Character Assassination

By J.C

THE ASSASSINATION OF TROTSKY Directed by JOSEPH LOSEY Screenplay by NICHOLAS MOSLEY

"Maybe it's the altitude," Romy Schneider suggests, none too helpfully, to Alain Delon, who plays the assassin Jacson. He has certainly known strange fits of passion since his arrival in Mexico City to murder Trotsky (Richard Burton). Suffering from a kind of ambulatory catatonia, Delon lurches about, subjecting his paramour Romy to his sexual vagaries and incoherent political outbursts. Romy, who plays a young friend of Trotsky's, grows testy at times, but endures nevertheless. She knows nothing of Jacson's murderous plans, yet senses, perhaps, that he is meant for important things.

Losey and Mosley take some pains to hew closely to the known facts of what the scenarist calls "one of the most documented murders in history." Jacson, for example, did have a girl friend who visited Trotsky and sometimes assisted him with secretarial work. Although the real Jacson never admitted to any motive for the murder, he is widely believed to have been a Stalinist agent. In the film, however, Losey makes a sonorous attempt to turn the murder into an oblique existential tract and the assassin into a schizoid avenging angel. Like characters in such previous and more estimable Losey films as The Servant and Accident, Jacson is a scarred and desperate man, searching a psychic void for some small sign of life. When he whispers to his police captor, hoarsely but triumphantly, "I killed Trotsky," it becomes not so much a confession as a self-confirmation.

At the time of his murder Trotsky was a grand old man of the revolution who lived inside his closely guarded compound dictating memos and manifestoes and reading newspapers and magazines for news of the world outside. (In one scene of the movie he good-naturedly marks up a copy of TIME with a red pencil.) Not only is the fire virtually gone from Burton's Trotsky, it is impossible to see how it could ever have been kindled.

The film is also maundering, as if taking its tone from Burton's characterization. To suggest the violence and turmoil of revolution, Losey relies on the murals of Rivera and Orozco, to which he dollies in at all too frequent intervals. Rather than heightening the sense of political turbulence, however, this deadens it, lending The Assassination of Trotsky the faintly instructional air of a classroom film strip. By contrast, the movie assassination is staged like a scene out of some Hammer horror epic. Trotsky roars and staggers about after Jacson has smashed his skull with an ice ax. Images of Rasputin, riddled by bullets and reeling from poison, are inevitable and surely inappropriate. qedJ.C.

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