Ivan the Terrible (film)

What is the story?

In 1547 the 17-year-old grand prince of Moscow is crowned the first tsar of all Russia. He vows to strike the enemies outside the country and those inside, the boyars. His aunt Yefrosinya Staritskaya wants her son Vladimir on the throne. A mob led by Malyuta Skuratov breaks into the wedding feast; Kazan declares war, and Ivan takes it by digging saps and filling them with gunpowder. On the way back he falls deathly ill, the boyars refuse to swear to his infant son, and his friend Prince Kurbsky hedges and is sent west.

Yefrosinya slips a goblet of poisoned wine into their chamber. When word comes that Kurbsky has gone over to the Livonians, Anastasia is shocked, and Ivan hands her the wine, unknowingly killing her. He wonders if this is God's punishment, then takes Basmanov's advice and forms the oprichniki from men he can trust. In 1564 he leaves Moscow and returns when hundreds of common people come to him. That is the end of Part I.

In Part II, The Boyars' Plot, Ivan divides the land and sets up the oprichnina. His old friend Kolychov becomes Metropolitan Philip with the right to intercede for the condemned, but Malyuta kills his kinsmen first. As a mystery play goes on in the cathedral, Philip confronts Ivan; a child asks whether this is the "terrible heathen king", and Ivan declares he will be what they call him. The boyars choose the novice Pyotr Volynets to kill him. At a banquet the drunken Vladimir gives away the plot, and Ivan dresses him in royal robes and bows to him. This feast and dance and Ivan's final speech are the only colour in the film. Afterwards Vladimir walks into the cathedral in the tsar's clothes and is stabbed. Yefrosinya sees her son's body and goes mad, and Ivan says that with the enemies within gone he can turn to those outside.

Why did Stalin want Ivan?

Russian historians had generally portrayed Ivan badly, but Stalin thought him a "great and wise" ruler and wanted to rehabilitate him as the founder of the modern Russian state. The commission came in January 1941, Andrei Zhdanov and Ivan Bolshakov chose Eisenstein, and Stalin personally approved the script. Eisenstein's previous film Alexander Nevsky (1938) belonged to the same line.

With war under way, shooting began in Alma-Ata only in April 1943. Bolshakov pressed him to let assistants shoot on days he was ill. Nikolai Cherkasov as Ivan had to hold extreme poses for long periods; Sergei Prokofiev wrote the score; Vsevolod Pudovkin played the holy fool Nikola. The colour scenes at the end of Part II were shot in Moscow on Agfacolor stock from Germany, after Eisenstein had been struck by the reds in a documentary on the Potsdam Conference.

Why was Part II banned?

Part I opened in January 1945 and won a first-class Stalin Prize. Part II, submitted in February 1946, was another matter. Ivan Pyryev called the oprichniki "16th-century fascists", and Alexander Dovzhenko reportedly said such a film "could serve as fantastic agitation against us". Stalin called it a "nightmare". It was banned on 5 March, and the Central Committee resolution of 4 September 1946 on the film A Great Life complained that the progressive oprichniki were shown as a gang like the Ku Klux Klan and strong-willed Ivan as something like Hamlet. It is one episode in the Zhdanovshchina.

Eisenstein did not back down. Recovering from a heart attack, he wrote to Stalin, and in February 1947 he and Cherkasov met Stalin, Molotov and Zhdanov at the Kremlin. A record of the talk survives. Stalin faulted the film for not showing the nationalist reasons behind Ivan's ruthlessness and allowed him to rework it, but Eisenstein did no more. He died of a heart attack on the night of 10-11 February 1948, aged fifty. Part III survives only as a few minutes of film, the script and drawings, along with Mikhail Romm's screen tests as Elizabeth I. In May 1958 historians agreed that Part II "could not discredit [Soviet] art", and it opened on 1 September.

Did it praise Stalin or indict him?

Answers divide. Mikhail Romm reported that the audience at the 1946 screening saw Stalin in Ivan, Beria in Malyuta and the NKVD in the oprichniki. According to one recollection, when asked why Ivan repents, Eisenstein answered: "Stalin has killed more people and he doesn't repent. Let him see this and perhaps he'll repent." The historian Joan Neuberger also argues that he did not mean to glorify Ivan, since he dwelt on the bloodiest years and left out the reforms.

There is another side. The critic Richard Taruskin wrote that the film "is dedicated to the proposition that abstract historical purposes justify bloody acts in the here and now", and Katerina Clark read it as an allegory raising Stalin as the unifier of the country. In Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich a character calls Eisenstein "an ass-kisser who followed orders like a dog". A Time reviewer stood between: he was less protesting the horror than trying to explain to himself the paradox that Stalin in 1943 had become Russia's saviour. No evidence settles the matter.

Artistic verdicts were split as well. Charlie Chaplin called Part I "the greatest historic film that has ever been made", Orson Welles dismissed it as an emasculated display of pretty pictures, and Pauline Kael found it lacking in humanity.

How far is it from history?

Eisenstein was not much concerned with accuracy. He replaced Ivan's allies Metropolitan Macarius and Sylvester with his opponents Philip and Pimen and invented the romance between Kurbsky and Anastasia. There is no evidence that Yefrosinya poisoned Anastasia. Vladimir is believed to have been forced to take poison and was not stabbed by Volynets; the holy fool Nikola is invented too. Viktor Shklovsky thought the scene of Vladimir dressed in royal robes came from the legend of the execution of the boyar Fyodorov.