Charles Jarrott | Mary Queen, of Scotts / 1971

relying on the heart instead of the head

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Hale (screenwriter), Charles Jarrott (director) Mary Queen, of Scotts / 1971

 

Given the remarkable cast of Vanessa Redgrave (as Mary), whom I believe to be one of the greatest actresses of the 20th century, and Glenda Jackson, who has played Queen Elizabeth so brilliantly in many productions, I was hoping that this production, now basically free of the Hays Code and so much more informed about events, would be a truly memorable film production.

   I was more than disappointed. Critics immediately jumped on the old bandwagon of historical inaccuracies. In fact, this film, in many respects, is fairly accurate. Unlike almost all portraits of the Virgin Queen this film actually shows Elizabeth’s love for Robert Dudley, whom she later named the Earl of Leicester. And instead of suddenly beginning as did the earlier John Ford 1936 version with Mary’s necessary return to her homeland, this movie begins in France with Mary still married to the then King of France, Francis, happily Ily in love until he suddenly develops his brain aneurism which began as an ear infection that sends him into madness and death. His mother Catherine de' Medici is not at all sympathetic to her daughter in law, forcing Mary to scuttle back to Scotland, where she still remained queen; but after years of being in France, she was only 17 at time, having had utterly no political education, she was ill-prepared to face a changed world back home which, through John Knox’s endless preachings and transformation of the scene, her own insistence on maintaining her Catholic faith, and her lack of recognition of the various divisions between Scottish clansmen, she was ill-prepared for what she had to face.

    I grew up Presbyterian, a church in which John Knox was always portrayed as a hero, but after watching these two films, and perceiving what a vile religious zealot he probably truly was I once again despaired of all religious values, which after all had been behind the endless Tudor-Stuart battles. It only made me glad of my choice of atheism which I determined at a rather early age. Religion has almost always been the spur of hate.

   If I thought Katherine Hepburn had betrayed her feminist viewpoints and her queenly-like demeanor of the early part of the film, Redgrave playing Mary is already clueless and all about the heart over the head. I have never before or since seen such a muted performance by Redgrave, who speaks her lines very nicely, and occasionally fights out forcefully for her queenly rights against even the kind of imprisonment her half-brother, James Stewart, Lord Moray (Patrick McGoohan) imagines for her: he will rule, while she shall be given a world of lovely parties, dances, and pleasures of the kind she has experienced in France.

    She does attempt, vaguely, to rebel against this, but oddly the forceful Redgrave, in this film is basically ineffectual until she comes under the protection of the atheist Lord Bothwell (Nigel Davenport), who is willing to battle the other clansmen in protection of the throne.

     The forceful and more dominant actress in this film is most certainly Jackson, who despite her love for Dudley, first sends him to offer a marriage proposal to Mary, knowing Mary will certainly deny him as representing her own “left-overs,” offering up another young, quite handsome man, whom although Elizabeth knows of his own ambitiousness, treachery, womanizing, and perhaps of his numerous bisexual encounters, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnely (Timothy Dalton), is nonetheless not at all the fop as portrayed in the 1936 film, but a man with an unquenchable appetite for both men and women. As Elizabeth perceives, she wins with either choice, putting her rival’s life into chaos.

     In this version of the film, she almost girlishly Mary falls for the handsome demeanor of Darnely without a clue to his inner nature or actual behavior.

     Jarrott’s film is honest enough to show Darnely in Mary’s Italian secretary David Riccio’s (Ian Holm) bed, as both plot for his rise in power of a consort King.

     The major inadequacies of this film arose not from its general historical arc, but the fact that it relied on minor historical speculations and unproved theories and ran with them as major plot developments. Darnely is fully involved, in this version, with the murder of Riccio because of his belief that he his wife and been having and that the child, the future James I and IV, who will become heir to Scotland, Ireland, and England, was not actually his own offspring. He and the anti-papist clansman, who have convinced him of that possibility, together plot Riccio’s stabbing in front of the queen as if it was an historical fact; it is not. The even happened, but scholars are not at all certain that Darnely was behind his former lover’s death.

     Soon after, it is made clear that James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, with the Queen’s permission and even, in this case, her pretense of making up with the brutal and now violently drunk Darnley, to plot his death at Holoyrod. Some historians have believed by this time Darnely, due to his multi-sexual activities, and come down with the pox (syphilis). The film makes this quite evident with a mask removed at one moment to reveal his pox-ridden fact.

     With no evidence that I have ever encountered, this movie presumes that he escapes and is strangulated, although in the original medical findings, his body was tossed through the explosion to the outside with no evidence of strangulation.

     There is no question in this romantic version that the heart-led Mary arranges for her own kidnapping from her estate and openly joins with Bothwell in what other scholars describe as a rape.

     Time and again, this film takes theories, accusations of the day, and speculations as evidence to present its romantic spectacle, leaving reality and real characterization behind. Mary becomes, as Elizabeth proclaims, a woman who has mistakenly attempted to rule with her heart instead of her head.

     And not only do the two queens meet once in this version, despite the fact we know they never met, but joins up again in a second meeting, basically repeating Mary’s charges against Elizabeth as fictionalized in the 1936 version. Frankly, by this time I had become a supporter of the far more intelligent and clearly plotting Elizabeth that the mindless Mary, even as played by Redgrave, who in a few last moments attempted to breath life into her already headless character.

     Jarrott’s film is often beautiful to look at for its country views, but it finally becomes such an empty vehicle that I longed for Hepburn’s panting desires and March’s attempts to appease her. But ultimately, even Bothwell is forced to leave her, escaping to Denmark where he too is imprisoned and killed.

     Mary greets her death as her fate, but Elizabeth has made it clear, she might have been a marvelous queen had she only employed her mind instead of her emotions. I might say the same of the same of this failure of a movie that took any chance with historical fact to create a quite empty sense of romance, which despite it’s beauty is drained of true character and filled with imaginative twists that have little to do with what actually might have happened—or perhaps I should say provides its own notion of what might have happened without any full historical evidence. Films generally do not like indeterminacy, and this film bulldozes its way through any possibility of speculative thought.

 

Los Angeles, September 26, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).