Ivan the Terrible Part II: The Revolt of the Boyars (1946, Sergei Eisenstein) (Patreon)

60/100

First part started out strong and gradually got bogged down in palace intrigue; sequel picks up the tedium where it left off (even throwing in an extended childhood flashback), then goes batshit insane roughly halfway through. I genuinely don't understand what happened, as Eisenstein doesn't seem like the kind of filmmaker who'd suddenly turn to Prokofiev and say "You know what we need here, Sergei? She should sing a musical number about a beaver. Any chance you could whip up something along those lines?" Even prior to that rupture (from which the film thankfully never "recovers"), there are hints of a mythmaking instinct struggling to emerge, e.g. Ivan actually announcing "I will become...terrible" and then shooting what's practically the Belushi eyebrow raise right to the camera lens. It's as if Eisenstein shot in sequence and something inside him just snapped after a while: "Miracle-play insults from angelic-looking children! What the hell, let's switch to garish color! EVERYBODY DANCE NOW!!" Granted, he still technically serves up Stalin's commissioned propaganda, but it's hard to take Ivan's boasts about unifying Russia seriously when you've just watched him foil an assassination plot via the goofiest method imaginable (as Stalin indeed apparently recognized). As usual, I can't pretend not to have been kinda bored for 45 minutes, so a mixed reaction overall; had this been released as a single three-hour film, though, I'd likely have been even more frustrated with what would then be a 90-minute stretch of melodramatic lethargy smack in the middle. Pretty hard to imagine where the never-completed third part could have gone from here, aesthetically if not narratively. 

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: Having previously opted to omit Part I and just go with Ivan the Terrible, which is how the first film was originally released in New York City, I checked to see what this one was then called—see image below. Also, while it wasn't publicly screened until 1958, my rule is to ignore any delay longer than 10 years (so as to avoid the patent absurdity of a newly discovered silent movie being dated 2021 or whatever, merely because that's the first time it was seen by an audience). Part II was reportedly completed in 1946, so that's where I'm filing it in my logs. See also Amazing Grace, The Other Side of the Wind, etc.