How Rasputin led to the use of a staple Hollywood feature
In the darkest corner of history’s deep caverns sits a monolithic figure who remains one of the past’s most alluring characters. The Russian mystic and holy man Grigori Rasputin walked the perilous tightrope of morality during the last years of the Russian Empire, having become friends with Nicholas II, the country’s last Emperor.
The Siberian-born peasant eventually worked his way into a significant position of influence in the Russian court through his supposed closeness with God, but remarkably, politics and religion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were not the only realms that Rasputin was to exert an influence over, because eventually, he would become part of cinema’s history too, with a notable Hollywood staple because created because of the historical figure.
Most films end with the disclaimer, “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental”. The passage is so banal that it’s barely even worth glossing over, but the truth is that it’s only present in the first place because of the notoriously hard-to-murder mystic of Russia, Rasputin.
In 1932, MGM produced the pre-code biopic Rasputin and the Empress, directed by Richard Boleslawski and written by Charles MacArthur, starring John Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore and Lionel Barrymore, making the film the only one that all three siblings starred in together. However, an exiled Russian prince sued the studio after claiming that the movie did not accurately depict Rasputin’s murder.
Prince Felix Yusupov would probably know how Rasputin’s end really happened, too, as it was he who killed him, giving the mystic cyanide-laced cakes and then shooting him anyway, just in case. Yusupov was exiled from Russia, and by the time the MGM film came out, he was living in Paris in poverty. The former prince heard about the film and thought it defamatory against his own person (portrayed in the movie as Rasputin’s killer, Prince Paul Chegodieff), but having already admitted to the real-life murder in a memoir, could not mount a legal case against the studio.
Instead, Yusupov decided to claim that Rasputin and the Empress was defamatory of his wife, Irina. As Yusupov became Chegodieff, Irina seemed to be linked to the latter’s wife, Natasha, whom Rasputin rapes in the film. This is where the problem for MGM arose because while Yusupov had indeed met Rasputin, the mystic had never come into contact with Irina, but by suggesting her similarity to Natasha, Yusupov suddenly had grounds for a libel case.
Irina eventually submitted the suit, and a jury awarded her around $125,000. MGM also had to remove the rape scene and take the film entirely out of circulation for many years. The biggest result, though, was that pretty much every movie following began to include a disclaimer explaining that all characters and events were based on fiction, even when they included historical figures. The rest is history, as they say, but that facet of the past all came from a big Russian mystic and nearly un-murderable holy man.