Briefs for September 3-4, 2026

Dolly Parton of course died last week at the age of 80. I had seen 9 to 5 show up on the FXM schedule a couple of times recently, but I couldn't remember when the next showing would be. FXM put one showing in the commercial-laden portion of the schedule, but the next commercial-free showing is tomorrow, September 4, at 11:15 AM.

Tim Curry also died last week and was also 80 years old. Pluto TV in one of their emails put up Clue in their on-demand section in his honor, also putting up Steel Magnolias for Dolly Parton. Neither of those two movie seem to be getting a commercial-free showing anywhere in the near future that I could find, but then again, searching TV listings very far in the future seems to be getting more and more difficult, by design.

One of TCM's spotlights for September is Stanley Kubrick, whose movies are going to be showing on Thursdays in prime time. Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final film, will be showing overnight between September 24 and 25, and I even had that one on my DVR. But I didn't get around to watching it before it expired from the DVR, so sadly, I won't be doing a review of it here until sometime later. Maybe this time I'll actually get around to watching it before it expires.

Alibi Racket

One of the TCM offerings I had on my DVR had enough time left over in the time slot to run a short, as is the case from time to time. This time, there was enough space for a two-reeler, and the short I saw was a Crime Does Not Pay short that I had actually not seen before: Alibi Racket.

Once again, your "MGM crime reporter" is on hand to tell the viewers how crime does not in fact pay, and does so by going into a story about a certain type of crime. Well, in this case not a specific type of crime per se so much as trying to make it so that crime can in fact pay. There's a gang war going on in town, and one of the gangsters gets bumped off. Now, since there are competing gangs, the obvious thought is that the prime suspect should be Leo Rinelli (Edward Norris).

But, Leo has a brilliant alibi, which is that he was at the movies the night of the murder, and made it unmistakeably clear -- obviously much too clear by the flamboyant way he got everybody around him to note the time -- that he couldn't possibly have been anywhere near the killing when it actually took place. He was expecting a phone call and took it at a very precise time; he made certain somebody spotted and noted what time he entered and left the theater, and so on. Now, since the alibi is too perfect, and since this is a Crime Does Not Pay short, you know things are going to fall apart at the end.

So police inspector Wilmer (Al Bridge) decides to investigate people around him, such as the rest of the Rinelli family. And Leo's brother Joe also has a trememdous alibi. One is that he's known not to like his brother, while he also made it perfectly clear that he had a flat tire at just the right time so that he couldn't be involved in any case. Unsurprisingly, Wilmer doesn't buy any of this nonsense, and has a wild hunch that couldn't possibly pay off except in the movies where the guilty guy has a brilliant alibi but somehow inexplicably fails to corroborate one precise part of it. And that, my friends, is why crime does not pay.

To be fair, this is just a two-reeler, not a prestige movie. And everybody involved is professional. But darnit if the coincidence that makes things unravel isn't just a little too perfect, much like Lou Rinelli's alibi itself. I've seen some better movies in the series, more because they focus on a specific type of crime that makes them more interesting.

Susan Sarandon Night

TCM is running a night of Susan Sarandon movies tonight. The night kicks off with another showing of Atlantic City at 8:00 PM, a film I'm always looking forward to, although as it turns out I've already done a post on it back in 2020. It aired on TCM in the very early days of this blog, when TCM got the rights to some Paramount films from after the batch that were sold off to Universal, and then didn't air for ages. In any case, the second film tonight is Bull Durham at 10:00 PM, and since that one's been on my DVR since this year's 31 Days of Oscar, I watched it specifically to put up this post.

The movie takes its name from the baseball team in Durham, NC, a minor-league team at what was at the time the lowest level of the minors affiliated with Major League teams, known as Single A. (Thanks to a reorganization and reaffiliation in the late 1990s, the team is now in Triple-A, the level just below Major League.) Generally, this is the sort of place that would get high turnover as most of the players are young one who are either going to be moving up or who don't realize they're never going to make it to the majors and finally going to give up the dream after a couple of seasons bouncing around. One of the up-and-comers is pitcher Ebby LaLoosh (Tim Robbins). He's got a really fast pitch, but no control over location and no sense of how to deal strategically with hitters.

