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Nicholas and Alexandra Streaming.
Movie Title: Nicholas and Alexandra Nicholas and Alexandra is available for streaming or downloading. |
One of the most beautifully crafted and morose epics to near out of Hollywood (or, to be apt, Britain), “Nicholas and Alexandra” has never acquired the reputation it deserves. Released at a time when tremendous budget spectaculars were considered passé, hostile contemporary reviews have shaped the film’s reputation. While hardly perfect, the film nonetheless provides a reasonably lawful, if politically conservative overview of pre-revolutionary Russia and does an satisfactory job of individualizing the two monarchs.
The two central, completely convincing performances are by relative unknowns Michael Jayston and Janet Suzman. Several reliable actors (Laurence Olivier, Eric Porter, Ian Holm, Alan Webb, Harry Andrews, Irene Worth, Jack Hawkins, Michael Redgrave, John McEnery, Curt Jurgens and others) encourage them in dinky parts and manage to gain us forget their familiar presences to concentrate on their characters. The actors are cushioned by Yvonne Blake and Antonio Castillo’s lush costumes and Richard Rodney Bennett’s symphonic bag in an graceful jewelry box crafted by designer John Box, cinematographer Freddie Young and director Franklin Schaffner.
The film has two major failings. First, it is unbiased a touch *too* sympathetic to the monarchs. Quite apart from the lack of any evaluation of their short-comings as leaders, there are too many scenes calculated, presumably (and questionably), to reveal Nicholas “learning” from his mistakes. Second, in the anguish to dramatize a complex historical moment, there is simply too powerful of it. We jump from the Russo-Japanese War to the 1905 Russian Revolution to Stolypin’s reforms, to Rasputin’s influence, to the First World War, the Februrary Revolution, the October Revolution, and on and on. In this accelerate to include everything, exiguous other than the monarchs’ lives is dealt with in any depth and the efforts to depict the revolutionaries are particularly awkward.
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One of the most renowned scenes in the film, commented upon by more than one contemporary review, is a brief early moment when Lenin says to a journalist, “Pay attention, you’re about to look the birth of the Bolshevik party.” That’s about the level of the political evaluation, and one can understand why the scene, along with about ten minutes elsewhere, was lop in subsequent theatrical and video release. (On the other hand, the characterization of Lenin as an intolerant prig, however uncomprehending of his political ideas, does ring remarkably correct.) The DVD restores these excisions. The transfer is considerably warmer than Columbia’s previous video releases, and is 16:9 enhanced.
I recommend the disc to anyone alive to in the subject or the capacity of films to effect history live for audiences. Apparently like several other reviewers here, I first saw “Nicholas and Alexandra” in its initial theatrical release and loved it. I immediately read Massie’s book after seeing it, which was the first step in what has proven a life-long interest in the period. Despite its failings, it is a testament to the film’s power that it can consume this level of fascination over viewers’ imaginations.
Buy,Download, Or Stream Nicholas and Alexandra! Click Here
The unadulturated history of the Russian monarchy has produced more compelling drama than anything Hollywood could beget in its wildest flights: Ivan the Terrible’s descent into madness; Peter the Great’s violent childhood and adult retributions (including the execute of his son) as the backdrop for supreme political accomplishments; Catherine the Great’s seizure of a throne from a madman and her emergence as the dominant monarch of her age; Alexander I’s possible complicity in the assasination of his father, his defeat of Napoleon, and likely faking of his death to live out his life as a religious hermit; Alexander II’s death at the hands of terrorists. And the curtain drops on the Russian monarchy great as the play ran — in pools of blood. The main incompatibility in the Nicholas and Alexandra saga is that their predecessors created their possess dramas, whereas Nicholas and Alexandra succumbed to the drama of events swirling around them.
This movie is wrong in many details. For instance, the genuine Dowager Empress visited her son on his recount only after his abdication, not in the weeks before the monarchy fell. Anna Vyrobuva, a signficant and unwittingly snide player in the Rasputin debacle, is missing. And the loyalty to the Tsar professed by the other Romanovs in the movie glosses over the fact that there were serious family discussions about a coup to send Alexandra into exile and maybe even to pick Nicholas himself.
Buy,Download, Or Stream Nicholas and Alexandra! Click Here
Buy,Download, Or Stream Nicholas and Alexandra! Click Here
But these are nits. In a larger sense the movie compellingly captures the essence of the two fundamental issues that combined to bring the Romanov dynasty crashing down. The first had to do with Nicholas. He was a kind, gentle family man considerable more genuine to the life of a country gentleman. When called upon to employ accurate power to influence complex events, he fell into a pattern of posturing, denial, and a passive opinion that he could unbiased go with his reactionary biases instead of with disciplined examination of reality. After all, God had made him emperor, and therefore it must be God’s will that he felt and decided as he did.
The other explain had to do with Alexandra. A worried, high-strung woman who was equipped neither by temperament, intellect, nor upbringing to crawl herd on a decadent court or fractious nest of in-laws, she inclined to a mystical plan of religion and monarchy that could rise almost to hysteria. It would have been a volatile plot in the best of circumstances. But Alexandra got dealt a very poor hand. Russia was opening up culturally and intellectually and looking to unshackle itself from unthinking political and religious orthodoxy. And she was failing in her principle purpose — to effect a male heir to the greatest throne on earth. Nearing menopause after bearing four daughters, she finally bore a son, only to win him cursed by the hoemophila that ran through her relations. She had offended God, and she had to know why.
Alexandra responded with a downward spiral into an increasingly bizarre mysticism that further clouded her husband’s foggy idea of his world and his role — and that ultimately opened the door to perhaps the most bizarre case of malign political influence in the annals of government: Rasputin.
While botching a detail here and there, the movie does a top-notch job of accurately portraying the salient aspects of how these things ate away at Nicholas’ valid power to replace it with a mushrooming fantasy of power as he, and Alexandra even moreso, perceived it. Although ruling one-sixth of the world’s land surface, the couple’s world concept finally came to extend no further than the tiny circle of their tight-knit immediate family and their gilded enclave at Tsarskoye Selo.
When the revolution came — as Nicholas’s fatalism and the insane yielding to Rasputin’s interference in government made inevitable — Nicholas actually entered a few months of still that on some level were the most mild of his life. Power stunned and exhausted him. The shackles of jailers were light compared to those of a throne.
The fact that the revolution that deepened his country’s enslavement actually freed Nicholas from those things he most abhorred illustrate impartial how far the Romanov dynasty had near to odds with the very purpose of its existence. In the waste, Nicholas and Alexandra showed a grace and sanguinity in captivity and extermination that was utterly absent when they ruled the world’s largest country. No scriptwriter could improve on this script, and the stout art of this movie is that none tried.
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