Franklin J. Shaffner's

Nicholas and Alexandra

The film opens with the birth of the Tsarevich Alexei (Roderick Noble) in 1904. The Imperial family already has four daughters, the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia (Ania Marson, Lynne Frederick, Candace Gelendenning, and Fiona Fullerton). The disastrous Russo-Japanese War is raging in the Far East. Russia expected Japan to be easily defeated, but instead the Russian fleet would be destroyed at Tsushima, and U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt would receive the first Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Treaty of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which ended the war. The film shows the new Prime Minister, Count Sergei Witte (Sir Laurence Olivier) counseling Tsar Nicholas II (Michael Jayston) against continuing the war. In reality Witte supported the war as a mechanism to unify the nation behind the Tsar and his government. When the war turned out badly for Russia, Witte blamed his predecessor Vyachaslav von Plehve, who had actually opposed the war. Plehve's assassination enabled Witte to take office, and Witte hoped the war would make it easier for him to govern by distracting from Russia's growing economic and social difficulties.

The Imperial Physician, Dr. Bodkin (Timothy West) diagnoses the Tsarevich with hemophilia. Numerous male descendants of Queen Victoria inherited the disorder from her, and there was no treatment. Robert K. Massie researched the story and wrote his best-selling popular history because his own son had hemophilia.

Tsar Nicholas and the German-born Tsaritsa Alexandra (Janet Suzman) attend a birthday party for Nicholas' mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Federovna (Irene Worth), hosted by the Tsar's uncle, the Grand Duke Nickolas (Harry Andrews). Nickolaisha is the Tsar's most trusted advisor. He enjoyed the sport of wolf hunting, and today, all surviving borzoi dogs are descended from his. Nickolaisha introduces the imperial couple to the Siberian peasant Grigory Rasputin (Tom Baker, later to play Dr. Who). The Tsaritsa appeals to Rasputin to save the Tsarevich from his incurable disease, and she is convinced he can intercede with God to save her son. She experiences profound guilt over her son's illness, and imagines God is punishing her for converting from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy.

Father George Gapon (Julian Glover) leads a march on the Winter Palace. He was actually a government official, appointed by St. Petersburg authorities to help manage, pacify, and help coordinate the more mainstream labor unions. Soldiers panic and fire on the crowd, killing hundreds. The Tsar was not even in the Winter Palace, but the incident earned him the epithet "Bloody Nicholas." Otherwise moderate workers and peasants are increasingly driven toward more radical political movements. The socialist intellectual Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, known to history as Lenin (Michael Bryant), his devoted wife Madame Krupskaya (Vivian Pickles), and military strategist and organizer Leon Trotsky (Brian Cox), lead a radical group which splits from the Socialist Party. They are joined by an apparently idealistic Georgian, Joseph Stalin (James Hazeldine), forming the nucleus of the Bolshevik ("majority") party—Lenin designated the larger socialist party which opposed him, the Mensheviks ("minority.")

While vacationing at Livadia in the Crimea, the Tsar is visited by the Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin (Eric Porter), who informs him of Rasputin's scandalous behavior in St. Petersburg and plans to commemorate the 1913 tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty. The Tsar sends Rasputin back to his home village in Siberia, much to the Tsaritsa's displeasure. She is convinced that only Rasputin can keep Alexei alive.

As part of the tercentenary festivities, the imperial family attends Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Tsar Saltan at the Kiev Opera House. Stolypin, who has retired as prime minister, is shot after the second act. The wound should not have been fatal, but he died a few days later due to inept and overly aggressive medical treatment, much like President McKinley.

Alexei falls at Spala in Poland—the Russian Empire included the eastern half of Poland, as well as Finland and the Baltic states—precipitating an attack of uncontrollable internal bleeding. Press releases announcing the Tsarevich's death are prepared. The Tsar relents and calls back Rasputin, who sends a message of comfort, since he cannot get to Spala for many days.

Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated in Sarajevo. At the height of the ensuing diplomatic crisis, Nicholas orders a precautionary mobilization. Count Witte pleads against war, but the Tsar is deaf to his arguments. Although mobilizaion would eventually create an army of up to 15 million men, it took months to organize these new soldiers into military units, much less train them for combat or other operations. Guns were only available for about a quarter of the army, the rest providing their own purportedly lethal agricultural implements as a stopgap. Unarmed soldiers were supposed to take rifles and ammunition from the dead as they became available. Once Russian mobilization started, it could not be stopped, and World War I became inevitable. Germany declared war as soon as they got word, just as Witte predicted.

An intermission occurs at the start of World War I.

Grand Duke Nicholas commands the army in the field, but when the war goes badly from the start, the Tsar relieves him, leaving the Tsaritsa in St. Petersburg as regent. Alexandra is preoccupied with the Tsarevich's health and is easily manipulated by Rasputin. The Tsaritsa and the Grand Duchesses convert the palace at Tsarskoye Selo into a hospital for wounded soldiers and serve as nurses. The Dowager Empress Maria Federovna visits Nicholas at the front and begs him to send Rasputin away. The German-born Tsaritsa becomes increasingly unpopular—the people blame her for the poor conduct of the war, vilifying her as a traitor even as she tends to wounded soldiers. Two nobles, the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich (Richard Warwick) and Prince Felix Yusupov (Martin Potter) lure Rasputin to the Yusupov palace where they murdered him.

Starving workers revolt and Alexandra continues her misrule. The army is ill supplied and units start to mutiny. The Tsar attempts to rejoin his family in Tsarskoye Selo and rally the army around the government. Parliamentary factions led by Alexander Kerensky (John McEnery) arrest the government and the Tsar is forced to abdicate. We first saw Kerensky as a uniformed engineering student—virtually everyone in Russian society was a uniformed government official of some kind, including university students. Lenin was excluded from the civil service because his older brother had been executed for treason, and it became his life's ambition to overthrow the regime which denied him bourgeois security.

Because of Alexei's hemophilia, Nicholas also abdicates on behalf of the Tsarevich, dooming the monarchy. Nicholas returns to his family at Tsarskoye Selo, but Kerensky cannot find any foreign government willing to offer asylum. Kerensky sends the imperial family to Tobolsk in Siberia, as the Germans permit Lenin to return from exile in Switzerland. Together with Trotsky and Stalin, Lenin engineers a coup, overthrowing Kerensky's provisional government and founding the Soviet Union in October 1917.

Keeping his bargain with the Germans, Lenin takes Russia out of the war, but a civil war breaks out almost immediately. Commissar Yakovlev (Ian Holm) takes custody of the family, but is forced to turn them over to Yakov Yorovsky (Alan Webb) who presides over their fate in Yekaterinburg. The sailor Nagorny (John Hallam) is executed after protecting the Tsarevich from one of their guards.

Nicholas and Alexandra was filmed in Spain. The director Franklin J. Shaffner had just filmed the Academy Award winning Patton for 20th Century Fox, filmed in Dimension 150, an advanced form of Todd AO. Nicholas and Alexandra was photographed in Panavison. The music is by the English composer Michael Tilson Thomas. The film was critically acclaimed and has always been highly regarded, but it was a loss for Columbia on its initial release, because it was such an expensive production. The two lead stars were primarily stage performers.