In a Moscow hospital bed, Russia's Dionysian cinema genius Sergei Eisenstein rolled and roared with joy. The cause of his delight was the medical opinion that he was dead. He had died, according to doctors, during his celebration of the completion of Part II of his three-part chef-d'oeuvre, Ivan the Terrible. Dancing with a young girl had been too much for his heart and he had collapsed.
"I am dead right now," he told the New York Times's Brooks Atkinson, chuckling. "The doctors say that according to all the rules I cannot possibly be alive. . . . Now I can do anything I like. I am going to have a good time." His good time: reading American books and magazines—the New Yorker, the Satevepost, the late William Ellery Sedgwick's Herman Melville, Maxwell Anderson's verse plays (which he said ought to be called "worse" plays).
Meanwhile, in Paris, the swank Normandie Theater on the Champs Elysées was the scene of the biggest cinematic hullabaloo since the opening there of Hollywood's Air Force. The occasion: the first night of Ivan, Part I. Outside, would-be spectators created mob scenes comparable to those in Eisenstein's Ten Days That Shook the World. Inside, however, the audience was sharply divided. Parisian sophisticates, perhaps not yet grown up to Eisenstein's post-sophisticated refurbishing of primordial cinema devices, booed and stomped and hissed at the all but Shakespearean intensity of the great static closeups, the poetic registrations of emotion, the grandiose, dancelike gestures of the players, broad as bad opera—or Michelangelo. When Ivan's enemies mugged fear, Frenchmen cheerfully shouted: "Cowards!" When the sound track jammed as Ivan received a chess set from Queen Elizabeth, someone in the balcony yelped: "Speech!" In the long scene where Ivan almost dies, the theater rustled with smothered laughter and one strident voice speared up from the dark: "Alors, mon vieux, kick the bucket and we'll all go home."
But most of the critics raved. Cried Combat: "Eisenstein has found again his incomparable style." The conservative Paris-Matin found "a power and color that not even American films have ever given us." Even Figaro, which panned the film for "extravagance, exaggerated looks and declamatory gestures," recognized "Eisenstein's accomplished art." The Socialist weekly Gavroche went all out: "This film crushes with its monumental mass everything that French screens have known since the beginning of the war."
Such boos and bravos were old stuff to Eisenstein, who has taken plenty of both. When the latest wave lapped at his hospital sheets, his most urgent "deathbed" concern was: "I would like to get a copy of Harvey quickly. Couldn't someone fly it over at once?"