That strategy is something that catchers normally deal with in conjunction with pitchers, which is you see catchers signalling pitches with pitchers sometimes calling them up. The organization realizes it needs a catcher who can show LaLoosh, given the nickname "Nuke" by his manager Skip (Trey Wilson), and in that regard it's demoted journeyman catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) to Durham. Crash made it to the majors once, and had a three-week stint there, but he's really never going to make it again and ought to know better. In fact, he's close to setting the record for most home runs by a player in the minor leagues, which is something one probably ought not want since it means you're spending a lot of time in the minors.

Meanwhile, there's Annie (Susan Sarandon), who has a connection with the team in part because of her family's having funded the stadium in part decades earlier. Annie also has a thing where she's going to take a player under her wing each year, although in her parlance that means sexually. We get the impresion that Crash would be right for her, but Nuke is just so much more exciting because he's young and studly and exciting with his craziness. Crash also doesn't really want to put up with this nonsense, which is why Annie eventually picks Nuke.

Thrown into all of this is the usual motley crew of off-beat tropes that populate baseball films: the Jesus freak, the Latin player with a crazy girlfriend, and so on. They all try to come together as a team, but the start of the season isn't very successful until Nuke's pitching picks up, at which point the team goes on a long winning streak. However, there's always the looming likelihood that Nuke is going to get good enough that the organization is going to move him up to a higher level, something that naturally does happen toward the end of the movie.

Bull Durham is generally considered a sports movie for obvious reasons, although it's just as much about the interpersonal relationships, with the team's on-field performance really being in the background compared to other sports movies. As such, the actors playing the three main characters do a good job with the love triangle material that just happens to be set against a baseball backdrop. The stock baseball player character part is something I found myself caring rather less about, to be honest.

A Lady of Chance

It's been a while since I've put up a post on a silent film. One that's been sitting on my DVR for a while that I recently finally got around to watching is A Lady of Chance, which probably ought to show up more often on TCM than I think it does since it was made at MGM. In any case, having finally watched it, now's the time for the obligatory post on it especially considering that today is the birth anniversary of star Johnny Mack Brown.

Norma Shearer stars as Dolly Morgan, and as the movie opens she's working in a big-city hotel as a switchboard operator, a job that puts her in contact with any number of people. One is a rich guy obviously looking for a woman to have a fling with while he's traveling and away from his wife. But then comes Bradley (Lowell Sherman) and his girlfriend Gwen (Gwen Lee). They recognize Dolly as "Angel Face", a con artist like them except that she got caught and spent time im prison and is supposed to be on parole although she seems to have skipped it, which gives Bradly and Gwen some power over her. They blackmail Dolly into putting the squeeze on the rich guy.

However, things don't go to plan, and while Bradley and Gwen plan to take the money and run, Dolly turns the tables on them and steals the cash herself, skipping town and going in pursuit of a suitable man far away from where Bradley and Gwen might be. Except that she's dumb enough to go to Atlantic City, just the sort of place where you can expect Bradley and Gwen to show up. There's also what seems to be a convention of people in the concrete business, including young Steve Crandall (Johnny Mack Brown), who's in town from his home town in Alabama hoping to consummate a business deal. Dolly starts the con by paying for his telegram home to Mother (Eugenie Besserer), and the two start a relationship that leads to his proposing rather quickly.

Except that just before they're going to get married, Bradley and Gwen show up in Atlantic City having found Dolly. They expect Dolly to con Steve, or else they're going to tell him about her past. Once again, though, Dolly is able to fool her partners in crime, being able to skip out on them and run off with Steve to get on a train back to his home town. The only problem is that, once the two of them get back to Alabama, Dolly discovers that Steve is not rich yet. He has an invention that could earn him a nice amount of money if he could get somebody to buy into it, but that hasn't happened yet. Dolly even considers leaving, but by this time she's so in love with Steve that she returns to him.

And then Bradley and Gwen show up again. They can't believe that Steve isn't a millionaire and lives in this modest house. But, complicating matters is the fact that on the day Bradly and Gwen come to Alabama, Steve gets a letter from a New York company saying that they want to buy the exclusive rights to his concrete. So Steve is in fact about to be rich, and Bradley and Gwen find this out, making them want to stay and force Dolly into conning Steve one last time.

A Lady of Chance is a lot of nonsense, but it's well-made nonsense coming from MGM. Norma Shearer does an unsurprisingly good job with a plot that is utterly unrealistic. Johnny Mack Brown is playing another of the naïve hick types, while Lowell Sherman and Gwen Lee do well as the villians. It's certainly not the first silent I'd recommend to people who are new to silent dramas, but it's certainly watchable enough.

