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.