His acting sucks and his accent especially sucks!
This guy is terrible in every role I've ever seen him in except for the Godfather. All he does is play himself! Except this time he's hiding behind a giant moustache and using a ridiculous Russian accent.
I hope he retires soon. This movie would have been okay without him.
"This guy is terrible in every role I've ever seen him in except for the Godfather."
Have you seen "To Kill A Mockingbird?" Very good movie, and Duvall does an amazing job.
I didn't see this movie, so can't comment, but I don't agree that Robert Duvall's acting stinks. I like him is all the roles I've seen him in, MASH, Tender Mercies, Lonesome Dove, Open Range.
I hated three of those (or at least his role in them) and I haven't ever seen the movie M.A.S.H.
shareRobert Duvall is a great actor, he may stink or seem as an awful actor because of his coice of some roles like this one, where he doesnt even seem capable of moving his mouth or giving any facial expressions because of the giant moustache and tons of makeup on his face, If you saw him in Tender Mercies or The Godfather you will understand how great he can be.
shareI don't get it? Who's a good actor then? I have yet to see Duvall act bad.
This film can be pretty boring, but that doesn't have much to do with Duvall - he did his part.
Anyone that says that Duvall is a bad actor has no idea about films and acting.I'm not an expert,but i think Duvall is objectivelly one of the greatest actors of all time.I've seen most of the films he's played.Sometimes the choices he made were bad,or the roles weren't good enough for his name,but he always manages to make an impact just with his presence.In this particular film however,i think he was miscasted.Even though he gave a good performance,i think he was miscasted and i don't mean just his accent.I don't care about accents.Sometimes,actors make great foreign accents,but that's the only thing they do right.They don't captivate their character's feelings and they focus on how to make a perfect foreign accent.If we want to see reality in all this projects,then maybe Duvall should speak Russian,or Sean Connery too in "Red October",or maybe Americans shouldn't make films about things that happen outside U.S!!!Come on now.This is ridiculous!
sharerobert duvalls the greatest give me any actor today that can match him
shareDuvall is an outstanding actor IMHO -and most other peoples' opinions
shareI've never seen him play anything other than "Robert Duvall" or "Robert Duvall with a cowboy hat" or "Robert Duvall with a Russian accent".
shareDo you have anything good to say about anything....what a negative personality!!!
shareSorry I just call them as I see them and he is always just the same guy in everything I have seen him in, with a slight accent change here or there. I liked a movie he did where he was a preacher and The Godfather but that was it.
shareWhat kind of drugs are you smoking? Duvall is an excellent actor with lots of range. His Stalin is great, and I've never seen him act badly in any movies that I've seen.
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Robert Duvall is one of the best. His performance in LONESOME DOVE is breathtaking, and it justfiably his personal favorite. The OP didn't know what he's talking about, and hopefully has learned the error of his ways in the 2 years since.
shareRobert Duvall is obviously one of the greatest actors of film history and we don't need/care to read from an unknown negative personality that his acting is bad.
His work speaks and will speak forever...
Unless you've had a chance to know Stalin personally it's quite hard to have an accurate guess on how well Duval plays the character. Yet, I do believe he does a pretty close impersonation of the "historical Stalin" as we have more or less been taught by the general account of what he did and how he rose and stayed in power. On the make up department I'd say that after seen a few assorted guys playing JFK or a couple of awful resemblances of others playing Hitler, I go for all the make up it takes to watch any character looking as close as the way they did before death. As for the accent, well, unless you shoot the movie in russian with a georgian intonation you have to settle for something else. I hate picky people denigrating actors who have prove themselves beyond their lines of duty.
shareI think Duvall is a great actor, don't get me wrong. I loved him in To Kill a Mcokingbird and other things. But I've been watching Stalin and man...his performance really isn't good in it. And his accent really doesn't sound Russian. I think his performance as Stalin is one of his weaker performances.
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I can't believe I'm spending time replying to this troll. Duvall is as good an actor as a man can be. Sure, his nose is weird here, the accent funny . . . all forgiven, as far as I'm concerned. He conveys perfectly the menace and paranoia of Joseph Stalin's personality.
The only things I find hard to take are the 4:3 AR and the dancing scenes which go on far too long.
So you admit his accent sucks and his nose is "weird" but you still say the guy you're replying to is a troll for saying he's not good in this? He's not good in this by your own admission! Good would mean conveying whatever you're talking about but also getting the basic accent correct!
shareI consider Duvall to be the yank Olivier. That said, I can see where someone would consider one performance of his, weaker than others, but to say he's a bad actor? I cannot comprehend. I'd like to ask the OP what yank actor she'd consider better. Hackman, Hoffman & Jack are in the running.
Something YOU said, tho, Vic, calls to mind a pet peeve. Duvall's Russian accent shouldn't be an issue. The characters were speaking Russian (or dialects) to each other---right? If the actor is speaking English with a Russian accent---there's already no accuracy. Right?
In WW2 films, when 2 German soldiers talk to each other, they usually speak English, with German accents? Why bother with the accents? If they're speaking English to English-speaking soldiers, of course, they're going to have a German accent, but not to each other. They'd speak German.
In the 30s, in 'Beau Geste', Gary Cooper, Robert Preston & Ray Milland played the English Geste brothers. Cooper & Preston were yanks. Milland was a brit. Each spoke with his native accent.
In Casablanca, French police captain, Louis Renault, was played by brit Claude Rains--w/out a trace of a French accent, and we've never questioned it.
In Dracula (1979), all the characters were brits, except Dracula & Van Helsing. All the actors had brit accents, except Olivier, as Van Helsing, who had a dutch accent & Langella, as Dracula, who had a yank accent.
So, if the title character can't be bothered to do an accent---why should anyone else?
I think we're extremely inconsistent ( unrealistic, really ) in our expectations, concerning accents.
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We all have our opinions on films and actors, yet I really don't understand how one could say Robert Duvall sucked in this film. I always thought he played the part great, and I always loved his acting in other films. Unfortunetely I haven't seen that many other actors portrayal of Stalin, but from what I've seen, Duvall was the best. Also, showed this movie to my former Russian History professor, and his opinion of Duvall was excellent. He felt Duvall really knew how to act like Stalin, at least from the knowledge he had on Stalin. There are things I didn't liek about the film, especially as I read more books on Stalin and those who carried out his orders and the party members he killed, but all and all I thought the film was great, and Duvall was great.
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If there was anything "ridiculous" about him, it was the parts of Stalin himself that he brought to life. And yet, he managed to infuse even him with a dose of humanity.