Ivan Groznyy [Ivan Groznyy: Part I] (1944)

(Criterion Streaming, December 2022) Uuuugh. Trying to complete a list of best foreign movies of the cold war era often lands us behind the iron curtain, where some seriously dull films were unexplainably hailed and praised by the Western critical establishment. Seen from a twenty-first century perspective, there’s got to be something we don’t understand anymore about that praise—often an attempt to stick it to Red Ivan, sometimes an attempt at détente, sometimes… I don’t know, maybe an honestly good movie. Too bad I’ll never have the patience to find out for myself, because Ivan Groznyy, a few days after viewing, has settled in my mind in an interminable series of tableaux surrounding the coronation of Ivan IV, an endless series of conversations between people with funny hats. Am I being near-sacrilegious? Well, yes: The reverence with which this film is regarded remains considerable. This is the first part of writer-director Sergei Eisenstein’s last movie, after all, and it regularly pops up on extended best-movies-of-all-time lists. But there’s a gulf between its importance and its watchability and I fall right in it.