Alexander Korda | The Private Life of Henry VIII / 1933

man and king

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lajos Bíró and Arthur Wimperis (screenplay), Alexander Korda (director) The Private Life of Henry VIII / 1933

 

Although it starred homosexual actor Charles Laughton as Henry VIII and his rumored “lavender” bride Elsa Lanchester as Anne of Cleves, one would be hardput to describe a movie about the Tudor King and five of his six wives, as well as two of his wives’ lovers within his court, Thomas Culpeper (Robert Donat) and Thomas Peynell (John Lodar), as anything other than reeking of heterosexual lust. But since this 1933 British concoction was cooked up by Hungarian-born director Alexander Korda and his Hungarian friend, novelist and playwright Lajos Bíró, there are the usual early 30s sissies among the numerous eccentric individuals who make up Henry’s court, first and foremost the French executioner (Gibb McLaughlin) who we see busy sharpening his sword with which to sever Anne Boleyn’s (Merle Oberon) lovely head.

     The English Executioner (Sam Livesey) is quite distressed that they’ve called in a Frenchman for the task when there are plenty of unemployed English executioners. But the Frenchmen assures him, in unequivocal terms, that the English headsmen are only fit to sever the bull-necks of their countrymen with a cleaver. “But a woman’s neck, a queen’s neck, that calls for finesse, for delicacy, for chivalry; in one word a French man,” as he flutters his fingers in the proper supplement to his words. The English headsman growls, “Well I can think of another word.” So too can we.

      The second major pansy to haunt the castle halls is the official Wedding Bed Preparer—who’s even given a name in the script, Cornell (Claud Allister), presumably because he’s a busy man given the king’s six wives. He struts around, hands on his hips, ordering up bedding pans, hot water bottles, and men to poke swords under the bed for suspect intruders, as well as fighting consistently with the King’s Nurse (Lady Tree) who each time before Henry lays down in his bridal bed, attempts to slips her “charms” under his pillow, which she assures Cornell will produce a male heir. At least with his third wife, Jane Seymour (Wendy Barrie), the charms indeed succeeded.

     Finally, although his character is meant to be heterosexual, Laughton, always the ham actor, portrays a Henry VIII in a manner that is often so over-the-top that it borders on camp. His Henry early in the film never walks or even struts, but scurries across rooms is short steps, grabbing up individuals, such as his scatter-brained new wife Jane Seymour the very moment he hears the bells announce Anne Boleyn’s death, rushing forward with acts he has clearly not properly thought out.

      Although the real Henry VIII was evidently a well-mannered diner and fastidious with regard to his body, Laughton’s Henry devours an entire capon, pounding it apart and greedily ripping off its wings and thighs as he chews up the meat before tossing the bones over his shoulder—all the time lecturing on his assertion that good breeding and manners have disappeared from British life. He is furious that after Seymour’s death in childbirth that his advisers and even his barber is demanding that he marry yet again! Henry himself bemoans his condition: “Am I the king or a breeding bull?!”

      But it is his next wife, Anne of Cleves, performed by Laughton’s real-life wife, Elsa Lanchester who releases his most comedic sequence of the film. Lanchester—who in her autobiography explains the reason they never had children is that Laughton was homosexual, suggesting that they did not have much of a sexual life—is here the one totally disinterested in having sex with the man she has been forced to marry in order to keep the German-French peace. Anne, represented as a great beauty in Holbein’s portrait, shows up in Henry’s court as a tripping, screw-faced near idiot who even practices in the mirror the ugly faces that might help distort any of her true beauty. On the wedding night, she juts out of her lower lip as if practicing for her very next major movie role, The Bride of Frankenstein, to say “no” to all of mankind. She appears utterly clueless about what plans he may have for her in bed. As Henry is forced to attempt to explain about the “birds and bees” to her, it becomes apparent to him that there is no hope, as he wonders aloud what he might do with her. Coyishly, she suggests, “Chop off my head?” But when she hints of divorce, Henry’s entire demeanor improves as they quickly plot out the divorce settlement, allowing her also to take her secret lover, Thomas Peynell with her.

      To while away the rest of the night, they play cards. Henry, who claims to be the best card-player in the kingdom (like a former US president, who resembled a mad, fornicating king, claiming he was the sanest man on the planet, Henry makes a lot of rash assertions, later suggesting soon after that he is the still, now in his 50s, the best wrestler in Britain), quickly loses to Anne, who demands cash payment before they can even continue their game. Strangely, she is the only one of his first five wives with whom he maintains a friendly relationship, perhaps because she outlived all the others.

