But at the end there is only an ordinary middle-aged man and his family, all very much bewildered and frightened, kidding themselves that they're not going to die. There's a tendency to get confused early on, when grand dukes and dowager empresses and Rasputin and everybody crowd the screen. If the movie isn't exactly stirring, however, it is undeniably interesting, especially after the intermission. But at the movie's center, where an adventurous fire should be glowing, the characters are lifelike in their mediocrity. stepping forward for an occasional bit scene and a bow. The revolution that replaced them is shown in cameo style, with Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Co. They lost the lives of thousands of their soldiers, they lost battles and then the war and they all but threw away their dynasty because they simply couldn't do any better. The story of their lives is one of incredible ignorance given free rein.

Nicholas and Alexandra may not have been the flashiest of czars and czarinas, but maybe they weren't entirely to blame the muted tone of the age was set by Queen Victoria, who (as Vincent Canby notes) was the grandmother of practically everybody in World War I. We democratic Americans even seem to like royalty more than those nations who have some. There's always a kind of fascination in royalty, of course. The fact is that Nicholas and Alexandra were rather ordinary people, and that, despite the millions of deaths they caused and the revolution they played unwitting midwives to, they were banal. They were handicapped somewhat by history, I guess, and the extensive research that went into Robert K. Schaffner (' Patton') have given us a big, expensive, sprawling indoor epic, in which vast landscapes are mostly avoided in favor of drawing rooms and boudoirs, but they haven't given us characters who really make things come alive.

Sam Spiegel (' Lawrence of Arabia') and Franklin J.

Robert massie nicholas and alexandra