Ceaușescu's Last Action Hero

Sergiu Nicolaescu

Sergiu Nicolaescu died yesterday at 82. Here, I pay tribute to one of my first movie stars and heroes, who enjoyed massive popularity in Iran.

In June 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the seemingly never-ending 1979 revolution, died at 86. Among the few Western politicians who bothered to travel to Tehran to pay homage to the deceased Ayatollah, in his recently built and quickly expanding tomb (or more likely, shrine), was a short man wearing a tie. Seeing a European statesman—even from the eastern side of the continent—was a rare sight in those days. The country had just signed a treaty with Iraq after eight years of exhaustive war and was totally isolated. All Western countries were backing Saddam Hussein.

Being a curious child, I asked my father who that man was. My father, probably thinking that the concept of a Romanian president might be too abstract for me, answered: “He is the president of Inspector Moldovan’s country.” The answer was solid enough for someone whose movie hero happened to be from Romania: director, actor, and producer Sergiu Nicolaescu.

As it turned out, Nicolaescu proved to be a better politician than his Romanian and Iranian counterparts. The now infamous Nicolae Ceaușescu, on 18 December 1989, departed Romania for that visit to Iran, leaving the duty of crushing protesters in his country to his subordinates and his wife. Two days later, upon his return, he found the situation out of control. The revolution that soon swept through many Eastern European countries toppled him as well. He was hurriedly—and rather cruelly—tried and executed just a week after I had seen him alive and well on Iranian TV. Ceaușescu’s executioners seemed as inhuman as the man himself. Brutality breeds brutality, and the husband and wife were killed like cattle. An immense miscalculation for a man who had been giving one of the longest and most predictable mise-en-scènes to the countless hours of footage documenting his “effort for the autonomy of Romania.”

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu

On the other end were the baffled Iranian politicians who had invited him. A heated debate began about the dubious lack of information within the Iranian government regarding the situation in Romania. “How can you invite a president who is going to be executed a week after a state visit?” That was the question some parliament members asked the Iranian prime minister. The hue and cry ended with the sacking of one of the usual suspects—the Iranian ambassador to Romania.

But for me, and my limited sources of heroism and bravery in cinema, nothing had changed. Growing up watching East German westerns, Bulgarian war films, and Soviet spy TV series, Nicolaescu was the closest thing to that cinema of style and excitement I had only heard about from my father and others regarding the haven of filmgoers—the pre-revolution Iran.

The Sergiu Nicolaescu I knew was a popular action hero of the Americanized Romanian popular cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. What brought him to fame in Iran was the thirteen-year-delayed screening of his first appearance as Comisarul Moldovan [Inspector Moldovan] in A Police Inspector Accuses (1974, directed by himself, as with most of his films). The story, set in the 1940s, follows Moldovan as he investigates murders committed in a Bucharest prison by fascists in dark leather jackets. It is based on true events, but its history—like Sergio Leone’s—is more a scheme for reviving certain styles, attitudes, and moods that are closer to fashion than history. Unlike Leone, and as is clear to me now, Nicolaescu barely went beyond the fashionable westernized setup. For him, history remained a vehicle for gunfights and revenge stories. Clichés from American films stuff the plot: the funny, faithful deputy; the final shootout in the suburban landscape with a nod to Bonnie and Clyde; a Don Ellis–type jazzy score; a nighttime conflict on the pier; and a noticeable absence of female characters that reminds me of The French Connection.

Gangster genre revived as anti-fascist cop story

A Police Inspector Accuses ends in a dramatic climax behind a church, where Moldovan is evidently shot and killed by rows of fascist gunmen—in a kind of daft slow motion you never see these days: long, heroic, and choreographed. It took Moldovan four years to resurrect in Revenge (all the dates given on IMDb are incorrect), which was more violent and more precise in achieving its goals. The final installment, Duel, came with electro-disco music and a Maurice Binder–style title sequence in which Moldovan’s silhouette shoots in all directions. Still, no women appear—not even in silhouette. This one had another role model: Jimmy Cagney and the Dead End Kids. So the inspector becomes a friend of marginal people. To avoid costly sets, most of the film takes place in war ruins, which is fitting, and the images of Orthodox saints complement Moldovan’s gangster-in-reverse saga beautifully.

