Review of Ivan the Terrible, Part I

I know "Ten Best" lists are an exercise in futility since aesthetics are a subjective matter and no one can lay claim to knowing what is best, only what one likes. If the rating system at IMDb had eleven stars, I would award them to this one which, taken together with Part II, would be my all-time favorite film. (As one reviewer already has noted, one cannot truly appreciate what Eisenstein was up to unless one sees both Parts I and II, preferably back to back.) When I was studying film at UCLA, I had to do a term paper in a seminar on film aesthetics and I did it on these two movies. My title was, "Eisenstein's *Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II: The Perfect Union of Form and Content." I tried to show how Eisenstein created a movie masterpiece by telling a story that works on three different levels: historical, satirical, and autobiographical. The two films (some work was done on a third part, but Eisenstein died of a heart attack before completing it, and in any case, the release of Part II was held up for decades once Stalin had caught on to the film's subtext) only superficially deal with the historical Ivan Grozny (in Russian, the meaning is more "awe-inspiring" or "formidable" than the English "terrible"). In fact, Eisenstein's Ivan is revisionist in the extreme, in part because he wanted to present a heroic figure who unites the Russian people against outside foes (in the movie, the Poles; in Eisenstein's time, Nazi Germany -- in fact, filming in Moscow had to be halted for a time so that production could be relocated to the resort town of Alma Atta). But as Ivan becomes more paranoid following the poisoning of the Czarina, Anastasia, at the hands of the patrician Boyars, he resorts to murderous plotting and counter-plotting, which Eisenstein uses as a metaphor for Stalinist pogroms against anyone "crazy" enough to question his reign. (Remember, if you spoke out against Stalin, you committed suicide by being thrown out of windows by the KGB, and those who escaped this fate wound up in Siberian slavery.) The third level on which the films operate, the autobiographical, presents Eisenstein as Ivan (hinted at by biographer Marie Seton when she included a photo of the director sitting in the Czar's actual chair, his feet dangling just like a shot in the film of the young Ivan during his regency). Eisenstein told Seton he had homosexual tendencies but that he thought homosexuality a "dead end." Of course, in Stalinist Russia, being homosexual was tantamount to being insane -- or traitorous. Eisenstein's movies are full of homosexual imagery, and *Ivan* is no exception. The Oprichniki, for example, Ivan's iron guard of loyal, KGB-like attendants, is depicted as a kind of samurai mafia which at times (e.g. the drunken banquet toward the end of Part II) seems definitely gay. That sequence includes a telling song and dance number by a pretty young Oprichnik who hides behind a female face-mask. In the same sequence, the Czar's drunken nephew, an effeminate young man, is dressed in the royal robes and sent into a cathedral where a Boyar assassin, thinking it is Ivan, stabs him to death. Although the Oprichniks want to kill the assassin, Ivan says to let him go, "for he has killed the Czar's worst enemy." In other words, they've murdered Eisenstein's own perceived weakness: his closeted homosexuality. The movie is full of such insights, and I can't think of a single other film that is so multi-layered. Once you begin looking for these things, you'll want to watch *Ivan* over and over again.