The second part of Eisenstein's unfinished trilogy is mainly concerned with Ivan's return to the throne and his ruthless opposition to the schemes of the boyars to keep Russia divided among its princes and foreign interests. Stalin took a particular dislike to the portrayal of the Czar's secret police and the film was banned. Part Two contains a lovely flashback to Ivan's childhood; a meditation on the loneliness of the Czar; the marvelous set-piece setting up the usurper Vladimir for assassination; and a Brechtian operatic interlude that is Eisenstein's one and only experiment in the two-color process. Followed by Ivan the Terrible, Part III: Very rare indeed, the only surviving sequence (five minutes long) from Eisenstein's last, never completed film.