55 Days at Peking

This year's Summer Under the Stars concludes today with a day of films devoted to actress Ava Gardner. And concluding her day, in the wee hours of tomorrow morning at 3:00 AM (so even if you're on the west coast but only have the east coast feed it's still technically on Sept. 1) is 55 Days at Peking.

After the opening titles, voiceover narration informs us that it is the summer of 1900, a restles time in Chinese history: the Manchu/Qing dynasty was weak, having been forced to give a lot of economic concessions to the various western powers that wanted to trade with China. Originally, the Chinese government had been in a powerful enough position to bar whole families from coming over and keep the westerners isolated in special communities much like the Japanese did with the Dutch in Nagasaki. But by the end of the 19th century the west had the upper hand. This combined with a bad harvest emboldened more radical Chinese forces, in a group commonly called the "Boxers" because of their closed-fist salute. They were trying to drive the west out wholesale, and the government was in a bind because trade duties with the west and taxes on the concessions were actually bringing in a sizeable chunk of money to the Chinese treasury.

It's against that restive background that the Americans rotate in a fresh platoon of marines to the American legation in the diplomatic quarter of Peking, under the leadership of career Marine Maj. Lewis. He shows up looking for rooms at the hotel just as a Russian, Baroness Natalie (Ava Gardner) is being evicted because her visa was revoked by her brother-in-law (Kurt Kasznar) for family reasons. Maj. Lewis doesn't know much about the local politics, but he's about to learn, and fast.

The day after he arrives, the Boxers assassinate the German ambassador to China, leading to an ultimatum from Dowager Empress Cixi (Flora Robson): all of the westerners must leave. The assembled ambassadors take a vote, with all of them voting to leave except for the American who is absent because he's dying in hospital, and the British ambassador, Sir Arthur Robinson (David Niven). The other countries, however, decide that they can't afford to give up all of their concessions to the British, so they change their minds and stay. And that causes the Boxers to start besieging the city.

The westerners are badly outnumbered, but all they have to do is hold out long enough for relief to arrive, which is supposed to get to Beijing fairly soon. Except that Imperial forces are mustered to prevent this from happening, and the westerners have to hold out longer until they can somehow get someone out of the area from below and get word that relief is still needed. Against the backdrop of all this, various personal dramas play out. These include a mixed-race child, Sir Arthur's family, and the relationship between Maj. Lewis and the baroness, which is turning romantic because apparently a movie like this needs a love interest in it.

The technical aspects of 55 Days at Peking are quite good, although it's Spain substituting for China in the backgrounds. This isn't terribly important, since the besieged quarter is all sets anyhow and mostly doesn't need large vistas. The sets and costumes work well as does the music. The weakness, however, is the story, which runs over 2½ hours and sags quite a bit, especially with the baroness character who's not really needed to advance the plot. There are also enough Hollywood-style reimaginings of the history that are probably going to bother some viewers. So it's easy to see why a movie like 55 Days at Peking got mixed reviews and hurt the career of its director, Nicholas Ray.

Captain Applejack

I'm always up for a pre-code movie I haven't seen before. So when Captain Applejack showed up on the TCM schedule quite some time back, I recored it. Having watched it, it's more of an early talkie than a pre-code, but there's still a lot about it that makes it interesting.

Ambrose Applejohn (John Halliday) is the latest -- and last -- of a long line of Applejohns, living in a manor-type house in southwest England along the English Channel. It's the type of place that is isolated and subject to bad weather, reminiscent of the place in Jamaica Inn. Ambrose has an elderly aunt Agatha (Louise Closser Hale) and a ward Poppy (Mary Brian) who pines for him although he doesn't realize it. Ambrose considers this a boring life, and has been thinking about putting the house on the market so that he can use the money to travel and lead a life of adventure.

This being a place subject to bad weather, sure enough we get a storm and a bunch of people looking for help getting out of the storm because reasons. First up are the Pengards, with Mr. Pengard claiming to be a clairvoyant, although of cource clairvoyancy is a bunch of nonsense. After that is Madame Valeska (Kay Strozzi). She's a woman of mystery, and she tells Ambrose that she's being pursued by a guy and needs to be kept safe. Sure enough, a man named Borolsky (Arthur Edmund Carew) shows up looking for Valeska, and threatening to kill Ambrose if he doesn't give up Valeska.

