The Girl in the Kremlin
Director:
Russell
Burdwell
Year: 1957
Rating: 5.0
Based on historical fact. I think. Maybe. You
never know. A great Cold War film. Because it is true. But first before we
get to the history part, we must discuss perhaps the most perverse opening
scene ever put on film. Four women are brought into a room by rough Soviet
guards. Stalin in his bushy moustache eyes them all with a fatherly calm.
Picks the little sparrow of a young woman and they sit her down. And then
for the next ten minutes they first cut her hair short and then shave it
all off as she stares upward looking for God in a godless country like a
Russian Joan of Arc. An amazing scene. Begonia before Begonia. And then the
character disappears from the film, never to be seen again. Was the point
that Stalin had a sexual kink to see women shaved and debased or is it the
director Russell Burdwell who does. Very weird. I kept waiting for her to
return.
Then the history kicks in. It is 1953 and
the police are coming to kill Stalin. Too late for millions of the dead.
To escape, he disguises another man as himself and kills him. And watches
his funeral. Along with Beria, a nurse (Zsa Zsa Gabor) and a few others,
he leaves the country after plastic surgery. He has plans to someday return.
Meanwhile, in Berlin a former OSS agent in his trench coat played by Lex
Barker has been hired by a woman to find her twin sister. Again Zsa Zsa.
Somehow between her nine husbands, she found the time to act. As twins. In
his investigation Barker discovers that Stalin is still alive and doing well
in Greece. This true history was a secret for years until revealed in the
Epstein files. This is not as bad as some seem to suggest. Enough strangeness
and propaganda to make it unique. Produced by Universal. I am just happy
that films like this once existed.
