Russian Dressing

By * J.C.

NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA

Directed by FRANKLIN J. SCHAFFNER Screenplay by JAMES GOLDMAN

A lugubrious rummaging through the Romanov attic, this is a Love Story with historical footnotes. Extracted from Robert K. Massie's bestseller, it seems to have started as an attempt to make what the boys back at the studio call "an intelligent epic." For Scenarist James Goldman (The Lion in Winter) and Director Franklin J. Schaffner (Patton), that apparently means endless vistas of gilded scenery, plus dreary dialogues about the future of Russia and the Czar's responsibility to his family and his increasingly obstreperous subjects.

The film is so resolutely dull that one hungers for the vigorous vulgarity of, say, Doctor Zhivago. The film makers occasionally comply, albeit inadvertently, as when Schaffner stages the obligatory scene of Mad Monk Rasputin wenching it up in a haystack, or when Goldman has Nikolai Vladimir Ilich Lenin grouse, "Well, Stalin has been exiled to Siberia again." There is even an occasional feint at topical significance. Count Witte (Laurence Olivier), trying to persuade Nicholas (Michael Jayston) to halt the Russo-Japanese War, says, "I'm advising you to stop a hopeless war." Replies the Czar: "The Russia my father gave me never lost a war."

Jayston and Janet Suzman, who plays Alexandra, are both highly professional but singularly unengaging actors. They are never able to fight through the emotional paralysis that cripples the film. Endless sequences are expended showing Alexandra wringing her royal hands over the fate of her hemophiliac son Alexis.

Worried about his wife and son, agonizingly conscious of his own weakness and indecisiveness, Nicholas offers no resistance to the revolution that is gaining momentum all around him. The Romanovs first become prisoners, then victims of history and fate.

It is a powerful story, full of grandeur and irony. It is almost operatic, but the movie whittles it down to soap.

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