Anastasia

I've been mentioning a couple of times how FXM runs most of the movies it runs multiple times, although currently it feels as if there are a few more movies in the rotation than normal. One movie that only seems to have gotten one ainig that that I haven't seen on the schedule in months is Anastasia.

Russian Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917 after the first of the 1917 revolutions in Russia, but stayed in the country with his family. After the Communist October Revolution, the Tsar and his family were placed under house arrest in western Siberia, and ultimately murdered in the summer of 1918. However, the Communists initally only announced the death of Nicholas.

In 1928 in Paris, it was well known among the Russian émigré community that there had been at least one woman claiming to be Anastasia, the youngest of Nicholas' children, who had shown up in various parts of Europe. General Bunin (Yul Brynner) leads a group of émigrés who is trying to get at the money that Nicholas had deposited in a bank in the west, since the western countries weren't about to hand this money over to the Soviets. But to do it, he's going to need to find somebody descended from Nicholas to get the trustees to release the funds, and time is running out.

Enter Anna Anderson (Ingrid Bergman), who has previously been in Berlin and Bucharest claiming to be Anastasia but having spent time in various institutions with a substantial case of amnesia. Now, in this version of the story, Bunin considers Anna a fraud, and we're in on that knowledge. (DNA evidence from after the fall of the Soviet Union confirms Anastasia did not survive the killings.) In the 1920s, there were a lot of skeptics, but no way to confirm that Anna was in fact not Anastasia beyond intuition. So Bunin plans to train Anna to pass herself off better as Anastasia, in the hopes that this time people might actually believe that she is in fact Anastasia.

Bunin can't get the proper people in Paris to believe Anna's story, so the only other option is the long shot of going to Copenhagen, where the Dowager Empress Maria (Helen Hayes), mother of Nicholas and grandmother of Anastasia, lives after having to been able to escape Russia before the Bolsheviks took over. She understandbly doesn't believe Anna's story at all. But a member of her retinue, Prince Paul (Ivan Desny), either does believe it or is going along with it because he has a romantic interest in Anna. Meanwhile, there's also some suggestion that perhaps Anna and Bunin are also developing a romantic relationship. If Anna isn't Anastasia, perhaps she can live happily ever after some other way.

Ingrid Bergman won the Oscar for Anastasia, but after having watched the movie again (I first saw it ages ago, probably before I started this blog since a search of the blog claims I haven't done a post on it), I have to admit that I'm a bit surprised by the Oscar win here. I suppose you can argue that having to play an amnesiac pretending to be royalty is a demanding role, but it doesn't seem all that great a role to me. Then again, the other nominees aren't a particularly strong lineup. (Looking at the other nominees, I think I would have voted for Deborah Kerr in The King and I.) I'm also not certain what the Academy boters would have thought of Bergman at this point. She had been forced to leave Hollywood after her marriage to Roberto Rossellini, and this was her first role back in Hollywood. I wonder if perhaps they had more sympathy than objectivity.

Anastasia is certainly competently made, and a good example of the studio system making an opulent movie to compete with television. But I can't help but think it could have been better.