After dealing with Borolsky, Ambrose plans to retire for the night, although Poppy thinks she hears something. In the investigation, they notice that a window latch has been jimmied, and that somebody seems to have found a secret hidden panel that nobody in the Applejohn family ever knew about, which is the sort of plot point that makes no sense. Making even more lack of sense is the fact that the panel contains a parchment that whoever came in through the window didn't find. The parchment says that the Applejohns are really the Applejacks, descended from the pirat Captain Applejack who absconded with a bunch of treasure and hid it somewhere in the house. So clearly we're in the realm of nonsense plot.

After a dream sequence, the various visitors show up again. As it turns out, they were all imposters, and are actually thieves looking for the treasure that's supposedly in the house. This leads to a madcap climax, and a happy ending for our protagonists.

Captain Applejack was based on a play, and most of the movie apart from the pirate dream sequence is set in about two rooms. Indeed, the movie starts off slowly enough that I was thinking it wasn't all that good. But then the parchment shows up and things start to get really weird, especially with the pirate sequence and then the finale which seems to be trying to change the movie from drama to comedy. It ended up coming across to me as one of those early talkies where the filmmakers didn't quite know what to do and decided to through anything they could think of at the audience. The result isn't always successful, but that finale is certainly different, making the movie more fun that it probably ought to be.

What if The Exorcist were a comic heist movie?

I found myself with a couple of Zero Mostel movies unwatched on my DVR and getting to the point where both of them were getting close to expiring. I've watched both of them now and am writing up the reviews, as usual spacing them out because I try to avoid posting about movies with the same star in close proximity unless they're both showing up on TV soon. In any case, the first of the two Zero Mostel movies is The Great Bank Robbery.

A train is heading for the town of Friendly, TX, and we see several people watching the train from afar, with the implication being that they're casing the train for a possible robbery. One group is led by Papa (Akim Tamiroff), father of Juan (Larry Storch); these are Mexicans who have come across the border and, one would guess, are planning to abscond with the presumed gold on the train back to Mexico. There's also Slade (Claude Akins), a gunman who knows a bit more about the bank in Friendly which is part of why he's scouting out the train.

Riding on the train is the Rev. Pious Blue (Zero Mostel), leader of a Salvation Army-style itinerant missionary group. His companion and second-in-command is sister Lyda (Kim Novak), and they're accompanied by a bunch of older character actor types, including Peter Whitney, Sam Jaffe, and John Fiedler. They, as it will be seen, have ulterior motives for making their way to Friendly.

We then learn that the bank in Friendly has two sets of books. One is the official set, although there's a second set and extra vaults because the bank supposedly holds the loot of a bunch of famous bank-robbing outlaws. Why, however, gangs like the James brothers would rob one bank and then trust the proceeds with another, is not answered. Texas Ranger Ben Quick (Clint Walker) has a feeling something is up in Friendly and is there to investigate.

Little does he know how much is up. Rev. Blue's group is, of course, there to rob the bank as well, with their plan being to tunnel under and blow their way into the vault during the Independence Day celebration and then get away with the gold somehow. Of course, they're going to have to stay one step ahead of the law but also one step ahead of the other robbers, who are going to feel aggrieved at having what they think should be "their" money stolen right out from under their noses.

The Great Bank Robbery is played for laughs, so there's a lot of comic styling in the reverend's plans to rob the bank as well as in their planned getaway, including using Sister Lyda to seduce Ben Quick. Complicating matters is the fact that Lyda finds herself legitimately falling in love with Ben.

It's fairly easy to surmise that The Great Bank Robbery was produced in part because there had been a spate of comic westerns in the 1960s as well as a spate of comic heist movies. Unfortunately, The Great Bank Robbery, coming at the end of both of these cycles, suffers greatly from being derivative. I'm also not the biggest fan of Zero Mostel, finding his humor much too broad, which is also a weakness of this movie. Instead of being genuinely funny, the whole thing comes across as the tiresome brand of zany. Ooh, let's have the climax be a hot-air balloon trying to flee the area! The movie is directed by Hy Averbaack, who worked mostly in television, and that shows, too.

Surprisingly, the screenplay is by William Peter Blatty of The Exorcist fame. The Great Bank Robbery does not rise to that level.

