Red Monarch

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Red Monarch
Directed by Jack Gold
Written by Charles Wood
Produced by David Puttnam
Starring Colin Blakely
David Suchet
David Kelly
Carroll Baker
David Threlfall
Cinematography Mike Fash
Distributed by Film4 Productions
Release date
16 June 1983 (UK)
Running time
100 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish

Red Monarch is a 1983 British television film, starring Colin Blakely as Joseph Stalin. It is directed by Jack Gold and features David Suchet as Lavrentiy Beria and David Threlfall as Stalin's son Vasily. [1]

Contents

Plot

Red Monarch is a comedy based on The Red Monarch: Scenes From the Life of Stalin , a collection of short critical essays by the Russian dissident and former KGB agent Yuri Krotkov. The film depicts Soviet politics and the interplay between Stalin and his lieutenants, particularly Beria, during the last years of Stalin's rule. The reading of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's "The Heirs of Stalin" [2] in the final scene supposedly warns that the threat of totalitarianism is constantly present.

Cast

Box office

Goldcrest Films invested £553,000 in the film and earned £292,000 making them a loss of £261,000. [3]

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References

  1. "BFI | Film & TV Database | RED MONARCH (1983)". Ftvdb.bfi.org.uk. 16 April 2009. Archived from the original on 16 January 2009. Retrieved 10 February 2014.
  2. "The heirs of Stalin". Yevgeny Yevtushenko Poetry Archive. Archived from the original on 20 October 2008. Retrieved 18 April 2009.
  3. Eberts, Jake; Illott, Terry (1990). My indecision is final. Faber and Faber. p. 657.