just stand there looking stupid and not saying anything. Unbelievably, we are expected to care when one of these ciphers gets killed (cue the cheap-looking mannequin) by Stalinists, or Fascists, or Anarcho-Syndicalists, or anti-Castro Cubans, or the CIA, or whatever. Nothing that goes on in this movie is ever very clear. And anyone expecting to learn a little something about the historical Trotsky will come away with the knowledge that he kept bunny rabbits at home.Delon plays Trotsky's assassin, Jackson, "spelled without a k". He's Belgian. When asked why a Belgian has a name like Jac(k)son, he explains that he's really French-Canadian. Oh, well, that's clear. Most of the movie operates on a "duh" level much like that.It is safe to conclude from the preceding that some mystery surrounded the precise identity of the assassin. If that is the case, the hapless direction of the utterly inept Joseph Losey was entirely confounded by a notion like "mystery". Or "tension". He manages to convey neither. The film has very little cutting, and hardly any reaction shots. There is no indication of what one is supposed to feel at any given moment. Everything looks like it was one take and wrap.Losey is fond of this absurd set-up where two people supposedly have a conversation with one in the extreme foreground and the other in the remote background. Natural sound wouldn't work so there's some badly dubbed dialogue on top. It's an attempt at an "arty" shot that Welles might have done something with, but which is completely botched in the hands of a hack like Losey.I can't conceive of anyone deriving any entertainment or elucidation from this fiasco. Five minutes spent with any reputable biography are more illuminating than 100 in the company of this film.