Several months before Black Sunday

Today's (August 28) star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Brock Peters. This gives me the chance to do a post on a movie that's been sitting on my DVR and I hadn't seen before. That movie, Two-Minute Warning, comes up in the wee hours of the overnight at 2:15 AM, which is technically August 29 on the east coast although technically very late on August 28 if you're in the Pacific time zone and only have the east coast feed.

The movie starts off by sort of giving away something that's going to be the main plot point later in the movie. A man with a rifle and telescopic sight looks out a high window and sees a couple of bicyclists in what looks like a typical Southern California suburb. The man with the rifle then proceeds to shoot one of the cyclists dead. We don't see the shooter, which is a good thing as it adds suspense to the movie.

Cut to the Los Angeles Coliseum. "Championship X", the big football game is going to be held there the coming weekend. We do get Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford, although nothing closer than that to the NFL because they didn't permit the use of any of their properties for Two-Minute Warning the way they would for Black Sunday which was released a few months later. (I don't know the full production schedule for both movies. It's possible the NFL had agreed with pre-production on Black Sunday and didn't want to be involved in two movies with similar themes.) Brock Peters works at the Coliseum in maintenance and security, looking after the Dobermans who are partly responsible for security.

But, before the game, we have to be introduced to the requisite character types, much like any other disaster movie. Among them are a family man, Mike Ramsay (Beau Bridges) and his wife and kid; a husband and wife (David Janssen and Gena Rowlands); a pickpocket (a very elderly Walter Pidgeon a few years after Harry in Your Pocket); and Stu (Jack Klugman), a gambler who's heavily in debt but thinks he can make it back by betting on the big game. Oh, Stu also winds sitting next to a Catholic priest (Mitchell Ryan) at the game because the priest knows one of the quarterbacks.

The big football game has always had security although back in the 1970s it wasn't quite as tight as it is today. Sam McKeever (Martin Balsam) manages the Coliseum, and has the local police precinct run by Capt. Holly (Charlton Heston). Meawhile, since the sniper already killed that cyclist, we've got the SWAT team out looking for the sniper. They're headed up by Sgt. Button (John Cassavetes), and for obvious reasons wind up at the Coliseum too.

That's because the sniper, seen only in long shots until the very end of the movie, has holed up behind the scoreboard at the top of the Coliseum tower where the Olympic flame would have been in 1932 and 1984. Eventually Mike Ramsay looks through his binoculars and spots the sniper, who has also already been spotted by people in the control booth since they've got shots from the Goodyear blimp above. At this point, it's not known if the sniper has a particular target, which isn't entirely unlikely since there was talk of some elected officials showing up; or whether the sniper just wants to kill random people the way he did with the cyclist. And when is the guy going to start shooting?

Two-Minute Warning is a movie which has some decided problems, in large part down to the lack of character development. Nobody gets to be much more than a stock character, and we have no real reason to care about any of the fans. On the other hand, the main idea of the story is a good one, and fairly well executed. The plot device of not giving the sniper any discernable motive, and not showing him until the very end, is an inspired move that I thought heightened the suspense.

Two-Minute Warning is an overlooked and underrated movie in the disaster film genre of the 1970s, but one that works well despite the one-dimensional characters.

James Barton

I've mentioned a lot how I think Warner Bros. made some really fun B movies, while B movies from other studios aren't quite as good. This is a bit true of MGM which has the whole MGM gloss that makes the B movies look a bit artificual. In the case of RKO, it feels more like the ideas are lacking. I couldn't help but think of that as I watched His Family Tree.

James Barton, who was apparently a vaudeville dancer, stars as Patrick Murphy, a former boatswain who now runs a pub of that name in Ireland. His son emigrated to the States, and is living in the sort of small city -- this time in Iowa -- that features a lot in movies of the 1930s. Supposedly they're small, but they've got so much of everything that you wonder how the US could have so many such cities with a population about 40% what it is today. But the bigger point is that Patrick's son Charles (William Harrigan) hasn't written to Dad in a while, so Dad decides that he's going to go over to Iowa to look up his son and see what the deal is.

Charles seems to have done reasonably well for himself, with a wife Maggie and daughter Elinor who is engaged to be married to one of the wealthier guys in town. The good government types even want Charles to run for mayor against long-time mayor Holtsapple (Ferdinand Munier), who isn't quite as corrupt as the local politicians in other movies, but is definitely the villain of the piece if there is one. Apparently the election is set to come down to which candidate the fourth ward comes down to, led by Irish-American community leader Nellie Oulihan (Maureen Delaney).

