Carry On Up the Kremlin

Rating: 8/10 (22 October 2017)

I have a nodding acquaintance with the era and personalities depicted, so quickly became aware that liberties were being taken. Stalin was found comatose in his pyjamas several hours after fears were initially roused by his failure to ring for his morning tea. In this account his housekeeper just marches in with the tray to find him on the floor still in uniform having suffered a stroke the night before laughing at a poison pen letter. It also took him much longer to actually die - stretched out for three days on his sofa - than conveyed in this telling. Even those actually present were probably too fuelled by adrenalin to afterwards accurately recall exactly just what did happen.
Just as films depicting the last days of Hitler never accurately depict the shrunken, shuffling wreck that the Führer was by April 1945, so Adrian Mcloughlin's cockney Stalin is far more vigorous than the white-haired 74 year-old in failing health that Stalin actually was in his final months. Steve Buscemi's Khrushchev seems pretty accurate, although I found Buscemi's growing resemblance to Gomez Addams rather distracting (my personal favourite screen Khrushchev was the late Brian Glover, who played him twice on TV during the early '80s). Michael Palin - bless him - I couldn't believe for a moment as Molotov; but Simon Russell Beale is something else entirely as Beria, and it is he who dominates the film. Perhaps because I'm less familiar with the physical appearances of the originals, I found the cameos by Paul Whitehouse as Mikoyan, Paul Chahidi as Bulganin and Dermot Crowley as Kaganovich satisfying; while Sylvestre Le Touzel and Diana Quick make interesting and understated appearances as the wives of Khrushchev and Molotov. The funniest of the cast is easily Jason Isaacs covered in medals as a macho, north-country Marshal Zhukov.
Armando Iannucci has plainly had a lavish budget to play with, and being prone to motion sickness I found myself overwhelmed both by the plushness of the production as well as Zac Nicholson's Steadicam photography, which made the gargantuan Stalinist epic 'The Fall of Berlin' (1949) seem by comparison a model of understatement and restraint.