STALIN (1992)


https://ok.ru/video/3518388308500

 To appreciate this film you might read any one of the best accounts of Stalin's dictatorship by Roy Medvedev, Dmitri Volkogonov, Edvard Radzinsky, Simon Sebag Montefiore, or Donald Rayfield. If you know these books you'll find little reason to argue with how this film portrays 'The Boss'. Other reviewers on this site have noted how well Robert Duvall captures Stalin's surly, crude, cunning, sadistic, paranoid personality. They're right. He's marvellous in the role. One reviewer has questioned whether Voroshilov would have dared to shout at Stalin, as he does in this film, at the start of the war. This is a fair point as Stalin picked his men carefully for their inability to stand up to him or take initiative. However, Donald Rayfield cites an example of the normally slavish Voroshilov doing something very like what is portrayed in the film, shouting at Stalin as war with the Nazis was looming for murdering most of the Red Army high command and so crippling the defences of the USSR. He was one of the few men to do anything of the kind and survive Stalin

The film is shot at the scenes of the crimes - the Kremlin at Stalin's Kuntsevo dacha - and is sumptuous watching as a result. Watch out for Satlin's huge, waddling shadow on the ceiling as he climbs a great staircase, an incubus about to settle on the Soviet People. It might be a standard trick but it doesn't look contrived.

https://us.imdb.com/title/tt0105462/

Ivan Passer
Writer (WGA): Paul Monash (written by)
Release Date: 21 November 1992 (USA) more
Genre: Biography | Drama more
The life and career of the brutal Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin.

Robert Duvall ... Josef Stalin
Julia Ormond ... Nadya Alliluyeva
Maximilian Schell... Vladimir Lenin
Jeroen Krabb ... Bukharin
Joan Plowright ... Olga
Frank Finlay ... Sergei Alliluyev
Roshan Seth ... Beria
Daniel Massey ... Trotsky
András Bálint ... Zinoviev
John Bowe ... Voroshilov
Jim Carter ... Sergo
Murray Ewan ... Khrushchev
Stella Gonet ... Zina
Colin Jeavons ... Yagoda
Miriam Margolyes... Krupskaya