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The weary lion and mama's sullen leopard, "such are the dialectics." May Day 1940, Mexico City, in the whirl of banners and songs the exiled Trotsky is hailed and disparaged, hero and "enemigo del pueblo." The graying firebrand (Richard Burton) misses the revolutionary Moscow days, in his fortified garden he cares for bunnies, dodges raids, and listens to his own recorded perorations. More symbol than fighter, he fondly gazes at his wife (Valentina Cortese) in a green patch outside his chamber while the slowly circling camera contemplates the bull's-eye in the back of his head. His opposite number is the young businessman (Alain Delon) who stares into canal water and spots a floating Stalin, according to the oblivious girlfriend (Romy Schneider) perhaps a matter of altitude or indigestion. "Do I cheat my own death?" Surrounded by Rivera and Orozco works, Joseph Losey paints a splendidly baleful mural of his own, shunning suspense for Brecht's "appeal to posterity." A beckoning bell tower and a screen sprayed red, "ariba, parias de la Tierra..." The bullfight elucidates the abstruse nod to Eisenstein, the aspiring slayer intently follows the spectacle past the matador's elegance and into the protracted bloodbath of the bovine quarry. (A sharp rack focus nudges Delon toward the pickaxe as he subsequently seaches for a different brand of ceremonial gear.) La Llorona, the squeamish Reaper amidst comrades, "a joke, a Jewish joke." The droll danse macabre (cf. Boom) is enacted by a hunter as confused in his identity as his redoubtable prey is embalmed in his, turns out a pierced skull is what it takes to get Trotsky to show raging life once more. "A question of precision," generally disprized yet matchlessly moody. The punchline takes note of Fuller's I Shot Jesse James. With Giorgio Albertazzi, Enrico Maria Salerno, Luigi Vannucchi, Jean Desailly, Simone Valère, and Claudio Brook.
--- Fernando F. Croce |