The Lion in Winter
Anthony Harvey (1968)
I saw The Lion in Winter in Sheffield on Saturday 6 December 1969, two days before my fourteenth birthday. It was a memorable weekend for other reasons, which rather eclipsed the experience of the film – although, as I recall, I didn’t much enjoy it anyway. I’d never seen The Lion in Winter since, until last night at BFI, and it made for a dismal ending to my engagement with the Katharine Hepburn season. I’ve been very selective in what I’ve seen, knowing already that I liked Alice Adams and feeling pretty sure that Hannah McGill’s talk introducing the season would be worth hearing (as it was). Even so, I’d not previously seen either Summertime or Long Day’s Journey into Night and both were great to watch; there seemed a fair chance that The Lion in Winter would have improved with age. An immediate problem was that the years had brought about, in physical terms, a serious deterioration in the film. The front-of-house man (the pleasant, competent one) explained that the colour had faded, that we could expect the images to have a ‘pinkish hue’ but that this was currently the best available print. The ‘pinkish hue’ was an understatement: Douglas Slocombe’s palette had been reduced to a virtually sepia colour range. But although the look of the film compounded my irritation with The Lion in Winter, it wasn’t the root cause.
The screenplay is an adaptation by James Goldman of his stage play, which opened on Broadway in 1966. The principal characters are the first Plantagenet king of England, Henry II; his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine; and their three surviving sons, Richard, John and Geoffrey. The time is Christmas 1183 – a few months after the death of Henry and Eleanor’s eldest son, Henry. Eleanor, imprisoned by her husband in various locations in England for many years, is brought to the king’s castle in Chinon, Anjou for a ‘Christmas court’. Eleanor wants Richard to succeed Henry as king when the time comes (as primogeniture would dictate); Henry prefers the youngest of the three brothers, John. (If Henry has the authority to keep his queen under lock and key, I’m not sure why he has to argue the toss with her over the succession, but let that pass.) There are also matters to settle with the young French king, Philip II (the son and successor of Eleanor’s ex-husband, Louis VII of France): Philip has given his half-sister Alais, currently Henry’s mistress, to the future heir to the English throne, and is now demanding either a wedding or the return of Alais’s dowry. The background is historical but the story James Goldman tells is largely fictional. Pauline Kael described the dramatis personae as ‘a family of monsters playing Freudian games of sex and power’ but it’s the tone of the proceedings that makes The Lion in Winter unusual for a medieval historical piece. Goldman translates the manoeuvring of the technically noble characters into a royally undignified and recognisably modern squabble.
The Lion in Winter was turned into a movie hot on the heels of Becket and A Man for All Seasons, two other English history plays that had been hits on stage and successfully adapted (good box-office, critical plaudits, multiple Oscar awards and/or nominations) for the screen. From the start, it’s clear that Anthony Harvey has decided to sacrifice the distinctiveness of the material in favour of assuring the audience that this is another prestige drama about kings and queens of England. (Harvey’s decision was vindicated to the extent that The Lion in Winter was similarly ‘successful’.) The scene-setting includes: Henry training the hopeless John in swordsmanship in a lush, open landscape; Richard preparing to dispatch an opponent in the lists; Geoffrey on a cliffside, supervising the ambush of a group of horsemen on the beach below; and Eleanor’s arrival at Chinon on the royal barge. There are Olympian camera shots of men and animals miles below; and the usual attempts to convey the primitive bustle of medieval life – dogs barking, hens squawking, and so on. This introduction is as pointless as it’s protracted: once the characters go indoors at Chinon, there’s little rationale for visual action and what camera movement there is, feels arbitrary. From this point onwards, the actors might as well be on stage. But although Anthony Harvey’s interest in the physical world of the piece slackens, he continues to encourage his cast to look for depth in their lines – as if this was a logical consequence of acting royalty playing historical royalty.
It turns out to be a wild goose chase. Although individual lines are clever, the structure and flavour of Goldman’s dialogue is samey. It’s one Machiavellian barb after another; every so often, the barbs are punctuated – and the high style is punctured – by knowing bathos. (One of the best-known lines in the script is Eleanor’s ‘Well, what family doesn’t have its ups and downs’?) The lack of variety in the writing does no favours to the unique timbre and rhythm of Katharine Hepburn’s voice, which has the effect of emphasising the sameness of what she’s saying. Hepburn also semi-anglicises her accent and this gives an artificial edge to her readings. She’s a notoriously patrician actress yet here she seems to be pretending to be grand. She has a striking moment when the queen, alone in her chamber, looks in her mirror and mocks her aging features. In the company of others, her wit and combativeness feel mechanical – and more like an assertion of superiority to fellow actors than a quality of the character she’s playing.
When she made this film Hepburn was sixty-one, just as Eleanor of Aquitaine was in 1183. Whereas Eleanor was Henry’s senior by eleven years, Peter O’Toole was twenty-five years younger than Katharine Hepburn and it shows, to his disadvantage. O’Toole had already played the younger Henry II in Becket and one of the highlights of that performance came in his tirade against Eleanor and his mother Matilda; in Henry’s opening outburst in the sword-fighting instruction to John, O’Toole picks up where he left off in Becket. He’s occasionally amusing in later exchanges too but even he becomes tiresome – both in delivery of the flamboyant invective and when he tries for something beyond it. Anthony Hopkins conveys, with brimming eyes, a sense of the anguish felt by the supposedly gay Richard (Coeur de Lion-to-be) yet the ‘truthfulness’ of Hopkins’s acting is embarrassing – especially since the staging of the scene in which Richard’s homosexual feelings for King Philip are revealed is farcical (Philip hides first Geoffrey and John, then, when Henry drops in for a discussion, Richard, behind curtains in his chamber). John Castle is a good and, I think, underrated actor but he’s monotonous as Geoffrey. Timothy Dalton manages to make Philip a reasonably amusing combination of dashing and callow, and his movement sometimes has a naturally kinetic quality that’s in short supply elsewhere in the film. Jane Merrow is woodenly elocutionary as Alais.
Given these complaints, I should have been grateful for Nigel Terry, whose hapless, petulant John looks like a village idiot from a Carry On film. In fact, I found Terry’s very basic caricature harder to watch than anything else – I felt embarrassed for him because, in this case only, Anthony Harvey gets the actor to be simply comical. It makes Terry look painfully limited in the exalted company around him. John Barry’s score manages to fuse fake grandeur and humour successfully but nothing else in the film does. It was my reaction to Peter O’Toole that made me realise I wouldn’t like The Lion in Winter however it was played, but that playing it for real was worse than playing it for camp laughs. Since (a) my elder sister and her husband took me to see it in 1969, (b) I didn’t know my way around Sheffield and (c) I wouldn’t have dared speak my mind anyway, of course I stayed put during the film and I’m sure I kept shtum afterwards. More than forty-five years on, fury and boredom converged so strongly in NFT1 that I felt I couldn’t and shouldn’t stand The Lion in Winter any longer. I walked out an hour before the end.
16 March 2015