This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. It's hard to believe, but we're already up to the last week of April, 2022, which means that it's time for another TV-themed edition of the blogathon. This time, the theme is "Royalty", and with the combination of that and it being a TV edition, this one was actually a bit tough for me. Thankfully I was able to recall a couple of TV movies from the 1980s, as well as something that has to be seen to be believed:
Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986). International co-production whose story you'll know, more or less, if you've seen the Ingrid Bergman movie Anastasia. Anna Anderson (played here by Amy Irving) was a mysterious woman who showed up in Berlin a few years after the Communists killed the Russian imperial family, claiming to be Anastasia, the daughter of Nicholas and Alexandra. DNA would ultimately prove -- but only after the fall of the Soviet Union -- that Anna was an impostor. But in the 1920s, nobody knew about DNA, so the question of whether this really was Anastasia was rather a controversial one. This is a surprisingly star-studded TV movie, with Olivia de Havilland, Rex Harrison, Omar Sharif, and a very young Christian Bale as the Tsar's son Alexei.
To Catch a King (1984). Fictionalization of a real-life story from World War II in which the Nazis tried to capture the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Duke being the former King Edward VIII, as it was thought that the Duke harbord Nazi sympathies. As a result of all this, the Duke was sent to the Bahamas to sit out the rest of the war.
The Grand Knockout Tournament (1987). I already used the game show Jeux sans frontières, also known as Games Without Frontiers (as in the old Peter Gabriel song) and a variety of other names. It had a brief run in the US in the mid-1970s as Almost Anything Goes and All-Star Anything Goes, and a somewhat longer run in the UK as It's a Knockout. Britain's Prince Edward, his royal duties rather lessened once Princess Diana fulfilled her royal duty of producing heirs, wanted to get into television, and had the brillliant idea of reviving It's a Knockout for charity with various members of the royal family as sponsors of the celebrity teams, each playing for a different charity.
3 comments:
Found a work around for the commenting issue! I Like the way you went with this theme. These are definitely ones I wouldn't have considered.
I have not seen any of these. I would like to see the first one because I was always enamoured with the Anastasia story with the wish that she was alive but, when she was interviewed, I knew it was not her. That 2nd film had me laughing...see Teri Garr run from the train, from the building, from the park, from the street. She was running a lot except when she was "roll, Roll, Roll in the hay..er bed. ). I am laughing at the last one with the Royals and some famous actors doing crazy antics. It reminded me of that Battle of the Network Stars.
I didn't know about the Anastasia series - but considering that I've always had a soft spot for the Don Bluth movie, I really ought to check it out
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