Word: eisensteins
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Another aspect of the new Communism, long evident, is the worship of old national heroes. From the Soviet film capital at Alma Ata, beyond the Urals, came word that Hollywood-wise, English-speaking Cinema Director Sergei Eisenstein has shot two-thirds of a new picture about Tsar Ivan (1530-1584). In Tsarist days, Russian school children learned that Ivan was called the Terrible because as a boy he enjoyed squashing little kittens to death, as a ruler he delighted in hacking off the heads of subjects...
...which motion-picture cameras are now recording. They turn up in any war film, any good newsreel. What is done with them is what counts. Leonid Varlamov, who edited Stalingrad, is a graduate of the Moscow Institute of Cinema Art, and works in the great tradition of Eisenstein. He has produced a literal, well-organized film, which lacks the heroic imagination that might have made Stalingrad a memorial adequate to the subject. More damaging to Stalingrad is John Wexler's commentary whereby the splendid screen images are undermined, overstated, or degraded by the propaganda of hate in which they...
...blessing of the National Council for American Soviet Friendship. A flatulent commentary with lines like "Fly, you banners-there is no wind strong enough to blow you down" is ping-ponged between Blues-Singer Libby Holman and mopey Actor Morris Carnovsky. The famous suspense with which Director Sergei Eisenstein prefaced the battle in Alexander Nevsky has been unmercifully hacked when half a minute of editorial discretion would have kept it whole, and the excellent battle music which Prokofieff contrived for that sequence becomes an aural trunk murder. Eisenstein's appalling scene in which soldiers drive civilians down a great...
...rich Magyarish English: "This Victorian phrase, 'with dismay' and 'cinematograph film' just slays me. You would think it would be someone from Barbaria who would come to undo a masterpiece. I just try to make a good 'cinematograph film.' " Famed Russian Directors Eisenstein and Pudovkin had promised to help, added Korda...
...Nevsky" falls into the hackneyed routine of a cowboy-and-Indian film with a Russian accent. It's a good deal more effective than the greater part of action movies that have been turned out lately, but it's a difference of degree and not of kind. For essentially Eisenstein's film is just a "don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes" story which takes place on a Prussian plain instead of on a Boston hilltop...