Moscow Parade

A con artist masquerades as Russian nobility and attempts to seduce the wife of an American diplomat.

Russia, 1936: revolutionary hero Colonel Kotov is spending an idyllic summer in his dacha with his young wife and six-year-old daughter Nadia and other assorted family and friends. Things change dramatically with the unheralded arrival of Cousin Dmitri from Moscow, who charms the women and little Nadia with his games and pianistic bravura. But Kotov isn't fooled: this is the time of Stalin's repression, with telephone calls in the middle of the night spelling doom - and he knows that Dmitri isn't paying a social call...

Antonina Milyukova is a beautiful and bright young woman, born in the aristocracy of 19th century Russia. She could have anything she'd want, and yet her only obsession is to marry Pyotr Tchaikovsky, with whom she falls in love from the very moment she hears his music. The composer finally accepts this union, but after blaming her for his misfortunes and breakdowns, his attempts to get rid of his wife are brutal. Consumed by her feelings for him, Antonina decides to endure and do whatever it takes to stay with him. Humiliated, disgraced and discarded, she is slowly driven to madness.

Set during the early part of his reign, Ivan faces betrayal from the aristocracy and even his closest friends as he seeks to unite the Russian people. Sergei Eisenstein's final film, this is the first part of a three-part biopic of Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, which was never completed due to the producer's dissatisfaction with Eisenstein's attempts to use forbidden experimental filming techniques and excessive cost overruns. The second part was completed but not released for a decade after Eisenstein's death and a change of heart in the USSR government toward his work; the third part was only in its earliest stage of filming when shooting was stopped altogether.