Elizabeth According to Hollywood

Or, THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX, with Bette Davis and Errol Flynn. What can I say, except that the thirtieth time they called one another, "Dahling" was simply too anachronistic even for me. It was good we'd watched the more contemporary versions (Glenda Jackson's and Helen Mirren's) first, for they at least attempted some degree of historical sense. The distortions and fantastic additions proved most amusing: All right then, he's going to get his head chopped off in the next ten minutes, so how do they get from here to there? After all, Elizabeth was 68 and Essex was 35 when she had him executed. They did WHAT?

Both of us giggled at musical impossibilities (in the opening procession, trumpets play notes that were not playable on the instruments of the time). The battle scenes in Ireland (men in awkward costumes rushing back and forth through carbon-dioxide fog, Errol Flynn watching them) likewise -- strange that only one of the Irish had an Irish accent. Oh, and Essex's "castle" could not have looked like that; Henry VIII had all such fortified places pulled down.

But for a piece of hyper-romance, it worked surprisingly well. Bette Davis was an amazing actor, perhaps at her best playing aging, vitriolic characters.