Ivan The Terrible: Eisenstein

Stalin liked the idea of Russia's greatest director making an epic movie about Russia's greatest leader (present company excepted) but hated the result. A Great Leader is calm, foursquare, avuncular- a man of steel- and doesn't in the least resemble the hysterical, angular creature with a beard like a beak that Eisenstein and his lead actor Nicolai Chertsakov conjured up. Part II never made it into the cinemas, filming of Part III was halted and much of the existing footage confiscated or destroyed...

Socialist realism it ain't. Design and performance are defiantly non-naturalistic.

It's like a lavishly illustrated book of fairy tales (Russian fairy tales) bought to life: extravagantly beautiful, every frame so very carefully designed, characters rendered as bestial caricatures...

Roger Ebert says of it that it was immediately elevated into the category of "Great Film" without anyone asking if it is actually a good film. Or to put it another way, it is so magnificently achieved, so completely its own thing, that it defies you to wonder whether it was worth doing in the first place.

Cinema has rarely been so pure, so uncompromising, so totally bloody-minded...

(I wonder what Vladimir Putin thinks of it...)