Anastasia

Anastasia is a 1956 American period drama film directed by Anatole Litvak and written by Arthur Laurents. Set in interwar France, the film follows a plot related to rumors that the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, the youngest daughter of the late Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, survived the execution of her family in 1918. Russian General Bounine (Yul Brynner), former leader of the White Army during the Russian Revolution, along with his associates plot to swindle an inheritance of £10 million from the Grand Duchess using an amnesiac (Ingrid Bergman) who looks remarkably like the missing Anastasia. The exiled émigrés of the Russian aristocracy, in particular the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna (Helen Hayes) of Denmark, must be convinced that their handpicked claimant is legitimate if the plotters are to get her money. Anastasia was adapted from a 1952 play written by Guy Bolton and Marcelle Maurette. He was inspired by the story of Anna Anderson, the best known of the many Anastasia impostors who emerged after the Imperial family were killed in July 1918. Plot Though the last Russian Tsar and his family were executed in 1918, rumors persisted that his youngest daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, somehow survived. In 1928 Paris, Anna Koreff, an ailing woman who resembles Anastasia, is brought to the attention of former White Russian General Bounine, now the proprietor of a successful Russian-themed nightclub. Bounine knows that while Anna was in a mental asylum being treated for amnesia, she told a nun that she was Anastasia. When approached by Bounine and addressed as the grand duchess, she refuses to have anything to do with him. She flees and tries to throw herself into the River Seine, but is stopped. Bounine meets with his associates Chernov and Petrovin. Bounine has already repeatedly raised funds from stockholders (eager to gain a share of £10 million belonging to Anastasia held by an English bank) based on his claim that he had found Anastasia. Privately he admits it is a scam, but the stockholders have lost their patience and given him eight days to produce her.