      His next bride, hand-picked from the court itself is the beautiful Katherine Howard (Binnie Barnes), who, if you believe any of Korda’s historical hokum, is the only woman he truly loved. Katherine, on the other hand, is the only woman who has no interest whatsoever in the “man” who is King, interested only in his crown, a theme reiterated again and again from the very beginning of the film when he overhears her about to say something terrible concerning him, beginning with the half-sentence, “If the King were not a king I’d call him….” Demanding to know what she would call him, the King interrupts her comments, as she, cleverly catching herself, bows and finishes her sentence with the word “a man.” When he later arrives at her bedroom one evening to have sex, indicating that he has left his crown outside her door, she rejects him, who as a “man” might destroy her reputation.

     Clever and manipulative, Katherine gets the crown, but also falls truly in love with the man whose affections she has previously only toyed with, Culpeper, and their secret meetings result in both of their undoings, as she meets her death just as Anne Boleyn did—although in truth Boleyn was innocent while in real history Katherine had had even an affair before her clandestine meetings with Culpeper. When Henry hears of her deceit, he breaks down in tears.

     And it is with Katherine, moreover, that this comedy turns more serious, as in his old age, we find the King who has lived a life of sexual philandering, is now lonely and disappointed with his inabilities to properly rule. Anne returns to point out a suitable sixth wife overseeing his children Edward and Elizabeth, both later rulers. Perhaps the perfect wife for an aging ruler, this Catherine nags him in the manner that Lanchester scolds Laughton to help keep him in good health in Witness for the Prosecution (1957). When she leaves the room, Henry turns to the camera, declaring to his audience: "Six wives, and the best of them's the worst."

     Korda’s comic fantasy was such a big success that he was able to establish his production company, London Films, and make many another movie that helped to keep British films interesting throughout the rest of the 1930s.

 

Los Angeles, January 29, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).

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).

Ari Itkin and Devon Diffenderfer | Love You Tyler / 2019

the tease

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ari Itkin and Devon Diffenderfer (screenwriters and directors) Love You Tyler / 2019 [9 minutes]

 

Devon Diffenderfer and Ari Itkin’s short 9-minute movie Love You Tyler is what you would have to describe as a tease.

      Luke (Diffenderfer) and Tyler (Ryan Pater) are roommates of two years, and both of the attractive young men appear to be interested in the other. Yet something is missing, and we see Luke in the first scene attempting to get up the courage to tell Tyler something.

      He finds Tyler packing up to take a weekend hiking trip—with other friends, and without him, which perhaps is behind his sudden urge to tell him his secret. He even wonders aloud why he wasn’t invited, immediately claiming his question was just a joke. But we sense it isn’t a joke and that all of his unexpectedly odd comments have some deeper significance.     

     When he finally gets up the courage, he tells Tyler that he has a new girlfriend who he’s known for only two weeks. Coincidentally her name is also Tyler, and like his male roommate works as a part time bartender.

       Even stranger, Luke insists that he’s soon going to ask her to marry him—yes, after only two weeks—and he’d like to practice is marriage proposal with Tyler. Beginning with the words “I love you Tyler,” he gets to his knees, talks about the two years of a roller coaster ride of a relationship—Tyler interrupts him to wonder about the “two years,” about which Luke apologizes as yet another “mistake”—finally saying “will you marry me?”—repeating the phrase over three more times in different intonations—and when Tyler finally utters “yes,” slips a ring on his finger (a gold band that might be used at a gay wedding as well as a heterosexual wedding proposal).

    It certainly sounds to the outsider audience, given the similarity of names and jobs, like Luke is really proposing to Tyler, and his roommate interprets it in the same manner, particularly when Luke thanks him for his help with a kiss on the lips. Tyler seems offended, almost disgusted by the kiss, almost as if he were a bit homophobic; and worse he proceeds to abuse Luke by arguing that there is obviously no girlfriend and he will never have a girlfriend because “you’re you,” suggesting that this is only one of many such stupid routines Luke has performed over time.

      Luke storms off to his bedroom, slamming the door. And a few minutes later, Tyler, obviously regretting his outburst, gently knocks.

      Opening it almost immediately, Luke plants another kiss on his lips, further outraging Tyler, Luke backing immediately away insisting that he had simply misread the situation, apologizing for his behavior and promising that it won’t happen again.

      We are now confused. Didn’t he get the message the first time around that Tyler was straight or least was not interested in a relationship with him, a possibility that Tyler himself now brings up with Luke.

      But the story quickly shifts yet again when Tyler suggests that Luke simply admit that he’s got the hots for him, that he’s gay and wants a relationship. The two at this point are standing face to face, and Tyler suddenly kisses him hard on the lips, backs off and repeats it seriously.

    Luke pauses, and says, “I can’t” as if the earlier dismissal of his “mock” proposal might have soured him on the possibility of their relationship.

      Tyler walks out, furious with the apparent continuation of the game. But as he leaves Tyler’s cellphone rings. He doesn’t answer. And it rings again, he finally taking it, answering, “Hi Babe.”

