Review of The Assassination of Trotsky

Joseph Losey's films are usually depressive, but this one is more so than usual. The script is terrible, but it could hardly have been made much better, as the story is sordid enough: the exiled Trotsky confined to what he himself calls a submarine existence in a restricted house constantly subjected to assassination attempts, as Stalin insists on having his former colleague assassinated even though he is already exiled. The Trotsky case is compared with a horrible bullfight where the bull is slowly tortured to death by the cruel proceedings of ritual matador bloodthirst. Trotsky lives alone with his wife, his children having been assassinated previously or sent to Siberia. Enter Alain Delon married to Romy Schneider, who quarrels all the time as Alain Delon is hopelessly incommunicative, obsessed with the one idea, as it turns out, to murder Trotsky. It's a slow and dull film in which the most interesting ingredient probably is the fantastic murals by Orozco, which are shown every now and then to illustrate the grotesque Mexican setting around the ailing Trotsky, who expects to die of some stroke any time anyway, at the age of 60. The film is historically interesting, of course, and Richard Burton is always worth seeing, but it's not one of Losey's best films.