TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

generationofswine It could have been better. So why the 10? Stalin is sort of human. People like him, like Hitler, like so many other embodiments of evil are exceedingly easy to dehumanize, to make them a devil and not a man.Stalin does a pretty decent job of showing the blindingly evil side of the man and still giving him a human feel. It makes him accessible.So why could it have been better? Stalin was a revolutionary. He was active from the start and played a major role on the Bolshevik side. He was the Soviet premier and he forced a backwards nation to industrialize in a single generation and that is a global record in itself. He fought WWII and crippled the Nazi war machine at the battle of Kursk.The movie should have been an epic. There is a much greater story to tell there. Instead it is tourniqueted. It is cut short and anyone with even a simple enough grasp of Stalin to vaguely know who he is gets the feeling that they are missing out.They made Che, years later, into two epic films. A life as important--and evil--of Stalin deserved more than a made-for-TV movie despite the quality.

bayardhiler When it comes to mass murderers, they don't get much bigger or worse than the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Ruling the Soviet Union from the mid-1920's to 1953, his reign was one of death and terror on a scale of such heights that it would give Adolf Hitler a run for his money as to who was worse. And yet surprisingly there are very few films (at least in the Western world) made about this man or his reign of terror. One of the few films from the west about him is the HBO produced docudrama "Stalin". Made not long after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992, it pretty accurately chronicles Stalin, from his rise in the Bolshevik party to the height of his monolithic power at the end of World War II. Playing Stalin is Robert Duvall. Now I admit, at first glance that sounds like one of the worst casting decisions ever. However, believe me when I tell you that not only does Duvall look and sound like Stalin through the use of good makeup and an accent, he BECOMES Stalin. In fact, the more the movie went on, the less and less I saw him as Duvall and the more and more I saw him as the real Stalin. It's a real testament to Duvall's ability as an actor, especially considering that Duvall is about as far away from an ethnic Georgian as you can get (Stalin was from the former Soviet Georgia). I would even go as far to say that Duvall's portrayal of Stalin is perhaps the closest we have as to who the real Stalin was, a paranoid mass murderer who was just as much at ease condemning his former close comrades to death as he was starving the Russian peasants in order to pay for the industrialization of the Soviet Union. Of course, Duvall's performance is the not the only good one here; the epic drama boasts an amazing supporting cast in the form of the late, great Maximilian Schell as Lenin, Julia Ormond as Stalin's suffering wife Nadya, Joan Plowright as Nadya's mother Olga, Roshan Seth as the treacherous Beria, and many more that I don't have the space for. In addition, the sets for the Kremlin are breath taking and for good reason: It's the real thing! The film crew was granted unprecedented freedom to the Kremlin buildings after the fall of Soviet Union, as well as the dacha just outside Moscow that Stalin stayed at the most. All of this gives the film a very realistic look that might not have been possible otherwise. Some people have expressed disappointment that the film did not pay as much attention to Stalin's atrocities as maybe it could have and it is indeed true that we barely get a brief look at World War II from Stalin's viewpoint, the war that propelled him to his greatest heights of power. However one has to keep in mind that there's only so much you can put in a film, especially when it's a film about Stalin. Furthermore, I would argue that we do get a look at Stalin's crimes, albeit a subtle one, be it the scene where Nadya witnesses people being herded into cattle cars while passing through a train station or the general talk of people disappearing left and right throughout the film. It's also important to keep in mind that the film is meant to be about the man Stalin and the effect he had on those closest to him and on this, the film largely succeeds. The movie is also thankfully widely available on you tube and DVD as well, which makes viewing it very easy. In short, "Stalin" is a film that one should watch, not only because of the importance of history but as a warning to future generations of what can happen when people collectively give up freedoms, checks and balances, their faith in God and what's right, and instead put all their hope in one man with absolute power over life and death. For in the words of Lord Acton, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." These words indeed describe Stalin to a tee. So watch, learn, and never forget the lessons of the monster that was Joseph Stalin.

