DVD/150: MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS (Charles Jarrott, 1971)

Producer Hal Wallis and director Jarrott hoped lightning would strike twice after ANNE OF THE THOUSAND DAYS with MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS.

However, John Hale's basic screenplay, constantly switching between the courts of Mary and Elizabeth I, never delivers a firm momentum and, as with every screen representation of Mary, she remains an enigma - a woman who things were done to, never an instigator.

Unsurprisingly, the film comes alive in the scenes we know are fiction, the two confrontations between Mary and Elizabeth.  They never met in actuality but it's too good an opportunity to pass up for dramatists - as in Schiller's MARY STUART - and of course it delivers the electric shock of Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson having at each other.

Glenda, in the same year as playing Elizabeth for the BBC, is all fire and brimstone while Vanessa is the ultimate willowy, romantic Queen, all air and light.

Shelf or charity shop?  Shelf.  Ultimately it might be a bit of a dull plod but it is worth the climb for the two confrontation scenes where Vanessa and Glenda light up the screen with their on and off-screen personas.  The male supporting cast hold their own against their warring Queens: Trevor Howard, Ian Holm. Timothy Dalton, Patrick McGoohan and Nigel Davenport all deliver strong performances while John Barry's score and Margaret Furse's costumes make it a pleasure for the ear and eye.  It's a pity Jarrott couldn't bring a more powerful flourish to match his leading ladies - still, I will take this every time over the turgid Josie Rourke version.

 

DVD/150: ANNE OF THE THOUSAND DAYS (Charles Jarrott, 1969)

Here is the one to blame as ANNE OF THE THOUSAND DAYS made me a junior film buff.

I came out of the Kensington Odeon obsessed: Photoplay and Film Review magazines were bought, the souvenir brochure was pored over and the novelization was read continuously..and is still on my bookshelf.

You can never tell what film will set you off into buffdom, but when it happens it has you for life.

Charles Jarrott's film is 1960s historical drama at it's height and I still swoon at Margaret Furse's glorious Academy Award-winning costumes.

The script betrays it's stage origins and seems over-awed by it's characters but it's a world I can happily re-visit.

But it's the performances that I adored then and now: Richard Burton at his most charismatic as Henry VIII and the blazing intellegence and steely resolve of the magnificent Genevieve Bujold as Anne Boleyn.

Shelf or charity shop?  Reigning on the shelf as befits such a special film to me personally.  I would certainly like to mention the cello-like sorrow of Irene Papas as Queen Katherine and Anthony Quayle's over-reaching Cardinal Wolsey, along with a cast of dependable actors like John Colicos as the truly evil Cromwell, Michael Hordern, Peter Jeffrey, William Squire, and Nicola Pagett in a blink-and-you-miss-it role as Princess Mary.

 

DVD/150: MADELEINE (David Lean, 1950)

Ah the long-standing problem of film directors and their leading lady wives... David Lean filmed MADELEINE as a wedding present for Ann Todd after their marriage the previous year but one suspects that a bracelet might have been better; Lean thought it "the worst film I ever made".

Based on a notorious 1857 murder trial in Glasgow, Madeleine Smith was the daughter of a respectable middle-class family who had a secret two-year affair with a French man called Emile L'Angelier.

When Emile demanded marriage, Madeleine tried ending the affair and demanded the return of her love letters. A month later, Emile was dead from Arsenic poisoning... and Madeleine had recently purchased some from a chemist.

Madeleine walked free from her trial after the jury returned a verdict of Not Proven, her guilt or her innocence not conclusively proved.

Lean's film looks marvellous but is remote and uninvolving.

Shelf or charity shop?  On the shelf only because it's part of a David Lean box-set.  The film remains watchable due of the wonderful contributions of frequent Lean collaborators: Guy Green's cinematography, John Bryan's art direction and Margaret Furse's Victorian costumes.  While the show-room dummy performances of Norman Wooland and Ivan Desny fade while you watch them, the real flaw in the film is the dead-eyed glacial performance of Ann Todd.  An actress who projected the heat of a mortuary slab, she was simply too old for the role and one wonders how much better it could have been with a younger actress like Joan Greenwood, Jean Simmons, Jean Kent or even Deborah Kerr.