'NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA'.......THE ROADSHOW HITS THE ROAD......

Nicholas And Alexandra (1971)    You'll never hear us go all nostalgic about the 3 and 4 hour epics that used to play theaters in what the film trade called "roadshow" presentations.......

            In other words, like a theatrical play. Reserved seats. Overture music. An intermission.  Exit music to see you out as you staggered up the aisle with legs still slowly waking up.......

             By the time the dinosaurian "Nicholas And Alexandra" lumbered into theaters, the roadshow had reached its twilight.  The huge 2000 seat movie palaces that hosted these cinematic behemoths were already on the verge of turning into parking lots, office buildings......or most humiliating of all, twin theaters.

             But we'll freely admit that in revisiting this film, we found pleasures that we may not have fully appreciated when we first sat trapped in a dark auditorium with it for 3 hours.

              Mega-producer Sam Spiegel ("Lawrence Of Arabia") avoided the expense of signing super-dooper international movie stars........he cast the entire movie with every familiar, brilliant British actor he could get his hands on, even his two leads, played by completely-unknown-to-the-world Michael Jayston and Janet Suzman.

             The cast list here reads like a Great Britain acting Who's Who.....Laurence Olivier, Harry Andrews, Jack Hawkins, Ian Holm, Brian Cox, Irene Worth.....and Tom Baker, later everyone's favorite Dr. Who, as Rasputin.

              Watching them all again, all of them in their prime, somehow made the film's punishing length much easier to endure this time.  And visually , Freddy Young's masterful cinematography is still a gorgeous sight to behold.

              Call us hopelessly old-fashioned, but we'll take true epic sweep over CGI landscapes and digital crowds every time......

              But the film's fatal flaw and the reason it died  a quick death still exists.  And that's the idea of building an epic around Tsar Nicholas II himself.

                Tsar Nick is no larger than life heroically tragic figure....(though the film takes a few awkward stabs at portraying him that way in its final third).Not a guy to keep viewers riveted to their seats.   He's pretty much a clueless, entitled royal moron, refusing to acknowledge the 20th century's end of monarchic rule and oblivious to the oppression and suffering of his subjects.

                 By the time the upheavals of the Russian Revolution catch up with him and his family, you're not apt to care about the humiliations and violent end awaiting them.......no matter how pretty all his princess daughters are.

                And not many moviegoers wanted to sit through a story centered around an idiot who gets what's coming to him. Not for 3 hours at reserved seat prices anyway.

                Which is why the best parts of the film are those that wander away from the woeful Romanov soap opera to have a look at the revolutionaries' struggles as they birth the uprising. And like an anticipated musical number, Tom Baker's protracted Rasputin murder scene becomes the movie's one and only showstopper. (And you'd better believe Tom makes the most of it...)

               No, we  don't miss the roadshow movies. But we do miss the meticulous artistry that was poured into movies like this one...........the kind of film where watching the incredible array of actors assembled were all the special effects you ever needed.

              That we do miss.  2 & 1/2 stars (** 1/2)