Red Monarch

My local video store has a shelf put aside titled "World's Worst". This I like to think is more an indictment of the staff's age rather than their critical ability. I have scored from this shelf some of the most enjoyable movies I've ever seen.

"Red Monarch" was the first film I took home from the shelf and what a fine, black, intelligent, scathing film it is. Revolving around Stalin, possibly the world's most evil man ever, it almost but never quite becomes "Carry on up the Kremlin". The hard edge under the buffoonery is applied just enough at appropriate times to remind us that the Stalinist regime was frighteningly thuggish, effective and above all real.

A cast of very British character actors make the humour satirical more than comic, Colin Blakely and David Suchet sharing the kudos for making their characters believable. Not all the scenes seemed to work though, whether due to the director not transferring the basic story's meaning well enough or not I can only guess. Mao's visit and Carroll Baker's over the top Yankee ingenue being two that don't quite gel. Others however are chilling in what I imagine is their veracity. And these scenes are in abundance, all based around Stalin's demented pitilessness and his cronies' cowardice.

Cynicism reigns supreme, not just in the film's slant on it's characters but in the behaviour of the characters themselves. A grim believable portrayal of what was and is wrong with totalitarian regimes. Bitter might even be a better word.

I'm not saying that "Red Monarch" should be put on the "World's Best" shelf, but it certainly did not belong on the one on which I found it. Btw, the movie next to it was "The Trojan Women" which is pretty good too.

Search the Internet for comments on this film and you might find it described as a failed Mel Brooks comedy that trivializes the suffering of millions. It isn't. If you want to see it as a black comedy then the director (Jack Gold) leaves that mostly up to you. The blackness is suppled not by him but by the closeness of the action to real events. This is not fiction, and it's not zany. These people really were like this and these things, or things very like them, happened. Some of the events shown are condensed from different incidents, it's true. Stalin's meeting with Mao is a caricature but one that captures the mutually suspicious, mutually uncomprehending mood of their real meetings. Stalin didn't literally die at Beria's hands although it's very likely that Beria had a hand in Stain's death. It's that probability that the film is depicting in condensed form. But it's not meant to be that kind of history. It's as a psychological study of the petty, frightened, sadistic murderers who held the lives of the people of the USSR in their hands towards the end of Stalin's life that the film works and deserves to be called a masterpiece. The whole cast is good but by Colin Blakely , David Kelly, and David Suchet stand out. Blakely plays the increasingly physically and mentally sick Stalin, paranoid, typically referring to himself in the third person as the real Stalin did, as though his crimes should be blamed on somebody else. The dying Stalin is obsessed with what he sees as the lethal significance of trivia (the basketball result, his guard's night shoes). Blakely makes it obvious that Stalin is as deeply afraid and insecure as anyone around him: when not actually signing death warrants he humiliates, crushes any surviving decency and self-respect that people around him have left. The old murderer enjoys doing it, but it's also the only way he knows to survive, physically and emotionally. David Kelly as Sergo gives a haunting performance as a man rehabilitated from 13 years in a labor camp, only to be condemned to something worse - a comfortable life in which the faith that sustained him before has now been destroyed by its own object. Suchet is brilliant as the rapist Beria, whining and cringing to The Boss and slimily, murderously self-assured towards everybody else. A clever touch is the use of British and Irish regional accents to reflect variations in regional accents of the USSR. The Georgians are all Irish and Stalin himself is very audibly from the north of that country. Molotov (Nigel Stock) is Welsh, Mikoyan (Freddie Earlle) apparently a native of Glasgow, Kruschev (Brian Glover) from the north of England. No student of the psychology of despotism should miss this film. (The march on which the films opens, incidentally, is 'Let's Go' by V. Soloviev-Sedoi, lyrics by M. Dudin Singer, originally written for the 1954/5 Soviet film 'Maxim Perepelitsa').

One of the big mysteries of film history is why Jack Gold's 'Red Monarch' has as good as disappeared: It is hard to find, does not come on the telly, and has, as of today (23/12/23), garnered no more than three reviews on IMDb. All this is a mystery because the film is absolutely brilliant. It shows Stalin's (Colin Blakely) private life in about 1950-53, and it does so largely accurately. You may gasp at what you see, but it all happened more or less like the film shows it. Stalin's paranoia, sadistic humour and skill as a manipulator are well attested, as is Beria's (David Suchet) role as serial rapist who forced his underlings to supply him with pretty young athletes. Check Sebag-Montefiore's 'Court of the Red Czar' - he has the details and the references to original sources. For all that, 'Red Monarch' is not a documentary; it is a comedy steeped in sarcastic, dark humour, which is arguably the only approach to the horrors of Stalinism that does not put your sanity at risk. The only reason why I am not rating the film higher than 8 stars is its episodic structure. While the same figures appear across all the short vignettes that make up the movie, there is no narrative arc. In that respect, 'The Inner Circle' (1991) is better. But only in that respect.

In this interesting British movie the inner circle of Stalin is depicted as a kind of absolute monarchs court. Very realistic rendering of an atmosphere of autocracy, distrust and terror.

Abuse of power is rampant. Beria exercises a "jus primae noctis" with all the young ballerinas of the prestigious opera houses. But also the mighty may fall, when the Wise Leader starts to distrust them.

Some keep their faith in the bolshevist creed until the very end. In front of the firing squad a stalwart bolshevist of the first hour exclaims: "Even in the best democracy errors are being made!"