The Assassination of Trotsky

Joseph Losey's film The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) opens with photographs of Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein) from early childhood until 1932, when be was a "wandering exile." His wandering finally landed him in Mexico in 1937. Just as he was beginning to feel a sense of security (or the closest he could be expected to get to it) agents of Stalin, his great adversary, began to stir up resistance to his presence in Mexico. Communists outside Russia were divided along strict lines either in support of Stalin or against him, Stalinists vs. Trotskyists. As long as Trotsky was alive, his supporters felt, there was still hope for the revolution in Russia that he masterminded. For his enemies, only his death would complete the summation of the revolution in the person of Joseph Stalin.

Before the opening credits, a title appears: "Wherever facts are proven we have attempted to present them accurately. Those unproven we have left open." Which makes one wonder which facts, the proven or unproven kind, one is witnessing. They might as well have shown us a title that said THIS IS A MOVIE.

And before the opening credits are over, the voice of Richard Burton delivers what one assumes is a supertext: "In revolution there is no compulsion except that of circumstances. A revolution takes place only when there is no other way out." It is May Day, 1940 in Mexico City. In the parade that day, according to Isaac Deutscher's monumental three-volume biography of Trotsky, "20,000 uniformed communists marched through Mexico City with the slogan 'Out with Trotsky' on their banners." We have already met the characters Jacson and Sylvia Ageloff (Alain Delon and Romy Schneider), alone in a room. We see them moments later in the street as the parade passes by, Ageloff shouting "Viva Trotsky!" and Jacson conspicuously trying to look inconspicuous.

Isaac Deutscher writes of Trotsky's old friends, Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, who had come to stay at his home in Coyoacan, Mexico in October 1939. But among these "welcome guests, the Rosmers, an ominous shadow was to creep in, the shadow of Ramón Mercader--'Jacson'. This was the 'friend' of Sylvia Agelof, the American Trotskyist who had attended the foundation conference of the Fourth International at the Rosmers' home ... 'Jacson' posed, plausibly enough, as a non-politically minded businessman, sportsman, and bon viveur; it was supposedly as an agent of an oil company that he went to Mexico City at the time when the Rosmers arrived there. He kept himself in the background, however, and for many months sought no access to the fortified house at the Avenida Viena [Trotsky's home]. But he was getting ready for his dreadful assignment."(1)

Jacson was an agent of Stalin's NKVD. A Spaniard recruited during the Spanish Civil War by Soviet agents, he acquired the stolen passport of a Canadian named Frank Jackson (misspelled 'Jacson' on the passport by the Russians) who had died fighting in the International Brigade in Spain. With it he travelled to the U.S. where he befriended Sylvia Ageloff, a New York radical and Trotsky sympathiser. He then moved to Mexico City and asked Ageloff to join him there. Their relationship in the film is exclusively erotic. In the film, he ingratiates himself with one of Trotsky's bodyguards. He expresses to Ageloff his desire to meet Trotsky, but she wonders what they could possibly have in common. 

Mercader was not just another loser like Lee Harvey Oswald whose life suddenly found a meaning and purpose in the murder of a world figure. In fact, Mercader was everything Oswald wanted to be. Sentenced to 20 years in a Mexican prison for killing Trotsky, his mother Caridad, also involved in the assassination plot, was awarded the Order of Lenin by Stalin. Upon his release from prison in 1960, Mercader travelled from Mexico City to the fledgling socialist state of Cuba, and from thence to the USSR, where he was given a hero's welcome and personally awarded Hero of the Soviet Union by the head of the KGB. He is buried in Moscow.

Losey follows the historical narrative closely, but he leaves little room for his characters to express themselves in anything other than historical terms. Trotsky himself, as performed by Richard Burton, speaks in slogans. Perhaps Trotsky was like that - a walking, talking professor of revolution. It's impossible not to see him as a political prisoner everywhere he goes. Everyone around him is either a Trotskyist or a more or less clandestine agent of Stalin. It's difficult to quite understand the degree to which Stalin's agents were everywhere. Trotsky's physical courage, once he realized what he was up against, had to be astonishing. At one point, Natalya (he calls her Natasha in the film) speaks Trotsky's epigram about Judas: "Of Christ's twelve Apostles Judas alone proved to be traitor. But if he had acquired power, he would have represented the other eleven Apostles as traitors."

As a dramatization of historical events that are more or less ironed out by the time the film was made, 30 years later, The Assassination of Trotsky acquits itself rather well. It even muddies some of the details that the Mexican authorities fudged in their investigation so that conclusions that might be drawn by the viewer become a trifle perilous. The facts remain clear today, nearly 50 years after the film was made. Leon Trotsky, the brains behind the 1917 Bolzhevik Revolution, came into direct opposition to Joseph Stalin upon the death of Lenin. Even with Trotsky out of Russia for good, Stalin knew that the great polemicist of revolution would remain a threat to his hold on communists abroad. After he had completed his biography of Lenin, Trotsky was at work on a biography of Stalin when the assassin struck.

