The imagination can become a horrible thing indeed when it is given as much scope and freedom as Von Sternberg apparently enjoyed while making his version of the Catharine the Great legend ["The Scarlet Empress"]. Or perhaps one had better say that when, as happens every so often. Hollywood decides to make a mistake, it is able, because of the vastness of its resources of every kind, to make a truly colossal mistake…. Josef Von Sternberg now shows us just what can be hatched when an overcharged imagination is set loose upon an eighteenth-century Muscovite background. One had always recognized that the Russia to which Catharine came as a bright and ambitious young bride must have been far from a pleasant and civilized sort of place. But in "The Scarlet Empress" one is transported to such a nightmarish realm as never existed outside the less plausible tales of...