Better a thousand times to die than for to live so tormented: dear, but remember it was I who for thy sake did die contented

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX

1939

Directed by Michael Curtiz

Written by Norman Reilly Raine and Aeneas MacKenzie (based on the play Elizabeth the Queen by Maxwell Anderson)

Spoilers: welllll, how familiar are you with the reign of Elizabeth I?

The tradition of screen actresses mortifying themselves with false age and unattractiveness, and reaping critical praise for doing so, is well into its second century now; so it could not have been new when Bette Davis, aged 30, thrust herself into her preparations for the role of Elizabeth Tudor, aged 63, in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex—though it is a relatively early and iconic example of that tradition, and I'd tentatively venture that it was, at that point, the largest gap between an actor's real age and the age or ages of their character as portrayed over the course of a whole film.  (Goodbye, Mr. Chips—also 1939—didn't have Robert Donat playing 80 for the entire movie.*)  As for this film, the makeup is a great effort, and by all means Davis pursued her own—she shaved her eyebrows, and part of her head—though the effect is a little less "63, and 68 by the end," than it is A Creature, not necessarily disgusting (she's still Bette Davis in 1939), but bizarre, an effect heightened by Davis wearing Elizabethan (well, obviously) makeup, on top of that aging makeup, while every other woman in the film, principally Olivia de Havilland but also the other actresses portraying the queen's ladies-in-waiting, is under regular old late 1930s Technicolor screen makeup, so at the center of a whirlpool of extras corps beauty is a clown-faced pseudo-hag.  That'd do it, though the partially-shaved pate is probably the most estranging element, and while Elizabeth is known to have not been in possession of a robust head of hair (from genetics, smallpox, or both), you see actresses and costumers routinely doing this with the part, and to phrase this as an open question, because I'm certainly no expert, aren't they just replicating (and perhaps overemphasizing) Elizabeth's tall forehead?  That is, Elizabeth wore wigs, so did she intentionally wear ones that told you she was bald?

Davis joined the visual transformation with something vaguely like dialect work (it would be a modest exercise by today's standards and it barely registers, which I consider preferable; the thing that stands out the furthest is a penchant for saying "me" instead of "my," resurrected in The Virgin Queen, which in both films but especially this one reads more as an affectation of the character), while also researching, to the extent this could be done, the mannerisms of Elizabeth, which means a shocking amount of actor's business regarding a fidgety physicality that is the most salient means by which Davis appears "old," insofar as it's a positive quaking more akin to a nervous system disorder than a personal quirk.  It's not bad business exactly (Davis is modulating it a great deal, ensuring that Elizabeth is clawing at her beads and such in a really annoying way only in moments where she's under great stress), though it can be a little distracting.  All told, it's a very good technical performance (and not one that ends at impersonation, to be clear); she, rightfully, got that critical praise (though not an Oscar nomination, being nominated for 1939 for Dark Victory instead); and while it does genuinely benefit from it, maybe Elizabeth and Essex isn't even a movie where technique was all that important, anyway.  Enter Errol Flynn, our titular Essex, Flynn being one year Davis's junior, for the record, portraying a character initially two years older than himself.  Not frequently accused of being the thinking man's actor, you could accuse Flynn's casting of typage at best—or even Warner Bros. simply throwing their biggest star at an expensive production that didn't even speak to his strengths, which Davis, who actively disdained Flynn's participation, certainly did**—though maybe I go too far to imply that technique was of no importance here.  The very clash between Davis's intellectual, arguably overprepared method, boosted by artifice tantamount to special effects, and Flynn's more feeling, more persona-driven approach is one of the key reasons that this Old Hollywood period piece, that indeed does not necessarily speak to any of Flynn's strengths as they'd been established (guess how many sword fights there are, because they round down to "none"), nevertheless manages to be dynamic as anything he ever did, lush in melodramatic sensation at the same exact moment it's so remarkably psychologically and politically chewy.  Apocryphally, Davis herself eventually came around: screening the film years later with de Havilland (and with Flynn in the ground, so the story goes), she discovered with some surprise that she'd been wrong, and Flynn was pretty great too.

It's based on the 1930 play, Elizabeth the Queen, its title proving to be Davis and Flynn's first battleground.  While it'd be reasonable to assume (for I personally did) that Warners was merely exploiting the success of Alexander Korda's 1933 film with Charles Laughton as Henry VIII, The Private Life of Elizabeth's Dad, it turns out they had intended on using the play's title, but Flynn objected to this diminution of his fame—hey, maybe he was inhabiting his character—so for a spell it was The Knight and the Lady, yet Davis was adamant that her character be described first (I suspect she also determined that The Knight and the Lady was terrible), and plain Elizabeth and Essex was copyrighted elsewhere as the name of Lytton Strachey's scandal-centric 1928 history that was (I'd infer) the proximate inspiration for Elizabeth the Queen; thus The Private Lives riff they finally used was more like exhausted desperation than anything else, yet all for the good, because that is one nice title, memorable but also simultaneously descriptive and ironic, given how those private lives are destined to be tragically and inevitably destroyed by their public ones.  In any case, that's what we've got here, a very particular spin on the matter of Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England and Ireland, and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, not so much because of its supposition of the attachment felt by the one for the other—that was common enough—but because of what it does with it.

