Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28605 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-05-30
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

Not a classic but still entertaining
What do you expect of a movie dealing with a historic event? This is properly the decisive question when judging this two-part TV movie first aired in 1986.

It recounts the life of Anna Anderson, a woman said to be in reality the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, the youngest daughter of the last Czar Nicolas II. Anna/Anastasia first made her claim in 1920, when she was an inmate in a Berlin asylum after a suicide attempt. Her story of escape from the Bolsheviks who killed the rest of her family in 1918 seems so vivid that many Russian expatriates are willing to believe her. It split the émigrés circles and the royal houses. Many believed passionately in her claims, many were equally passionately opposing her claims. For a long time it was one of the most fascinating mysteries of the 20th century. When the bodies of the Imperial Family were found it first seemed strengthen the case of Anna Anderson as one of the bodies of a Grand Duchess was(and still is )missing. However, DNA testing put an end to all this: Missing body or not, Anna Anderson was not the Grand Duchess Anastasia but a Polish factory worker.

When the movie was turned all this was not known and the "magic" of Anna Anderson" still intact and of course that is the main attraction of the film. Amy Irving plays the leading character in a lady-or-the-tiger fashion. One never really gets if she truly believes in her own tale or if she's merely a charlatan. However, it seems to me that Anna Anderson herself has completely slipped into the personality of a Russian Imperial Grand Duchess.

The cast is impressive: Edward Fox, Olivia DeHavilland, Elke Sommer, Rex Harrison, Claire Bloom, Omar Sharif, Jan Niklas and Susan Lucci co-star in this opulent, location-filmed production.

The movie received three Golden Globe nominations and won two (for Olvia DeHavilland and Jan Niklas). This is already an indication that the movie has quite an appeal. However, it is a bit far removed from reality, far too glitzy and too Hollywood like. It is still entertaining, never really convincing and in the end out-dated.

I cannot see that this movie will become a classic on Anastasia as a previous reviewer stated. To be frank, I prefer the movies by Ingrid Bergamn and even more by Lilli Palmer on this very subject, if and only for the superb acting of these two movie stars. Their talents to portrait Anastasia is a world apart from the acting of Amy Irving.