...something slant sends along this riveting article from the Daily Telegraph [registration req'd] about Stalin the cineaste. That's cineaste as in he had a theatre in every one of his houses and often made political decisions based on what he'd seen in a movie, in case you were wondering. These days he'd show up in InStyle or on "Cribs."
The cinetrix understands the powerful sway of the silver screen. That's pretty much how she ended up living in Chicago and New York at various times. And, well, ordering all those assassinations [character only, people].
The whole article is so delicious, the cinetrix can't help but excerpt enormous sections.
Stalin loved movies, but he was much more than a movie-buff. The new Communist Party archives in Moscow, and the recently opened personal papers of Stalin, reveal that he fancied himself a super-movie-producer/director/screenwriter as well as supreme censor, suggesting titles, ideas and stories, working on scripts and song lyrics, lecturing directors, coaching actors, ordering re-shoots and cuts and, finally, passing the movies for showing.[snip]
At a typical movie night with Stalin, when the showing was over, he would often ask: "Where have we seen that actor before?" He frequently asked actors who were playing him in films over for dinner: once he asked the best "Stalin", "How will you play Stalin?" "As the people see him," replied the clever actor. "The right answer," said Stalin, presenting him with a bottle of brandy.
[snip]
[L]ife and death was decided during the showings. When a projectionist broke his machine, spilling mercury, he was arrested and accused of trying to poison Stalin.
[snip]
Stalin inherited Goebbels's movie library after the war; he loved Chaplin and films such as In Old Chicago (1937) and It Happened One Night (1934). In the archives, I found a document requesting Tarzan the Ape Man (1932).
Westerns with Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable were also favourites. Stalin the solitary, pitiless and Messianic egocentric seemed to associate himself with the lone cowboy riding shotgun into town to deal our brutal justice. Hence, he liked director John Ford's work - and John Wayne.
Khrushchev recalled how Stalin would ideologically criticise cowboy movies - and then order more. But, in spite of his enjoyment of the films, one source claimed that Stalin once declared at the end of a showing that Wayne, a vociferous anti-Communist, was a threat to the cause and should be assassinated.
Whether Stalin was speaking drunkenly in the early hours, or whether he meant what he said, such was his power that, either way, the order was quite likely to be executed. Assassins were supposedly sent to LA but failed to kill Wayne before Stalin's death.
Ah, the Cold War. Impaired world leaders with itchy fingers hovering over the button. Life was so much simpler then.
