Rasputin: The Mad Monk
                                                                         
Director: Don Sharp
Year: 1966
Rating: 6.0
In this case, they changed the names to protect the guilty. This may seem a rather fanciful rendering of the life of Grigori Rasputin, but his real life was so fantastic that it is almost impossible to exaggerate it. Mystic, hypnotist, curer, sexual predator, mind reader and a mad man. That was the real Rasputin or at least how he was perceived in his lifetime. Born as a peasant in Siberia he managed through his magnetism to become the confidant of the Empress Alexandra of Russia in the early 20th century. His ability to save her son from his disease of hemophilia, the disease of the Royal families throughout Europe thanks to Queen Victoria.  How much of his healing abilities were legitimate or faked is a question never answered but this film plays it down the middle. He is a master manipulator of people but his abilities are real.



Rasputin is portrayed by Christopher Lee towering above everyone around him and a force of nature. His eyes dominate the film. Hypnotizing people. Terrifying people. Comforting people. Lee is pretty great here. From out of the wilds of Russia he comes to St. Petersburg - no attempt to create a facsimile of the city - no budget for that - and gets into a drinking contest with Boris (Richard Pasco). After winning he gets up and does a Russian jig - meanwhile a party of four aristocrats has come in to slum for the night and inadvertently laugh among themselves. Rasputin takes at as an insult directed at him and gives Sonia the stare. "You will come to apologize to me" he intones. Sonia is played by the lovely Barbara Shelley, a Hammer star. She does the next day - shows up at his shanty abode - and in a startling scene drops her clothes to engage in sex. All I could think is how badly he must have smelled.



She is an attendant to the Empress and with the use of hypnotism he manages to use her to get close to the Empress to heal her son. He becomes an influencer, a fad with all the nobility going to him for cures. But as in real life, he is angering many of the people who have been pushed out. They conspire to assassinate him. This is where they changed the name to protect the guilty comes in. When the film was made the murderer of Rasputin was still alive and in fact had written a book about the killing of Rasputin. In his book, he describes luring Rasputin to a house and first poisoning him with drink and food. Thinking he is dead, he leaves and comes back the following day only to have Rasputin jump him. He then shoots Rasputin in the head and dumps his body off of a bridge to the freezing water below. That telling was very much disputed by his autopsy and the film leaves out the shooting and the dumping. The character that Sonia plays was based on Anna Vyrubova, who from photos looked nothing like Shelley. In a curious note, Rasputin had a daughter who got out of Russia after the Revolution and became of all things a lion tamer in a circus in France and lived till 1977. 



This feels like a strange choice for Hammer at this point. A bio-pic though admittedly one of a legendary mad man. There have been many films about him. But it's not really horror nor drama nor exploitation. Rasputin had a reputation as a seducer but other than the Shelley instance, no others are shown and that one was mild. A few more extreme scenes were filmed and then cut due to concerns of offending people. Director Don Sharp left during the editing process and apparently didn't like the final result though he said he thought it was the best thing Lee has ever done. The film was released as part of a double feature with The Reptile.