maestro-45 With Stalin HBO outdoes itself and it can be attributed entirely to Robert Duvall -which is not to say that the rest of the cast is not top notch, it is. Historically Stalin is one of the greatest monsters that ever walked the earth. Duvall manages to catch this ghastly aspect of the man but still makes the Soviet tyrant irresistible. No doubt about it those old Soviets who took over Russia after the czar were a ruthless bunch and among that murderous crowd Stalin rose to the top of the heap by out doing every one in the terror stakes. Given what was going on in the world Stalin may have been the right leader for Russia -- rule that mess of nationalities with an iron hand. This is not to excuse his terror, but to recognize that that country was largely ungovernable except by force. Since the fall of communism about 20 years ago, Russians have told pollsters that they have nostalgia for Stalin's good old days. Maybe not for his drop of a hat terror, but because he got things done. Robert Duvall captures this and make the character likable while he goes on his merry murdering way. Especially in his interaction toward the end, the last scene he has with his grown up grand daughter. It is some of the best acting ever put on film and a must see!!

jumbaxter To appreciate this film you might read any one of the best accounts of Stalin's dictatorship by Roy Medvedev, Dmitri Volkogonov, Edvard Radzinsky, Simon Sebag Montefiore, or Donald Rayfield. If you know these books you'll find little reason to argue with how this film portrays 'The Boss'. Other reviewers on this site have noted how well Robert Duvall captures Stalin's surly, crude, cunning, sadistic, paranoid personality. They're right. He's marvellous in the role. One reviewer has questioned whether Voroshilov would have dared to shout at Stalin, as he does in this film, at the start of the war. This is a fair point as Stalin picked his men carefully for their inability to stand up to him or take initiative. However, Donald Rayfield cites an example of the normally slavish Voroshilov doing something very like what is portrayed in the film, shouting at Stalin as war with the Nazis was looming for murdering most of the Red Army high command and so crippling the defences of the USSR. He was one of the few men to do anything of the kind and survive StalinThe film is shot at the scenes of the crimes - the Kremlin at Stalin's Kuntsevo dacha - and is sumptuous watching as a result. Watch out for Satlin's huge, waddling shadow on the ceiling as he climbs a great staircase, an incubus about to settle on the Soviet People. It might be a standard trick but it doesn't look contrived. Rather less convincing are the portrayals of Stalin's wife and some of his associates. This is the fault of the script or the direction or both, not the actors. For example, Stalin's second wife Nadya was not quite the principled heroine seen here who apparently took her own life because she saw no other escape from the evil that her husband was bringing to the country. The real Nadya brought some of her own problems to her marriage and these contributed to her death. Bukharin, wretched in his final weeks, may have been the best of them but that was saying little. He was not quite the noble, tragic 'swan' portrayed. He was prone to hysterics - about his own problems primarily - the suffering millions could suffer as long as he was approved of. During his final imprisonment, Bukharin wrote to Stalin offering to do anything, put his name to anything, if only Stalin would be his 'friend' again. Stalin takes all the heat and deserves plenty but many of the rest seem like innocents, fooled by him, finding out too late that they were caught up in his evil and corrupted or destroyed by it. But Stalin, like Hitler and any other dictator, was only possible because those around him saw advantage for themselves in supporting him. If there's a problem with this film it's that it lets some of Stalin's minions off the hook. It settles for extremes - Stalin and his chiefs of secret police on the one hand, and the good or loyal but naive on the other. But the only innocents were the people of the former Soviet Union, those far from power whose lives were destroyed according to the requirements of a command economy - so many deaths and so many slaves were required from every walk of life, like so many tons of iron, to meet quotas. (They are acknowledged in the film's dedication). Those around Stalin, however, were all up to their elbows in blood just as he was, obsessed with their own positions, Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Kamanev included. This is perhaps something to bear in mind in watching a generally excellent and historically accurate film. If you're interested in the psychology of Stalin and his henchmen try Jack Gold's 'Red Monarch' (1983) with Colin Blakely as Stalin. The history comes second to the general impression in that film but it's worth the sacrifice. Duvall as Stalin is marvellous in a deadly serious way, but Blakely is bloody marvellous in a deadly funny way. Red Monarch also spares the audience English peppered with 'Da' to remind you that these people are really speaking Russian, and faked Eastern-European accents.