NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA
(directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, 1971)
***+ (out of 5)
.
> Geez, Russian history can be a downer.
. I enjoyed this long, detailed historical epic about the downfall of Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia, but the closer it got to the final carnage, the more bummed out I was. I knew how fate wrote their story. That does not mean I was eager to see their demise come about. The czar got what was coming to him suppose, considering the endless sufferings he perpetuated on the peasant population. But did his ailing son, German wife and four daughters have to share his brutal fate? The new “people’s regime” must have been eager to sever all ties with its Imperial past, by eliminating every single trace of royal Romanoff blood. It was easier to just butcher ‘em all.
. Penned by the fine wordsmith James Goldman, the script wades into the weeds of history a bit, introducing familiar characters like Stalin and Lenin and Trotsky, and most interestingly, Rasputin- but never loses its bearings. The royal couple are played by Michael Jayston, who seems to grow into the role, and Royal Shakespearian Janet Suzman, who is quite good throughout. The secondary cast includes luminaries like Laurence Oliver, Brian Cox, Ian Holm, Michael Redgrave, and an actor named John McEnery who impressed me so in Franco Zeffirelli’s ROMEO AND JULIET, as a perfectly tempered Mercutio.
. This movie burned through a bunch of directors before settling on Franklin J. Schaffner (THE BEST MAN, PLANET OF THE APES, and PATTON), who handles what could have been an unwieldy mess with restrained finesse. But Schaffner is brutal with us at the climax. He places us directly in the royal family’s shoes, staring at the closed door awaiting their ultimate fate for the longest time. They can only intuit what’s coming. We know. And that wait is excruciating! Time fairly stops- the only sound the increasingly loud ticking of the grandfather clock, marking their final seconds on earth. When history finally bursts through those doors… that’s all she wrote, baby. The film ends as suddenly as the family’s lives did, with bloody bullet holes in the wall. Yikes!
. The way Jayston presents the change that comes over Nicolas between his arrest and his assassination, the pitiable softening the man experiences when he realizes that the choices he’s made have doomed his family, are almost enough to make you forget Nicolas was a ruthless, imperious dictator who wielded power through intimidation and violence- like all the tsars that came before him.
. Most interestingly, in this time of a hot war in Ukraine, it’s fascinating the window this film casts on the Russian way of war. After watching it, I feel as though I understand Putin slightly better. He is acting like all the tsars that came before him, only under a different title. No wonder he’s throwing men into battle bare-fisted, like human meat: that’s all his citizens are to Putin: human meat: peasants, the grist with which he hopes to grind down the world into the shape he imagines it should be. Yevgeny Prigozhin is his Rasputin. And it will end the same way for Putin that it ended for Nicolas and Alexandra and all the despots that came before in the bloody tapestry of Russian history:
– With bloody bullet holes in the wall, or its equivalent.
*
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