The Assassination of Trotsky

This film has a reputation as a terrible film which I find greatly undeserved. It is average in the sense there are better films and there are worse. I found the film to be fairly static. The story is slow moving and the character of the assassin is never really delineated. Alain Delon is the true lead of the film, with Burton's Trotsky more a secondary character. I thought Burton did a fine job as Trotsky, the only think slightly bothering me is that Burton was physically imposing and that's not how I picture Trotsky. I picture him as more of a bookish intellectual of less than physically imposing attributes. (I do not know the actual physical attributes of Trotsky.)

In any case, Romy Schneider is very lovely and sexy and the camera also treats Delon well, even if we do not have any clear insight to his motivation. In the end, I'm not sure what the purpose of this film was and that is its greatest failure. But, while the film did not succeed, there is nothing memorably bad about it. So my rating falls plum in the middle.