Alexander Korda (1941)
The only film in which Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh appeared together while they were married – and a distinctive confection. The title seems to refer to the notorious public reputation of Emma Hamilton, to hint at an exploration of who she was behind that reputation. (The picture’s theatrical release poster reinforced this by adding an exclamation mark after the title.) Vivien Leigh’s Emma is, most of the time, the protagonist. But when That Hamilton Woman got made skews the latter part of the narrative in a big way. What can only be called a sea change occurs when the stuffy admiralty informs Nelson (Olivier) of a peace treaty between Britain and France (presumably the Treaty of Amiens in 1802). He angrily responds that:
‘… you will never make peace with Napoleon! Napoleon cannot be master of the world until he has smashed us up, and believe me, gentlemen, he means to be master of the world! You cannot make peace with dictators. You have to destroy them, wipe them out!’
The film’s first audiences knew well that Nelson had someone other than Napoleon in mind.
According to Wikipedia, Alexander Korda’s film, which opened in America in spring 1941 and in Britain the summer of that year, drew the ire of the isolationist America First Committee (AFC), who objected to a picture that ‘seemed to be preparing America for war’. (Others in the same AFC category included the previous year’s Foreign Correspondent and The Great Dictator.) Korda, accused of ‘operating an espionage and propaganda center for Britain in the United States’, was due to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 12 December 1941. The appointment was cancelled following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor five days beforehand. That Hamilton Woman is famous as Winston Churchill’s favourite film. Although the screenplay is credited to Walter Reisch and R C Sherriff, it’s even been suggested that Churchill was the author of Nelson’s patriotic speeches.
It’s not surprising that the several different names under which the film was released internationally (according to IMDB) include ‘The Battle of Trafalgar’[1], which provides a well-staged climax and Olivier with an impressive death scene. (He never lost his talent for remarkably physicalised agonies – as the television Brideshead Revisited, forty years later, proves.) The sequences aboard HMS Victory are followed by Emma’s receipt of Captain Hardy’s bad news. This scene too is impressive and imaginative. Hardy (Henry Wilcoxon) keeps delaying telling Emma that Nelson is dead. She shows no sign of impatience. Vivien Leigh makes us believe that she prefers Hardy’s anguished prevarication to hearing him say what she knows must have happened. Even so, a decisive switch to Nelson as the central figure has now taken place and the leading lady can’t quite regain the initiative. The narrative is bookended by scenes in Calais, where the aging, alcoholic, fallen-on-hard-times Emma tells her story to a street girl (Heather Angel) with whom she shares a prison cell. In the closing sequence, the cellmate eagerly asks, ‘And then … What happened after?’ Emma replies, ‘There is no then. There is no after’. That’s the end of the film and the effect is anti-climactic in not quite the right way. It’s as if Korda himself has lost interest in his heroine.
Rudolph Maté’s black-and-white photography and sets designed by the director’s brother Vincent give the picture, especially the opulent residence of Emma’s uncle and husband Sir William Hamilton (Alan Mowbray), the British ambassador to Naples, a glossy, expensive look. Yet the film, even before its climactic change of tack, doesn’t penetrate the surface of its production in the way this viewer had hoped, seeing it so soon after Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII. The passion of the Nelson-Emma love affair is constrained by a Hollywood-history stiffness and coarsened by an overwrought Miklós Rózsa score that has to be heard to be believed.
Even though the historical context of its making now eclipses That Hamilton Woman as drama, some elements of the latter have aged well. In the opening Calais scene, the blows exchanged by a police officer and Emma are startlingly realistic. Vivien Leigh, at the height of her post-Gone with the Wind fame, gives a fine performance: her changes of mood and pace are dazzling. The women in the cast, although in a small minority, make a strong impression: Gladys Cooper, as Nelson’s chilly, shrewish but convincingly offended wife; the Irish actress Sara Allgood as Emma’s mother. The latter wasn’t really Irish but Allgood’s accent and presence help convey a sense of Emma’s humble origins that Leigh’s poise and beauty obscure. The mother’s xenophobic chatter (which also reflects the world of 1941) in a dinner-table scene is an entertaining highlight.
The men are relatively boring – even Olivier at times. He’s deft in the low-key moments with Leigh, a bit dull when he smoulders and particularly when he delivers an admittedly prosy speech, as bells ring in the new century, in which Nelson lists big names and events of the old one. Henry Wilcoxon is a handsome, likeable Hardy, though he overdoes the grief when Hardy finally spits it out that Nelson’s dead. As the cuckolded Sir William, Alan Mowbray is even duller than he’s surely meant to be. The phrase ‘that Hamilton woman’ does occur a couple of times in the film, including in a letter that Nelson’s son Josiah (Ronald Sinclair) writes his mother.
19 January 2019
[1] This was the film’s title in Portugal, where it was released at the end of 1941. In several other countries, it was Lady Hamilton. In Italy and West Germany, where it didn’t see the light of day until the early post-war years, it was respectively, Il grande ammiraglio (‘The Great Admiral’) and Lord Nelsons letzte Liebe (‘Lord Nelson’s Last Love’).
