Tea at Trianon: ‘Two Prosecutors’ and a Call for Anti-Communist Filmmakers

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, December 15, 2025

‘Two Prosecutors’ and a Call for Anti-Communist Filmmakers

From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

Two Prosecutors is a devastatingly powerful movie about the deadly bureaucracy of the Soviet Union under Stalin. The film takes place in 1937, when a young attorney, Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), receives a letter from Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), a prisoner in Bryansk. The note is written in blood on a piece of cardboard and alleges that the Russian security services, the NKVD, are torturing and murdering older party veterans like him to replace them with young Stalin loyalists. (Though certainly less bloody, there are parallels here to the modern American left’s tendency since the advent of Barack Obama to toss out more mainstream Democratic Party operatives for hard-core progressives.)

When Kornyev attempts to figure out what is happening to Stepniak, the nightmare begins. In what one critic described accurately as “weaponized inertia,” Kornyev is forced to wait—and wait and wait and wait, as officials hope he will just go away. He doesn’t. There are long shots of grey rooms and corridors where nothing happens on screen except the waiting. The local governor tells Kornyev that Stepniak has a contagious disease, but Kornyev won’t back down. The governor finally allows his request, but with a warning: “Washing your hands with soap won’t save you from certain infections.” Stepniak, we discover, has welts and bruises all over his body, and his urine is red.

Appalled, Kornyev heads to Moscow to meet with Chief Prosecutor Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy). Kornyev gets nowhere, of course, as his situation becomes increasingly desperate and claustrophobic. Stalin’s Russia is rightly portrayed, as one critic noted, as “a malign bureaucracy which protects and replicates itself by infecting those who challenge it with a bacillus of guilt.” This is the dull, inescapable nightmare of Kafka, Orwell, and the academic and governmental star chambers of Britain and America in 2025. There is a growing sense of dread as the audience suspects that Kornyev is naïve and doesn’t fully understand the danger he is in. Stalin is liquidating anyone who might be a competitor. The actors, direction, script, and set design of Two Prosecutors are all first-rate. It’s the kind of film Americans don’t make anymore. (Read more.)