BEFORE: Ingrid Bergman carries over from "For Whom the Bell Tolls", and so does Akim Tamiroff. Hmm, I'd never heard of Akim Tamiroff before yesterday, and now I've seen him in two films. Weird.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Anastasia" (1997) (Movie #1,111)
AFTER: Well, at least Bergman's playing Russian in this one, or faux Russian, which means she could be any nationality, and that makes it a lot easier to accept her accent - I just couldn't buy her playing a Spanish woman. Hollywood seems to have a shortcut in casting foreign actors to play foreign roles, and the exact nationalities don't seem to matter very much. As long as they sound foreign, that'll do. I think that really sells the American movie-going public quite short.
Take Yul Brynner, who's also seen here playing a Russian (I think) - but he was most famous for playing the King of Siam (now called Thailand) - hey, as long as he seems vaguely Asian, close enough. OK, so he's a Russian general who finds an amnesiac woman who looks enough like the allegedly-lost-but-probably-killed daughter of Czar Nicholas II to claim her inheritance. Hey, weren't we just there last week as the Russian aristocracy crumbled, as seen in "Doctor Zhivago"?
But this is set years later, when Anastasia would have been an adult, assuming she survived the purge (she didn't) but with enough coaching, this lost soul can be instructed to answer the proper questions, to learn enough about Anastasia's life that even she is no longer sure who she really is. Which memories are real, and which are the ones she's been taught?
As with the 1997 animated film on the same subject, we are led to believe that this amnesiac might possibly, somehow, impossibly, be the real deal - in the end if the Dowager Empress believes, why shouldn't we? But the ending sort of feels like a cop-out, since it doesn't take a firm stand on her identity - so we can choose to believe it if we want. Sorry, I say you've got to pick a horse here.
I think this stands now as sort of a remnant of a time, before DNA testing, when it was rather hard to prove someone's identity, and by extension easier for someone to pretend to be someone else. This Anastasia pretender didn't even have to answer three security questions, like her first pet's name, in order to stake her claim.
Also starring Yul Brynner (last seen in "Futureworld"), Helen Hayes (last seen in "Airport"), Martita Hunt, Ivan Desny.
RATING: 4 out of 10 grand balls
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