If all this seems painfully academic by now, The Assassination of Trotsky does nothing to make us care about any of the principal figures in the story, except perhaps Natalya, Trotsky's extremely long-suffering wife, gracefully if thanklessly played by Valentina Cortese. Richard Burton is charismatic as always but wasted in a role that never seems to breathe on his own, unassisted by the historical bulwark. Alain Delon is wasted, too, in the part of the silent assassin, who occupies himself looking for an opportunity to strike. It was five years since Delon played the far different, inhumanly cool hired killer, Jef Costello, in Melville's Le Samouraï. Romy Schneider does her best in the role of a neurotic American socialite-turned-revolutionary. The sound recording is a godawful mess, with much post-dubbing due to all the heavy (mostly French) accents, and even a few strange voice-overs that would seem to be Trotsky's and Jacson's thoughts. When Jacson finally attacks him, Trotsky's scream is terrifying. But within seconds, as he Jacson being beaten nearly to death by Trotsky's bodyguards, it is hard to distinguish his screams from Trotsky's. (Perhaps that was Losey's point, but it's hard to tell.)  

Nicholas Mosley wrote the non-fiction book on which the film was ostensibly based and he wrote the screenplay. He had also written the novel Accident that Losey had turned into a creditable film in 1966 (with a script by Harold Pinter). Mosley, who died just last year, was, of course, the son of Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists and one of the most reviled Britons of the 20th century. How intriguing that his son was drawn to telling the story of one of history's greatest revolutionaries. Joseph Losey's involvement in the project made better sense. In 1946, Losey had joined the Communist Party. He didn't know it at the time, but he and his wife, the actress Elizabeth Hawes, were already under FBI investigation. In fact, the FBI suspected that Losey had become an agent of Joseph Stalin in 1945! Eventually, Losey was brought to the attention of the dreaded House of Un-American Activities Committee and was blacklisted. He went to Europe to work in films, first under an assumed name, since some actors didn't want their names associated with a named communist. He managed to emerge from intentional obscurity with the superior sci-fi The Damned (1960), but it was The Servant (1963), also scripted by Harold Pinter, that brought Losey international attention.

Shot on location in Mexico (by the excellent Pasqualino De Santis), with period production design by Richard Macdonald, and a brooding, mostly electronic musical score by Egisto Macchi, the film seems to keep itself aloof from events that it is helpless to prevent. There is not even a sense of the terrible waste of it all, even when the film itself is a waste. The insertion of a horrifically botched bullfight (followed by the butchering of the bull) is gratuitous rather than symbolic. The torero failed to kill the bull outright with his sword - get it? Just as Jacson failed to kill Trotsky outright with the ice axe. The moment he delivers the blow, Jacson closes his eyes - only to see an enraged Trotsky getting up to fight him when he opens them.

How did the makers of this film (including its producer) think audiences would respond to the careful reconstruction of events surrounding the death of one of the principal architects of the Russian Revolution? Trotskyism did not die, as Stalin perhaps hoped, with Trotsky. Trotsky emphatically believed, as did many socialists, that the end of the war would bring about the last great cycle of the revolution. The story of Trotsky's murder has a tragic dimension that the film doesn't even hint at. Some critics have commented on the total lack of suspense in what could be mistaken for a suspense thriller. But the way the film is laid out deliberately mitigates whatever suspense or thrills it might have had. Because it's history, we already know everything. Why should we care for anyone in the drama? The film fails to give us an answer because it doesn't convince us that Trotsky was anything more than the loser in a power struggle involving millions of people we never knew. Jacson is presented to us as nothing but a sinister creep whose sole function in life was to carry out Trotsky's execution. Whatever built-in pathos the killing of the old Bolzhevik may have for people who still give a damn for the socialist cause (and I am one of them) is completely missing.

The film doesn't tell us that Trotsky was cremated and his ashes buried beneath a white stone within the compound of his house in Coyoacan and that his wife lived there another twenty years, according to Isaac Deutscher, "and every morning, as she rose, her eyes turned to the white stone in the courtyard."

With the exception of Mr. Klein, I was never all that impressed by Losey's work. To his enduring credit, however, he told an interviewer in 1983 that being forced to give up a career in Hollywood had saved him: "Without it I would have three Cadillacs, two swimming pools and millions of dollars, and I'd be dead. It was terrifying, it was disgusting, but you can get trapped by money and complacency. A good shaking up never did anyone any harm."


(1) Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940 (London: Verso, 2003).