Elizabeth According to Hollywood

[deborahjross]

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.

Comments

[imhilien.livejournal.com]

I love shows / movies about the Tudors, but sometimes I wonder how much research gets done before filming. :-p

When I watching season 2 of 'The Tudors', I could be found muttering, 'but Anne Boleyn didn't have *blue* eyes, did she?'

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

I wonder, too, but I do pay attention to the presence of authentic(TM) historians in the Special Features. It could be their comments are afterthoughts rather than planning thoughts, but I give them points for trying. Otoh, the Special Features commentary for THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX were all =film= historians.

The disc had a "Night at the Movies" feature, with all the other things (short movie, cartoon, newsreel) that one might have seen in 1939. The short film was "Royal Rodeo," and looked like someone just grabbed a lot of extras from "E & E" and a Western-with-singing-cowboys and mushed them together. Hilarious.