Word: potemkinism
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...vremenshchik (man of the moment). He is Pyotr Zavadovsky, 37, her private secretary, who has moved into the traditional consort's suite just below the Empress's own chambers (and connected to them by a green-carpeted circular stairway). Where does that leave His Serene Highness General Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin, 36, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Count of the Russian Empire, recipient of Prussia's Black Eagle decoration, Denmark's White Elephant and Sweden's Holy Seraphim? It apparently leaves him maneuvering to retain his power by appealing solely to the Empress's judgment rather than her emotions...
...while--you want to go take in a good Charles Bronson Hick. But there's one thing on the Janus bill that's worth a thousand copies of Film Quarterly: the Renoir double bill of The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion. When people talk Citizen Kane, and Potemkin, Birth of a Nation and The Seven Samural, if they don't talk about these two they're crazy, because they could give any motion picture ever made a real run for the ultimate superlatives...
Scarcely less exotic are the human rituals that take place along the border. At one point, for example, the South Koreans have built an elaborate stucco "freedom village" that is supposed to typify the comforts of capitalism; near by, the North Koreans have solemnly built a slightly larger Potemkin village of their own (its 3,000 smiling inhabitants are trucked in each day and out every night, according to U.S. officials...
They don't slip down the gullet like meringue, but Potemkin and The Last Laugh are two of the Greatest Movies Ever Made, the former maybe The Greatest. Ah yes, the dopes will walk by them, on their way to see Georgina Spelvin wrassle snakes, but as far as film goes you can't beat these. When Potemkin dropped itself on the world in 1925, it was a revolution--it changed the art of making motion pictures and watching them. It was shocking in form and substance, nobody had created anything quite like it before, and it remains probably...
...Poison. A cult piece, which means that a lot of people liked it better than the New York Times did. No matter--it has Tuesday Weld and that's reason enough to slip over and see it after you've told fifty people at dinner you're going to Potemkin, "unlike the rest of the mealy-brained slobs at this University." Good luck...