A Royal Scandal, also known as Czarina, is a 1945 American comedy-drama film directed by Otto Preminger, produced by Ernst Lubitsch, about the lovelife of Russian empress Catherine the Great.

However, determined young lieutenant Alexei Chernoff, coincidentally Jaschikoff's fiancé, insists on an audience with Catherine, riding for three days and storming past palace security to speak to her.

It comes as no surprise to the czarina or to Chancellor Nicolai, who has already made an "arrangement" with Ronsky, but Catherine likes the patriotic and handsome lieutenant, promoting him to captain and asking him to prepare policy recommendations on foreign and domestic issues.

Troops storm the palace, but they are loyal to Catherine; Chancellor Nicolai has leveraged his illicit control of Russia's finances for the allegiance of the rebels and then immediately betrayed them.

The diplomat, himself a young and handsome nobleman, greets Catherine with such obsequious flattery that the Czarina takes a romantic interest in him, and the film ends with Chancellor Nicolai leaving the two to flirt in privacy, confident that a relationship between the two will lead to the alliance for which he has long schemed.

Ernst Lubitsch, who directed the silent film Forbidden Paradise upon which A Royal Scandal is based, was the first director hired, but when he fell ill, he was replaced by Otto Preminger.

In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther called the film "an oddly dull and generally witless show" and wrote: "The fault is quite obviously in the writing.