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GILDED INERTIA Robert K. Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra is history wrapped in romanticism and hemophilia. The latter one of the crucial factors in the Tsar’s inability to control events conspiring to set in motion Russia’s bloody revolution; his son’s disease eclipsed warnings of populist rebellion, exacerbated by his fervent, intrusive, demanding wife who, though loving him and her children completely, further entrapped the family via her own myopia and fatal dependence on mystic bastard Rasputin. Massie’s chronicle often reads like a sympathetic novel—he’s the father of a hemophiliac: We get so caught up in Nicholas’s travails we’re virtually begging him and the author to wake up and do something. Massie rescues his objectivity when portraying Nicholas as a weakling with scant intellectual prowess, a failure at governance and military undertakings—most embarrassing the humiliation of being defeated by Japan—and for much too long apathetic about the growing plight of ordinary Russians. Curiously, having presented these facts and the Tsar’s strident claim espoused defiantly at his coronation that it’s his God-given right to rule as heir to the three hundred year reign of the House of Romanov, and his virulent anti-Semitism and his eager despotic dispatches to crush civil discord, Massie will return to the sympathy card as the Tsar is by and by shown as loving husband and father about whom, including his daughters and the bleeder (who nevertheless will sneak in a bed-ridden reproach in the movie), we hesitate to see harmed. Avoidance of such for Tsarina is highly noticeable. Franklin Schaffner’s three hour condensation, with the exception of the ending, reverses the thick book’s various sentiments: we watch and think, as we flinch at the climax, “They deserve their fate, guilty of arrogance, sponginess, bungling, willful isolation and callosity.” Stodgy, lethargic, inept as spectacle, the movie wants to be a loyalist’s Doctor Zhivago—telling us the “other side” of the story. Even has the inevitable award-winning David Lean look, albeit unbreathably gilded, accessorized and draped. All poses, uniforms and manicured beard, Michael Jayston resembles Nicholas and sounds like Hal the Computer; hopelessly regretting her timebomb as irreversible cause for the son’s condition, Janet Suzman’s Alix is recurrent regal hardness suggesting a before-Glenn-Close-arrived version of Close; Tom Baker’s Rasputin foreshadows the 90s comic book movie villains without the laughs, taking four shots and multiple slams from a heavy duty chain to kill him. The royal daughters behave in expected obedience save for Tatiana who opens wide her nightgown to give a brute guard a substantial eyefill, after which she laments not getting fullfilled. The distinguished extras include Laurence Olivier, Irene Worth, Harry Andrews, Curt Jürgens, Michael Redgrave, Jack Hawkins, Alexander Knox, John Wood, Ian Holm, Guy Rolfe, Eric Porter, Vivian Pickles, Brian Cox, Diana Quick and John McEnery. Produced by Sam Spiegel; screenplay by James Goldman; cinematography by Freddie Young; music by Richard Rodney Bennett; Oscar-winning production designed by John Box, also serving as second unit director; Oscar-winning costumes by Yvonne Blake and Antonio Castillo. In Panavision, with 70mm blowup. (Opening 2/2/1972 at the Palace, running 16 weeks.) Oscar nominations for best picture, actress, cinematography, musical score. 
Text COPYRIGHT © 2001 (Revised 9/2026) RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |
too much fake
Regarding the fate of the
royals, Massie had been convinced long before DNA tests on
the discovered remains that all of the immediate family
had been killed together and their remains scattered. Nicholas and Alexandra and three daughters were found in 1979 but not exhumed for testing until 1991, and tsarevich Alexei and the fourth sister found in 2007. The Russian government officially confirmed their identities in 2018. The 2019 Netflix six-part docudrama The Last Czars borrows heavily from the templates of drama set by Massie’s book and the movie, as well as inserting the sham about Anastasia as sole survivor, with a determined sense of accuracy. The hybrid of actors acting along side historians repeating facts, fact-based opinion and showing real photos and newsreels isn’t exclusively a Netflix province, but this time the elements satisfactorily mesh, an improvement over Netflix’s Roman Empire series, which sometimes looks like a casting agent’s wet dream of beefcakes trying to sneak off to the baths between slaughters. 
