Alexander Korda (1933)
I expected great things from Charles Laughton in the title role (and wasn’t disappointed). I didn’t expect Alexander Korda’s film to be so good in other departments too. An opening title card explains waggishly that Catherine of Aragon won’t put in an appearance – ‘her story is of no particular interest – she was a respectable woman’. Besides, the huge political significance of the end of Henry’s marriage to Catherine doesn’t accord with the film’s prevailing jaunty spirit; and it’s important to the structure of the screenplay, by Korda’s fellow Hungarian Lajos Bíró and Arthur Wimperis, that The Private Life of Henry VIII is bookended by the beheadings of the two Henry queens to meet that fate, Anne Boleyn and Katherine [sic] Howard. On both occasions, the crowds are out in force and include a spectator on whom Korda focuses. Even though this character is unnamed and the actress who plays her (Toni Edgar-Bruce) was uncredited, she’s a telling illustration of the overall approach.
As the stage is set for Anne’s execution, this well-spoken Tudor lady tells her husband how sorry she feels for the queen then perks up to ask the woman in front of her, ‘Would you mind removing your hat? We can’t see the block’. After the deed is done, she enthuses about Anne’s choice of dress. The spectator’s social manner and turn of phrase are contemporary with 1933. Her high-speed switches from sentimentality to ghoulish curiosity to frock appreciation mean she’s still recognisable as a particular breed of royalty fanatic. I noticed at the start that the film originally received an ‘A’ (children to be accompanied by an adult) certificate from the BBFC and that seems right. There’s some enjoyable broad comedy but Bíró’s and Wimperis’s dialogue is often sophisticated and there are plenty of double entendres. It’s remarkable how comfortably the film accommodates the events of the story within a consistently comic frame – how it also manages to deploy anachronism and caricature without merely deriding the historical personages on the screen. By coincidence, I watched the eighty-six-year-old The Private Life of Henry VIII in the same week that Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite opened in British cinemas. The Korda treatment of historical royal court shenanigans strikes me as the more sophisticated as well as the more likeable of the two.
The modest timeframe of the film – from 1536 to the mid-1540s – draws attention to how back-loaded Henry’s matrimonial history was. His marriage to Catherine of Aragon lasted twenty-four years (1509-33); the subsequent five marriages added up to fourteen. The last of them, to Catherine Parr, began in 1543 and ended with Henry’s death in early 1547. Charles Laughton is playing Henry from his mid-forties to his mid-fifties. It no doubt helps that Laughton, thirty-three at the time, was prematurely heavy and the ageing make-up is good. But this great actor ages beneath the make-up too. Laughton rings the changes on the sustained childishness of Henry’s boundless egotism to persuasive and brilliantly entertaining effect. In the early scenes, he’s insolently clever. Later on, as he declines physically, he’s almost touchingly dependent and vulnerable. Korda contrasts the king’s responses to the firing of the cannon that confirms his queen’s execution has taken place: Henry is callously relieved that the wait for Anne Boleyn’s end is over, desolate and upset at the death of Katherine Howard. Laughton’s development of character in the interim ensures this latter reaction is natural and credible. His command of voice and gesture are a wonder. This performance is famous for exuberant gluttonous demolition of roast fowl but watch Laughton too in his last, furtive encounter with a chicken leg when the scolding Catherine Parr has left the room. The appetite is willing but the digestive apparatus by now pretty weak. Charles Laughton won the Best Actor Oscar for his work in this film. There can have been few wittier or more deserving recipients of the award.
The project originally developed as a joint starring vehicle for Laughton and his wife Elsa Lanchester, who plays Anne of Cleves. Then other queens were added to the recipe. Lanchester is appealing and amusing: the scene in which Henry and Anne play cards for money and move on to discussing terms of a divorce settlement is a real highlight. (Anne comes out of both contests ahead.) Merle Oberon has a nice combination of poise and fear in her brief appearance as Anne Boleyn. Everley Gregg (best remembered for playing Dolly Messiter in Brief Encounter) is amusing in her even briefer turn as Catherine Parr. It hardly matters that Wendy Barrie’s Jane Seymour makes little impression – she too isn’t around for long – but Katherine Howard is the queen with the most screen time and Binnie Barnes, though competent, is somewhat bland. The affair between Katherine and Henry’s adviser Thomas Culpeper sits less comfortably than other parts of the narrative in the tonal scheme and Robert Donat seems uneasy as Culpeper. The other key Thomases of the court manage to be distinctively amusing without camping things up – Franklin Dyall (Cromwell), Miles Mander (Wriothesley), Laurence Hanray (Cranmer). John Loder is Anne of Cleves’s inamorato Peynell (yet another Thomas). The film’s antiquity is reflected in the presence, as the king’s nurse, of the widow of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. She’s even credited as Lady Tree.
4 January 2019
