The Assassination of Trotsky (Joseph Losey, 1972)

This film appeared in the Medveds' 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. Like many of the titles included therein, The Assassination of Trotsky isn't quite deserving. But it's a head scratcher for sure. The main problem is that there seems not to have been a script or perhaps it arrived on location in tatters. A screenwriter is listed (Nicholas Mosley, who later wrote a critical biography of his father, British Union of Fascists founder Sir Oswald Mosley). But much of the screenplay consists of Trotsky (a paycheck-mopping Richard Burton) dictating his memoirs which does little to push the narrative (or even any ideological project) forward. Slow, lazy pans document the exile's Mexico City compound lending the production a travelogue feel. Alain Delon is on board as Trotsky's assassin Frank Jacson, canoodling with Romy Schneider and reciting risible dialogue that one hopes was improvised or written moments before shooting. Losey et al. convey so little sense of Trotsky as a Great Man that one could claim the film instantiates a Communist aesthetic. But The Assassination of Trotsky is more a Swiss cheese wheel than a film, car-crash fascinating but not exactly a pleasurable or recommendable experience.

Grade: B-minus