Mary, Queen of Scots (1971)

As I've said, movies about real-life British royalty have a good track record with me. This one is by the same director (Charles Jarrott) as Anne of the Thousand Days, so it was apt to feel even more like a sequel thereto than The Private Life of Henry VIII.

The tale begins in 1560, when teenage Mary (34-year-old Vanessa Redgrave) is about to lose her first husband, King Francis of France (Richard Denning). Having no claim to his throne, she decides to return to Scotland, but Queen Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson) will not grant her safe passage through England to get there. Even when Mary arrives home by ship, she finds her reception rather lacking, thanks to the rise of Protestantism and attendant hostility to Catholics such as herself. Indeed, her next 27 years will be riddled with people seeking to undermine her, whether by making her a figurehead in practice, persuading her to renounce all authority, imprisoning her, or assassinating her.

Nicholas and Alexandra (1971)

I think I had two main reasons to put this on my queue: The Academy nominated it for Best Picture, and the early '70s were a good time for dramas. Of course, it wasn't so good if you wanted a happy ending. And once I realized who the title characters were, an unhappy ending was a foregone conclusion.

You don't need to be well versed in history to recall that Nicholas II (Michael Jayston) was the last tsar of Russia. This movie begins in 1904 with him and his wife (Janet Suzman) welcoming a son after four daughters. That may be the last time we see them both happy, and it's not for long, as they learn of little Alexei's hemophilia -- terrible news for anyone and all the worse for an heir apparent to the throne, whom the public should not see as fragile. Little do they know how moot that point is, thanks to growing unrest in the empire. For the next nine years, Alexandra entrusts her son's health to the mysticism of Grigori Rasputin (Tom Baker of Doctor Who fame), without her husband's approval.