Apparently, there is a fourth reincarnation of Moldovan from 2008, which I haven’t seen.

In the second half of the 1980s, the trilogy did very well in Iran—first in theaters and later on TV. Sergiu Nicolaescu was a substitute for the banned American films and stars such as Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, and Jack Nicholson. He even resembled George Segal (via Robert Stack) and tried to be as hip as his American models. Nicolaescu was filling the empty stage of stardom in a starless country. I doubt he ever knew it himself.

So when, for instance, the Huffington Post referred to him as a “director and politician” and added, “Nicolaescu was also an actor, and had several leading roles during his career,” considering that sufficient to explain a cultural phenomenon, one begins to understand why comprehension of other forms of popular culture—those in opposition to Hollywood—has remained so limited and impractical.

* * *

Sergiu Nicolaescu was born in 1930 in Târgu Jiu, Romania. He discovered cinema when he was eight, and his passion for film often took him to movie theaters—sometimes to see the same film more than twice.

In 1948, his father was arrested and imprisoned for his political beliefs. The theme of prison and justice is repeated in the Moldovan series, which is charged with a fictitious urge toward Romanian history.

After graduating from university, Nicolaescu became a mechanical engineer. One of his classmates, who was working in the film industry, encouraged him to take a chance and pursue his passion for cinema. Thanks to his engineering knowledge, he became a camera operator, and in 1962 he made his first short film, Scoicile nu au vorbit niciodată [Shells Have Never Spoken], which was a success in Romania and France. This seven-minute symbolic short led to his first feature—a Franco-Romanian co-production, Dacii (1967, in France: Les Guerriers)—which made him famous. The film was celebrated at the Moscow Film Festival, and as a result, he began his most ambitious project, the Romanian epic Michael the Brave (1971), which runs nearly 200 minutes. Later, Columbia showed interest in the film, bought it for international release, cut it in half, and released it as The Last Crusade. It was another popular film on Iranian TV.

The battle sequences in Michael the Brave were amazingly well made, and one cannot ignore the fact that in 1968 he was technically adept enough to co-direct a film with Robert Siodmak (and with the eternal technical supporter of big-time directors, Andrew Marton). The film, a European all-star epic made in two parts, The Last Roman, starred Laurence Harvey, Orson Welles, Sylva Koscina, and Harriet Andersson—and relied more on Koscina’s sexual aura than on its sets or battles (there is also a memorable scene with Honor Blackman in a bathtub).

Nicolaescu, who appeared in most of his own films, made his last in 2012: The Last Corrupt in Romania, a sequel to his penultimate film, Poker. He loved sequels.

Excluding his long flirtation with politics as a member of Parliament—which lasted from Ceaușescu’s fall to 2010—he pursued his American vision of popular cinema in Romania and occasionally abroad for half a century. There was even a rumor that he wanted to make a war movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the project never materialized.

His Moldovan films coincided with the years of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s dictatorship in Romania. Both men were politicians and “image-makers.” Which of them was the better metteur en scène is difficult to say—especially after The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (Andrei Ujică, 2010), which boldly assembles three hours from hundreds of hours of footage shot during Ceaușescu’s long reign. Nicolaescu’s cinema can be read as an attempt—similar to Ceaușescu’s—to give a false sense of progression by using the already tested formulas of populist mass entertainment (as in Fascist Italy or popular Nazi cinema), which pretend to use history as their source while, in reality, being least concerned with it.

“After all, a dictator is simply an artist who is able to fully put into practice his egotism,” says Andrei Ujică, the director of The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu. “It is a mere question of aesthetic level whether he turns out to be Baudelaire or Bolintineanu, Louis XVI or Nicolae Ceaușescu.” To that polarized aesthetic, one can add Nicolaescu’s in opposition to Ceauşescu’s. Yet the question always remains: weren’t they playing the same game by employing the camera (and in Ceaușescu’s case, all kinds of media) to create a deceptive image of grandeur? I strongly doubt that Nicolaescu was unaware of the outcome of that approach. I doubt he was a mere entertainer. I even doubt that the notion of a “mere entertainer” can exist at all.


Footnote:

* Nicolaescu was elected to the Romanian Senate in 1992 as a member of the Romanian Social Democratic Party.