Red Monarch
                                                                                          
Director: Jack Gold
Year: 1983
Rating: 6.0
This seems like a very odd subject for a TV movie back in 1983. I wonder what brought it on. It depicts the last few months of Stalin's life. As a comedy. As did the 2017 film, The Death of Stalin. I was actually hoping for a serious drama about those months and the men around him. They were all terrified of him and yet needed to be close to power. His purges were an ongoing series of executions - for any reason in the demented mind of the paranoid Stalin or his Chief of Security, Beria. There is probably a film out there that does it seriously. Stalin died of a heart attack in 1953, Beria some seven months later. By execution. The film contains elements of terror - the execution of a line of men each with a bullet to the back of the head - the sadistic tormenting of an old friend released from prison, but much of it is exaggerated for comic effect. Not so much funny as absurd and satirical.



Playing Stalin is Colin Blakely - a character actor and Dr. Watson in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes - and Beria is played by David Suchet, famous as Hercule Poirot. Both take their roles and run off the tracks with them. Stalin as a paranoid, secretive, psycho and Beria fawning over Stalin like a lost puppy and as an absolute horndog selecting women out of athletic events and forcing them to have sex with him. All the others from Molotov to Khrushchev are all yes men trying to keep their head where it is. One guard wears slippers his wife made for him so not to wake Stalin. He is of course shot. One time Stalin looks at the daily list of people to be executed by Beria and sees a name of a man who once saved his live. He dithers, should I rub his name out or not. Well, maybe he said something bad about me, so leaves him on. It is a strange subject for humor - black humor certainly - but Stalin killed over a million people in his purges. Not as clever or amusing as The Death of Stalin and too broad for its own good at times. Carroll Baker has a weird cameo as an American journalist who is a Communist sympathizer.