      Writer and actor Diffenderfer himself describes his intentions to confuse the viewer: “Love You Tyler is a queer friendly romantic comedy of sorts. Awkward and confusing and at times messy in its approach, that to me is how love can be.

     I wrote the short to give the audience enough twists to be kept off balance and leave them in the end to wonder. Regardless of what I Intended and know for myself to be true of the story it is up to the audience to make their own conclusions and be left hopefully wanting more in the end, with a laugh or two along the way.”

 

     His audience will obviously find many ways to read this, including the obvious conclusion, that he truly does have a girlfriend named Tyler who is amazing also a school teacher. But I can’t believe that ending for one moment.

     In hindsight, I now see Tyler’s disdain and seeming rejection of Luke’s first kiss is not in response to the kiss but to the play-acting that he just put him through. It’s clear that both men are sexually interested in the other, but it’s also evident that Tyler can’t fully come out with the truth, to honestly express his love for his roommate, and that miffs Tyler, not the quick kiss. If Luke has been asking him to marry him, why still play a game? And if that is his way of expressing his feelings, then perhaps he isn’t ready for a gay relationship being still far too conflicted about his desire for the same gender.

      Accordingly, I interpret Luke’s statement, “I can’t” has another restatement of his inability to come out. The problem is just as Tyler has described; he can’t admit to himself that he loves another man. Luke is actually “the tease.”

      When the phone rings so immediately after, I see it as being Tyler calling him yet again, Luke returning to a kind of game-playing which is the only way he can express his homosexual love, “Hi Babe.”

     But that’s only my reading. Each viewer will surely have their own way of perceiving the events of this slightly absurdist comedy.

 

Los Angeles, July 13, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022). 

 

Sally Potter | Orlando / 1992, USA 2010

sleeping beauty

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sally Potter (screenwriter and director) Orlando / 1992, USA 2010

 

Sally Potter’s cinematic retelling of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is stuffed with various explorations of sexuality, particularly concerning the role of women, androgyny, and transsexuality. But it is also a history of the United Kingdom from the death of Queen Elizabeth I to the present-day, seen mostly through the eyes of its brilliant central character (Tilda Swinton).

      Swinton as Orlando begins life as the young male courtier in the Elizabeth I court, who is so handsome and talented that the dying Queen (performed with near-perfect irony by the gay/trans woman Quentin Crisp) awards him a palace and an annual financial gift if he only agrees to her terms: “Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old."

     Somehow he magically does not appear to age and is prepared to marry a venal woman who would probably drive him crazy until he meets the Russian Princess Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey) with whom he immediately falls in love. When she refuses his offer of marriage and fails to show up for a meeting with him under London Bridge, he undergoes a crisis of sorts which consists of several days of sleep (reminding me a little of the long day-long sleep that the young heroine of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt undergoes when she discovers that her beloved uncle is a murderer).

     Indeed, you might subtitle this film as “Sleeping Beauty.” Orlando recovers and to resolve his sorrows he takes a job as English ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, upon which yet further crises follow. Although Orlando remains a male, the addition of long male wigs during this era might almost be said to make him over into a woman, which, after another crisis which involves another long period of sleep, he finally discovers he has become. As Swinton quips: “Same person, no difference at all.”

      She now returns home as the glamorous Lady Orlando, immediately to be challenged by government lackeys over Elizabeth’s largesse, since women were not allowed to own property or accept the inheritance agreements that Orlando has.

      Over a period of 50-year transitions, we see the female Orlando tiresomely having to counter court suits while falling in love with a male, Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine (Billy Zane), and producing a daughter.

      By the early 1990s, when Potter’s film ends, she has nearly been worn out battling to declare her rights of gender, and the longevity of her life leads her to declare: “Today or always tomorrow I am neither a woman or a man.”

      Yet by the end, the “me” who Orlando has uncovered seems to find some peace simply sitting under an orchard tree with the daughter beside. Orlando finally has found a new outlet in writing a book about his/her history, accepted by a 20th-century editor played by Heathcote Williams, who earlier in the film, performing as the fictional Elizabethan poet Nick Greene, derided Orlando’s poetic attempts.

       The beauty of this film does not lie in its fragile and often incongruous plot, but in its dash through British history supported by the glorious art direction of Ben Van Os and Jan Roelfs and the costume design by Sandy Powell, all of whom were nominated for Academy Awards.

     Although there’s lots to think about in Porter’s film, the transformations of all kinds visually displayed make this excellent work a bit more like the films of Sergei Paradjanov than any other British or US filmmaker. And Swinton is at every moment someone to behold. She is simply a being to admire and love, helping us to comprehend, as Potter notes, “The intellect is a quite solitary space.”

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2020).