Word: rasputine
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...film is so resolutely dull that one hungers for the vigorous vulgarity of, say, Doctor Zhivago. The film makers occasionally comply, albeit inadvertently, as when Schaffner stages the obligatory scene of Mad Monk Rasputin wenching it up in a haystack, or when Goldman has Nikolai Vladimir Ilich Lenin grouse, "Well, Stalin has been exiled to Siberia again." There is even an occasional feint at topical significance. Count Witte (Laurence Olivier), trying to persuade Nicholas (Michael Jayston) to halt the Russo-Japanese War, says, "I'm advising you to stop a hopeless war." Replies the Czar: "The Russia my father...
...inspirer of such love-hate feelings has long gray locks, chubby pink cheeks and an apple shaped figure. A onetime sailor, onetime ballet dancer, Russell now looks, at 44, rather like an amiable monk. On a set, though, the monk turns into Rasputin, roaring, stamping his feet, cracking a riding whip on the floor. Whole scenes, including choreography, are often invented after the cameras begin turning. "Instant creation," Russell calls it, beaming...
...Mike Romanoff, eightyish, Hollywood's reigning restaurateur-raconteur for more than two decades; of a heart attack; in Los Angeles. That no one knew Romanoff's precise age is a fitting footnote to the life of a legendary impostor who at various times passed himself off as Rasputin's assassin, the son of Victorian Prime Minister William Gladstone and a cousin of Czar Nicholas II. Actually, there is evidence that he was born Harry F. Gerguson, the son of Russian immigrants. After trying his hand at farming, peddling papers and bumming, the flamboyant phony with the Oxbridge...
...that her dialogue does not exist as lines, a guile-lessness making at once for high comedy and fine acting. Llody Schwartz's Kolenkhov is a natural scene-stealer. He pronounces "The Monte Carlo Ballet" with just the right Bela Lugosi intonation, he talks and gestures like a proud Rasputin fallen on bad times, and his Romanov leer is so hilariously Russian that one can smell the caviar in the pit. George Mager's classic internal revenue agent scene is a stunning shtic planted in the first act. And Suzanne Sato's wonderful costumes are more convincing than those...
Died. Princess Irina Youssoupoff, 74, widow of Prince Felix Youssoupoff, the assassin of Rasputin, and niece of Czar Nicholas II; of a heart attack; in Paris. A fragile beauty whose wedding to Youssoupoff in 1914 mirrored all the pomp and splendor of the Romanoff empire, Princess Irina was hundreds of miles away on the evening, two years later, when her husband poisoned, shot and bludgeoned to death the Mad Monk. Soon afterward the couple fled to England, where in 1934 Irina made world headlines by winning a $125,000 libel suit against Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the film Rasputin...