Franklin J Schaffner (1971)
Today’s British royal family is sufficiently popular to star in a film and make it a smash hit. To their admirers, they combine inoffensiveness and uniqueness. Our media constantly drool over them, even though the royals are an untalented bunch. At the same time, the press and television like to emphasise – through occasional, affectionately unflattering images and reports of minor misdemeanours – that the family, deep down, are just ordinary people like you and me. Maybe foreigners are curious about them because they’re so opulently anodyne: a collection of unprepossessing individuals often doing bizarre and antiquated things in nutty costumes. To Britons, the royals are, it seems, both brilliant and reassuring. Monarchists maintain that a royal head of state brings glamour into people’s dull lives and prevents too much power falling into politicians’ hands.
The makers of Nicholas and Alexandra seem to think that we’re all not only wild about modern royalty but also in awe of blue bloods throughout the centuries. But we don’t respect Henry VIII as a king or even as part of our nebulous royal ‘heritage’: we enjoy him, according to our shallow understanding of history[1], as a flamboyantly entertaining monster – just as we think of Richard the Lionheart as a brave, romantic leader of men and conqueror of dastardly aliens. Mention of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his wife Alexandra brings to mind haemophilia and Rasputin but we probably don’t know anything about them as individuals, other than what eventually happened to them. Although they’re related to the British royals of the time, Nicholas and Alexandra are shadowy, distant figures.
Sam Spiegel has made his reputation as the producer of ‘thoughtful’ epics like Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia but he and Franklin J Schaffner, best known for Patton, fail badly with Nicholas and Alexandra. The eponymous pair were appallingly misplaced persons – a devoted couple whose self-involvement helped trigger the Russian Revolution. Although they’re not conventionally entertaining Hollywood figures of history, the idea of weak, introverted Nicholas inadvertently catalysing the events that led to his overthrow has dramatic potential. The considerable irony of the situation isn’t developed at all, however – even though the Tsar’s lack of charisma and the Tsarina’s selfish credulity in thinking Rasputin a miracle-worker would seem to give Spiegel, Schaffner and the screenwriter James Goldman (The Lion in Winter) a head start. Nicholas and Alexandra, based on a successful biography by Robert K Massie[2], is so timorous it looks like the work of sycophants in the Imperial Russian court. The picture seems to expect us to root for the last Romanovs to the exclusion of any interest in what are presented as background events to their lives – the First World War, say, or the Russian Revolution. These tiresome disturbances simply get in the way of Nicholas and Alexandra’s happy marriage. It could be argued that the film tries to be fair to everyone but since Nicholas and Alexandra have much more screen time than anyone else, it’s disproportionately fair to them.
An expensive production like this guarantees glamorous sets and costumes. The handsome leads, Michael Jayston and Janet Suzman, wear the clothes well. Their casting is otherwise hard to explain: was the use of unknowns – to American audiences, at any rate – meant somehow to assert the ‘integrity’ of the project? It’s hardly the fault of Jayston and Suzman that they struggle to rise above the prevailing dull reverence of the narrative – and exasperating that, in combination with their intelligently unshowy playing, the actors get to seem as dull as their characters. You’ll know better if you saw, for example, Jayston as Siegfried Sassoon in Mad Jack (a BBC Wednesday Play) or Janet Suzman as Joan of Arc (in the BBC Play of the Month production of Shaw’s Saint Joan). Tom Baker is rather a tame Rasputin. Michael Bryant’s Lenin is a misguided but well-meaning fellow with a quiet, loyal wife (a remarkably miscast Vivian Pickles)[3]. Richard Rodney Bennett’s enjoyable score sometimes lifts the energy level of this desperately sober, very long film.
[1975]
[1] Afternote: I was speaking for myself!
[2] Afternote: I would now say ‘deservedly successful’.
[3] Afternote: The script features the ‘Hello, Trotsky – I’m Stalin. Have you met Lenin?’ line that’s since become a classic example of clunky historical biography dialogue. This may not be verbatim but it’s not far off.