The Assassination of Trotsky | |
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![]() Film poster | |
Directed by | Joseph Losey |
Written by | Nicholas Mosley |
Produced by | Norman Priggen Josef Shaftel (executive producer) |
Starring | Richard Burton Alain Delon Romy Schneider Valentina Cortese Jean Desailly |
Cinematography | Pasqualino De Santis |
Edited by | Reginald Beck |
Music by | Egisto Macchi |
Production companies | |
Distributed by | Cinerama Releasing Corporation |
Release date |
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Running time | 103 minutes |
Countries | Italy France United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Budget | £1 million ($2.4 million) [1] |
Box office | 561,109 admissions (France) [2] |
The Assassination of Trotsky is a 1972 British historical drama film, directed by Joseph Losey with a screenplay by Nicholas Mosley. It stars Richard Burton as Leon Trotsky, as well as Romy Schneider and Alain Delon.
Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929, Leon Trotsky travels from Turkey to France to Norway, before arriving in Mexico in January 1937. The film begins in Mexico City in 1940, during a May Day celebration. Trotsky has not escaped the attention of the Soviet dictator of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, who sends out an assassin named Frank Jacson. The killer decides to infiltrate Trotsky's house by befriending one of the young communists in Trotsky's circle.
In 1965, Josef Shaftel optioned the novel The Great Prince Died by Bernard Wolfe. The film was a co-production between the French Valoria Company and Dino De Laurentiis. It was originally to be shot in England, [3] but was eventually filmed in Rome. The movie used Isaac Don Levine's book The Mind of an Assassin as a source. [4]
According to author Melvin Bragg, the director Joseph Losey was so drunk and tired that he relied on long monologues by Burton to carry the film, in some cases even forgetting what was in the script. Burton himself wrote that he, or the continuity girl, would have to remind Losey of things that would have caused continuity gaffes. [5]
The Assassination of Trotsky was included as one of the choices in the book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time . [6]
Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and political theorist. He was a central figure in the 1905 Revolution, October Revolution, Russian Civil War, and establishment of the Soviet Union. Trotsky, with Vladimir Lenin, was widely considered one of the two most prominent Soviet figures and was de facto second-in-command during the early years of the Russian Soviet Republic. Ideologically a Marxist and a Leninist, his thought and writings inspired a school of Marxism known as Trotskyism.
The Fourth International (FI) was a political international established in France in 1938 by Leon Trotsky and his supporters, having been expelled from the Soviet Union and the Communist International.
Romy Schneider was a German-French actress. She is regarded as one of the greatest screen actresses of all time and became a cult figure due to her role as Empress Elisabeth of Austria in the Sissi trilogy in the mid-1950s. She later reprised the role in a more mature version in Luchino Visconti's Ludwig (1973). She began her career in the German Heimatfilm genre in the early 1950s when she was 15. Schneider moved to France, where she made successful and critically acclaimed films with some of the most notable film directors of that era. Her performance in That Most Important Thing: Love is regarded as one of the greatest in the history of cinema. Coco Chanel called Romy “the ultimate incarnation of the ideal woman.” Bertrand Tavernier remarked: “Sautet is talking about Mozart with regard to Romy. Me, I want to talk of Verdi, Mahler…”
Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río was a Spanish communist and NKVD secret agent who assassinated the revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in August 1940. Mercader was imprisoned for 19 years and 8 months in Mexico for murdering Trotsky with an ice axe.
Teheran 43 is a 1981 Soviet-French-Swiss political thriller film made by Mosfilm, Mediterraneo Cine and Pro Dis Film, directed by Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov. It is based on events around Operation Long Jump, the 1943 attempt by Nazi Germany to assassinate Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Tehran Conference.
Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon is a French actor, singer, filmmaker, and businessman. Acknowledged as a cultural and cinematic icon of the 20th century, he emerged as one of the foremost European actors of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
Purple Noon is a 1960 crime thriller film starring Alain Delon, alongside Marie Laforêt and Maurice Ronet; Romy Schneider, Delon's girlfriend at the time, makes a brief cameo appearance in the film. Directed by René Clément, the French/Italian international co-production is loosely based on the 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. The majority of the film's dialogue is spoken in French, although there are brief sequences in Italian and English.
Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich was a Soviet secret police (NKVD) operative active between 1937 and 1953, when he played a role in assassination plots against Communist and Bolshevik individuals who were not loyal to Joseph Stalin. This included the murders of claimed and actual Trotskyists during the Spanish Civil War including Andreu Nin Pérez, and an initial, failed assassination attempt against Leon Trotsky in Mexico.
Monsieur Klein is a 1976 mystery drama film directed by Joseph Losey, produced by and starring Alain Delon in the title role. Set in Vichy France, the Kafkaesque narrative follows an apparently Gentile Parisian art dealer who is seemingly mistaken for a Jewish man of the same name and targeted in the Holocaust, unable to prove his identity.
Joanna Marie Shimkus is a Canadian film actress. She is the widow of actor Sidney Poitier and mother of actress Sydney Tamiia Poitier.
Scorpio is a 1973 American spy film directed by Michael Winner and written by David W. Rintels and Gerald Wilson. It stars Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Paul Scofield. Delon plays the title character, a hitman hired by the CIA to assassinate his mentor (Lancaster), a former agent suspected of treason. The film's score was composed by Jerry Fielding.
Christine is a 1958 French period drama film, based on the 1894 play Liebelei (Flirtation) by Arthur Schnitzler. The film was directed by Pierre Gaspard-Huit and the title character was played by Romy Schneider. The cast included Alain Delon as a young lieutenant.
La Piscine is a 1969 psychological thriller film directed by Jacques Deray, starring Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet, and Jane Birkin.
Ignace Reiss – also known as "Ignace Poretsky," "Ignatz Reiss," "Ludwig," "Ludwik", "Hans Eberhardt," "Steff Brandt," Nathan Poreckij, and "Walter Scott " – was one of the "Great Illegals" or Soviet spies who worked in third party countries where they were not nationals in the late 1920s and 1930s. He was known as a nevozvrashchenec ("unreturnable").
The Leon Trotsky House Museum, Trotsky Museum, or Trotsky House Museum, is a museum honoring Leon Trotsky and an organization that works to promote political asylum, located in the Coyoacán neighborhood of Mexico City. Its official name is Instituto del Derecho de Asilo - Museo Casa de León Trotsky.
Day and Night is a 1997 French drama film directed by public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy and starring Alain Delon, Lauren Bacall, Arielle Dombasle and Francisco Rabal. The film follows a French author who fled to Mexico for a quiet life and an actress who is willing to seduce him to get a part in a film adapted from one of his books.
The Chosen is a 2016 Spanish-Mexican thriller drama film written and directed by Antonio Chavarrías. The film stars Hannah Murray, Alfonso Herrera, Julian Sands and Henry Goodman. The movie was filmed in Coyoacán, Mexico and Barcelona, Spain, and its release was scheduled for the first part of 2016. The film is based on the murder of Leon Trotsky in 1940.
Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence is a political biography of Joseph Stalin, written by Leon Trotsky between 1938 and 1940. The book was never finished due to Trotsky's assassination in August 1940 although copious draft manuscripts for concluding chapters survived, allowing editors to complete the work.
Trotsky is a Russian biographical eight-episode television mini-series about Leon Trotsky directed by Alexander Kott and Konstantin Statsky. The series stars Konstantin Khabensky in the title role. It debuted on Channel One in Russia on 6 November 2017 for the centenary of the Russian Revolution. The series is a rare high-budget artistic representation of Trotsky in post-Soviet Russia, as his name was a taboo during most of the Soviet period.