The Assassination of Trotsky (1972)

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

I missed this movie when it came out way back. Saw it now. And I am glad I did not waste money on it way back when I had less to spend. The event and the characters screams for a movie. But decent movies does not have inflated pretense to "art" and has a good script writer. This movie have buckets of embarrassing pretense and a terrible script. It even defeats Richard Burton, who plays Trotsky - and by the way is rarely in the movie! Many shots of church bells, mediocre architecture, Alain Delon pouting with sunglasses on and Romy Scheider crying or panicking about something (it is never explained what) and so on. But fortunately after this was made, along came Costa Gavras to show how such movies should be made. Don't bother with this one.

A terrible, forgettable film chronicling the last days of Leon Trotsky's exile in Mexico City. The story could have had great potential: The time, the place, the characters. Rather it fails to exploit any of these assets. Making the film tedious and dull. Winning dialogue that is meaningless, explains nothing, and is just plain dull is the norm here as for example when Trotsky's wife asks the Delon character why a Belgian should have a name like Jacson and Delon explains, it's because he's French-Canadian. The film is not anti-Stalin, Pro-Trotsky, actually it's not much of anything. We learn nothing about the characters: Who they were and what motivated their actions. Nor do we learn anything about the time period and what was taking place in Mexico. Sadly, the film has no historical value,because of this. Lacking character development, we never learn how these casts of characters came to Mexico or what motivates them. There is no mention of Trotsky starting a 4th International here. No mention of the affair the married Trotsky had with Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera's wife in Rivera's own house which angered Rivera beyond belief and which devastated Trotsky's wife. And lastly no mention of the painter David Siqueiros, involvement in spraying Trotsky's house with bullets. Alain Delon is stiff like a board. Richard Burton hardly looks like Trotsky. The goatee he is wearing looks like it should be returned to the horse whose tail it was misappropriated from. His acting seems to only run the gamut from A to B. True it's an improvement from Delon's who never manages to get beyond A, but not by much. Only Schneider was able to give enough color to her character to make her come alive. While Trotsky is depicted as an egoist who likes to hear himself talk, Jacson is portrayed as an ice-cold killer as shown by his affectionless affair with Ms. Schneider and his unflinching ability to watch a very brutal bull-fight: A scene certainly not for the faint at heart. The real Mercador (aka Jacson) was a dedicated idealistic Spanish Communist who fought and was willing to die in defense of the Spanish Republic in Spain's Revolutionary War against Franco and the Fascists. After serving his 20 year sentence for Trotsky's murder, he moved to Cuba. Although a great idealist, who was willing to spend the rest of his life in jail by killing Trotsky for his role in betraying the Spanish Republic, you would never know this from the film. Rather Losey seems to describe his motivation as stemming, not from idealism, but from some sort of sense of existential emptiness. Huh? How is this historically accurate or for that matter any of the film?

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.

This film has a reputation as a terrible film which I find greatly undeserved. It is average in the sense there are better films and there are worse. I found the film to be fairly static. The story is slow moving and the character of the assassin is never really delineated. Alain Delon is the true lead of the film, with Burton's Trotsky more a secondary character. I thought Burton did a fine job as Trotsky, the only think slightly bothering me is that Burton was physically imposing and that's not how I picture Trotsky. I picture him as more of a bookish intellectual of less than physically imposing attributes. (I do not know the actual physical attributes of Trotsky.) In any case, Romy Schneider is very lovely and sexy and the camera also treats Delon well, even if we do not have any clear insight to his motivation. In the end, I'm not sure what the purpose of this film was and that is its greatest failure. But, while the film did not succeed, there is nothing memorably bad about it. So my rating falls plum in the middle.