This is my first time combining two films into a single Reaction. I don’t like doing it, but here it feels necessary. Even the Wikipedia article combines it into a single page. This is the final film of Battleship Potemkin director and (based on all the pictures I’ve found of him) David Lynch character Sergei Eisenstein. While the two parts were filmed before 1942 and 1946, part 1 was released in 1944 and part 2 wasn’t released until 1958. Thanks Stalin. And I’m not being flippant. Apparently he didn’t care for where the second film was going and refused to release it.
The two parts do feel pretty distinct though. Part 1 feels a lot like a Hollywood movie of the time. The photography and score are very polished. I’m not used to European films feeling this much like they could’ve been produced by MGM. Part 2 looks much newer. I had no trouble believing the film really had been made in the 1950s when I watched it. I didn’t realize it was made a decade earlier until afterwards. It has scenes in color and the photography looked a lot cleaner. There are story elements like the different songs which felt like they were responding to a different trend than when the first part was made.
Definitely throw Ivan the Terrible into my “I’m glad to have watched it” pile. I didn’t get much out of watching it at the time, but it will be a useful one to have as a reference point now. It’s an ok movie. I want to see more of Eisenstein. He’s the only point of context I have for this era of this region’s filmmaking. The performances in the film, Nikolay Cherkasov as Ivan, in particular, are very big, like Eisenstein hadn’t quite worked out the transition from silent to sound in film. But they are at least distinctive.
Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend
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