The Assassination of Trotsky

103 minutesCountriesItaly
France
United KingdomLanguageEnglishBudget£1 million ($2.4 million)^[1]Box office561,109 admissions (France)^[2]

The Assassination of Trotsky is a 1972 British historical drama film directed by Joseph Losey with a screenplay by Nicholas Mosley. It stars Richard Burton, Romy Schneider and Alain Delon.^[3]

Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929, Leon Trotsky travels from Turkey to France to Norway, before arriving in Mexico in January 1937. The film begins in Mexico City in 1940, during a May Day celebration. Trotsky has not escaped the attention of the Soviet dictator of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, who sends out an assassin named Frank Jacson. The killer decides to infiltrate Trotsky's house by befriending one of the young communists in Trotsky's circle.

• Richard Burton as Leon Trotsky
• Alain Delon as Frank Jacson
• Romy Schneider as Gita Samuels
• Valentina Cortese as Natalia Sedova Trotsky
• Luigi Vannucchi as Ruiz
• Jean Desailly as Alfred Rosmer
• Simone Valère as Marguerite Rosmer
• Duilio Del Prete as Felipe
• Jack Betts as Lou (credited as Hunt Powers)
• Michael Forest as Jim
• Claudio Brook as Roberto
• Joshua Sinclair as Sam
• Giorgio Albertazzi as Commissioner

In 1965, Josef Shaftel optioned the novel The Great Prince Died by Bernard Wolfe. The film was a co-production between the French Valoria Company and Dino De Laurentiis. It was originally to be shot in England,^[4] but was eventually filmed in Rome. The movie used Isaac Don Levine's book The Mind of an Assassin as a source.^[5]

According to author Melvin Bragg, the director Joseph Losey was so drunk and tired that he relied on long monologues by Burton to carry the film, in some cases even forgetting what was in the script. Burton himself wrote that he, or the continuity girl, would have to remind Losey of things that would have caused continuity gaffes.^[6]

The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Disconcertingly, any summary of the bizarre circumstances of Trotsky's death – the old man, once a prime mover in great events, screened from the world behind walls and watch towers until his confrontation with his impenetrable executioner – reads like a parody of a Losey movie. It is even more unsettling to find that The Assassination of Trotsky goes some way towards heightening this sense of parody, at times approaching the hyper-refined allegory of Boom!, with an overcrowded texture thrusting its meanings on to the surface of the film. This erratic intensity is in part the inevitable result of the material, partly the result of a collaboration that has not achieved the harmony of Losey's work with Pinter. We are no longer in a milieu where the steady accumulation of physical and behavioural details reveals a world continuously rebuilt by its inhabitants on a dream of perfect self-sufficiency, and where the currents of disruption are felt only to be approaching in a heavy ground-swell. By comparison with The Go-Between, the characters in Trotsky seem to belong to no specific place or time: their relationships are founded on no shared code or natural necessity, but on the absurd chances of war and on blind collisions arising from their attempts to heave obsessions into actions that will move and change the world outside."^[7]

The Assassination of Trotsky was included as one of the choices in the book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.^[8]

• The Assassination of Trotsky at IMDb
• Original New York Times Review