Word: moorehead
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...scenes were shot on the cheap in Yugoslavia. More than 3,000 Yugoslav peasants and some 4,500 cavalrymen of the Yugoslav army are employed as camera fodder. To top it off, nine big names (Silvana Mangano, Van Heflin, Viveca Lindfors, Geoffrey Horne, Oscar Homolka, Agnes Moorehead, Helmut Dantine, Finlay Currie, Vittorio Gassman) have been stacked on the billboards like a packet of insurance policies...
Byzantine Bureaucracy. Says Moorehead about the struggles that preceded Russia's short-lived Constituent Assembly, when democracy went down to the whistles and catcalls of the Bolsheviks: "The field of action was now beginning to clarify itself somewhat in the manner of one of those Shakespearean battlefields where the opposing armies take up their positions in full view of one another, while the generals ride about from place to place making declamatory speeches...
Contradicting Communist myth, Moorehead recapitulates such things as the relative obscurity of Lenin in Marxist councils before the revolution, the fact that German subsidies were of great importance to the Bolsheviks, and the massive extent of the funds offered by the policy of "expropriations," meaning armed robbery; Stalin himself carried out successful heists. Moorehead evokes the strange quality of Russian life with its tone of "brittle lethargy," the Byzantine bureaucracy of the Czarist system and the paternal absolutism of the Romanovs, which was inherited by the Russian revolutionaries and became "the core of [their] mind." Finally, Moorehead stresses the importance...
Full Cycle. With his journalist's eye, Author Moorehead does not overlook the story's gaudy set pieces, including the mass funeral of revolutionaries at which 1,000,000 people, or half the population of Petrograd, marched in silence (the dead were buried without religious services, but next day. in a shamefaced gesture, priests were brought to say prayers). And there is also the unforgettable picture of Lenin being transported-in Churchill's phrase "like a plague bacillus"-across Germany in the famous sealed train. Lenin made his associates retire to the train toilet to smoke...
...Moorehead leaves his subject with a grim picture: the murder of the Czar and his family. The Bolsheviks later executed five responsible for the massacre, establishing a tradition-elimination of witnesses-that would cost many of the Reds their own lives. Concludes Moorehead: 'The wheel had now turned almost full cycle from [Czar] Nicholas to Lenin, from autocracy back to autocracy again . . . Bread and Peace' had been at the heart of the party's program from the beginning. What Russia was now about to receive was famine and civil...