And herein lies part of the rub. Charles, when he came to Iowa, changed his name the way a lot of immigrants did. Except that he made up a bogus story to go along with the name change to Murfree (not much disguise there) that involves having a family in Murfreesboro, Tennessee that goes back generations. Now this was only seven years or so after Al Smith lost the presidential election, so maybe small cities in the midwest still weren't ready for an Irish Catholic mayor. But for whatever reason, it's decided that the idea that Murfree isn't Charles' original name is something that's totally going to sink his election chances, which you'd think he would have told his backers before running. And having one's Irish father come over certainly wouldn't help in that regard.

But Patrick is Movie Stereotype Irish, the guy who's got a charming brogue and Irish jig and all that goes with that, along with being able to bring everybody over to his son's side regardless of whether the thing about Charles having changed his name is true. Mayor Holtsapple and his campaign managers see this, and realize that the only way they're going to win is to stop Patrick from campaigning for his son, using force if necessary.

I've also stated before on a couple of occasions that I find Hollywood's doe-eyed view of Ireland to be detrimental to films because of the treacly attitude it induces, but that's not the big problem with His Family Tree. Instead, it's that the script is so unintelligent and unoriginal that I found myself rolling my eyes at it all. People who are interested in seeing what James Barton was all about may enjoy the couple of scenes where he gets to do his dance routine, but the movie as a whole doesn't quite hold up.

Ivan the Terrible, Part I

Two of the foreign films sitting on my DVR are the two parts of Sergei Eisenstein's proposed three-part film on the first Tsar of All Russia, Ivan the Terrible. Only two parts were completed in part because Eisenstein died and in part because of the political reaction to the second part. Recently, I watched Ivan the Terrible, Part I.

To understand this film requires a bit of an understanding of Russian history. Before about the middle of the 16th century, Russia was rulled by a bunch of local princes along with noblemen called boyars. This internal conflict left Russia weak and subject to predation by various forces on its borders including Poland, Baltic Sea kingdoms, and the Muslim khanate of Kazan in what is now central Russia. In 1547, the teenaged Ivan rises to the throne of the principality of Moscow and pretty much crowns himself Tsar of All Russia, a move that understandably creates a whole bunch of political enemies. Russia was also, at this time, despite being Christian, very much not western compared to the rest of Europe; it wasn't really until Peter the Great went to Holland to study shipbuilding that Russia really began to become more westernized.

To deal with all of this, Ivan needs to do a bunch of things. One is to try to ally himself with the Orthodox Church and the common peasants against the boyars and competing princes. Another is to get himself married and set about creating an heir to the throne. The third is to try to unite Russia, for which a common enemy would do nicely. Thankfully for him, the wedding celebration is interrupted by envoys from Kazan. It seems that Kazan is planning to attack Moscow again, and this is the declaration of war.

Ivan is no dummy, and decides that the best defense is to attack himself, so he besieges Kazan and blows up the fortress from below, earning him a major military and political victory as well as gaining some key allies among the people who served under him. However, there's still quite a bit of opposition from the boyars, as they're going to be throughout Ivan's life. Ivan nearly dies but miraculously recovers, earning himself more allies.

But there's still opposition, including quite close to him in the form of his aunt who is plotting to poison his wife. And she actually succeeds. This emboldens the boyars, and Ivan eventually announces that he's going to go away from Moscow for a while to regroup, gather his strength with the peasants and other people allied to him, and return to Moscow triumphant. Since there's a second movie in the Ivan the Terrible story, the first one ends on a rather uncertain note.

As I watched Ivan the Terrible, Part I, released in early 1945 and filmed in 1943 and 1944, I couldn't help but think of how the movie mirrors the situation Russia was facing against Germany at the height of World War II. Indeed, Eisenstein had to decamp to Central Asia to film much of this. But more relevant here is how Eisenstein was able to make a hagiographic movie about the first Tsar against the repressive dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Indeed, it's quite easy to look at this and argue that a case is being made for the idea of a present-day leader with an iron fist. The need to unite all the principalities is also a natural parallell to the need to unite the Soviet people against Germany.

Although I have mostly positives for this movie, there are some negatives to note, which is notably in the stilted dialogue. Eisenstein was moving away from the sort of realistic storytelling which was common in Hollywood and commercial films, instead focusing on a style that has a lot of closeups. I wonder whether part of the dialog issue is also because of the backdrop of medieval Russia and also liturgical Russian.