Word: maniacs
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Kanin's hero (Tony Curtis) is a young sax maniac from Milwaukee who has come to Manhattan to blow the town down-he stands for Innocence. The heroine (Debbie Reynolds) is a hoofer who expected to wrap show business around her pretty little figure, but after two years of tryouts is still suckering sailors in a dime-a-dance hall-she stands for Experience. And the villain of the piece is the great big city, a sort of cold-water Sodom populated by pimps, prostitutes, land pirates, tourist trappers, gay young switchblades, softheaded bartenders and hard-nosed landlords...
...which Ivan's purge of the boyars presents an obvious parallel to Stalin's purge of the party-that the spectator can only wonder how the director managed to escape with a mere reprimand. As Cherkassov plays him, Ivan-Stalin is a full-blown paranoiac and power maniac, and his hysterical protest that his crimes have been committed "not for myself, but for the motherland'' has the ring and the glare of madness...