After he came back from South America,Pierre Chenal's career became unfocused as ever;not that his movies were bad;"Jeux Dangereux"(1958) and "La Bete A l'Affut"(1959) are entertaining thrillers ;and "L'Assassin Connait La Musique"(1963) is a funnier comedy ,at least to my eyes ,than his "Clochemerle" .Between his two films Noirs and his slapstick farce he made another version of Raspoutine ;it was not the first time he had filmed a "Russian" story :"Crime Et Châtiment" (1935) owed a good deal to his cast:Harry Baur and Pierre Blanchar.
Here the cast cannot save a desultory script :for instance war scenes come at the most awkward moment and these scenes seem to belong to another movie (it's WW1 honestly )-stock footage?-;rather satisfying in its first part,the plot becomes incoherent when everybody including the head of the police wants to get rid of the mad(?) monk.Many historical mistakes do not help: the murderer's wife (princess Irina)did not know very well the monk,she probably never spent an evening with him;the empress did not know anything about the murder and she did not suspect the Iusupov -who were part of the Imperial family- and of course she did not phone them on that fateful night.People interested in the story of the murder should try and see Robert Hossein 's "J'Ai Tué Raspoutine"(1967) which was based on the assassin's own memories.
As for the cast ,the actors are not well chosen;Edmund Purdom portrays a passable Raspoutine (but inferior to Harry Baur (1937),Gert Froebe (1967) and mainly Pierre Brasseur (1953));Purdom was a specialist of the costume drama ,in America ("the Egyptian" "the prodigal son" etc) and in Europa (dozens of sword and sandals).Gianna Maria Canale's good looks and her Femme Fatale side do not make her a believable empress ;as for the emperor ,he does not look at all like Nicolas the Second (there are plenty of photographs of the monarch ,some of which have been published in a big album).John Drew Barrymore as Iusupov does not display any screen presence.