It begins with Robert's triumphal return to London in 1597 after his victory over the Spanish at Cadiz, which even so has failed to endear him to his queen, partly because his victory didn't enrich England the way he'd promised, for the Spanish treasure fleet was sunk rather than seized, but at least as much because that victory has grown his glory to rival that of Elizabeth herself, and she has long recognized the dangerous ambition burning in her favorite.  Nonetheless, despite an inordinately tense audience that concludes with her slapping him directly in the face (which Flynn complained was rather too real and, thanks to the costumery, had much more momentum behind it than he expected), he does remain Elizabeth's favorite, and for good reason, as they're lovers whose every other word is a kindness, even if the sweet ones pretty much always alternate with some baleful argument or another.

Though Robert is dismissed, Elizabeth eventually has an excuse to compel him back to court—the ongoing war in Ireland—but his pride is goaded into folly by his rivals, amongst whom number Sir Robert Cecil (Henry Stephenson) and Sir Walter Raleigh (Vincent Price), when he rejects the staff position in London that Elizabeth has set up for him, and instead blusters his way into the command of an army to be sent to Ireland to put down the rebel Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone (Alan Hale, usually to be found somewhere in any Flynn movie, albeit this time as an enemy).  Elizabeth gives the baby his bottle, and Robert meets disaster, thanks to the machinations at court resulting in an interdiction of all his communications with Elizabeth, undertaken by his male rivals as well as by the prospective rival for Elizabeth's affections in the form of Lady Penelope (de Havilland), who doesn't understand why Robert might prefer the ancient queen and who took it poorly when he made his preference clear.  Defeated but still in possession of an army, despite being formally relieved of his command and summoned back to London, Robert returns with vengeance, believing Elizabeth to have left him and his men to rot, and now aiming to topple his lover and become king in his own right, which is, of course, what he'd always wanted.  But even now he trusts Elizabeth too much, or maybe she does not trust him enough.  It's complicated.

That gets us more-or-less to the end, and perhaps I should say "there are, arguably, some actual spoilers here" because this 106 minute movie, though it begins and ends historically, is basically counterfactual in every possible respect for the 100 minutes in the middle.  The really amazing elision is that Essex was, in fact, married this whole time (he impregnated his wife five times), the occasion for a previous altercation with Elizabeth.  It's less surprising that they don't mention that he's Elizabeth's first cousin, though of the twice-removed variety, so let's not be ridiculous about that, since the much more interesting thing there—in that it adds to the movie's subtext—is that Essex was the child of Lettice Knollys from her first marriage, who, for her second marriage, "stole" Leicester, a previous favorite of Elizabeth's (with whom history more solidly confirms a specifically sexual affair), so the interesting part is that the legend of Elizabeth and Essex could be reductively but essentially characterized as Elizabeth saying to her despised cousin, "oh, yeah? well, now I've fucked your kid, bitch, and how do you like that?  Not as much as you'll dislike me beheading him."  (William Knollys (Ralph Forbes) is also in this movie, but his nephew is not acknowledged as such, though in fairness William had fourteen siblings so maybe he barely knew Essex.  Our Robert's chiefest ally, instead, is Francis Bacon (Donald Crisp).)  Alright, that's enough; let's cut bait on the Elizabethan minutia.  The other big, flat "what" is the suggestion that Essex failed in Ireland due to sabotage rather than his own ineptitude—to which we may add the insistence that his attempted coup ever had much of a chance.

Now, that gloss on the Nine Years War in Ireland, or something functionally like it, would be relatively necessary to this story, so I don't begrudge it being here; but it does occasion my least favorite things about the movie, for starters the way it obliges the production to include "action sequences," something it's oddly reluctant to do.  Despite this being very important, I have not so far noted that this was directed by Michael Curtiz, who was Flynn's most frequent director in this decade and was in some respects his creator, being the director of Captain Blood, Flynn's starmaking turn as the swashbuckler par excellence back in 1935, as well as several Flynn adventures in between.  The implication of the two working together here would be that this would have at least a touch of Captain Blood- or The Adventures of Robin Hood-quality action, particularly since it does concern a war on sea, a war on land, and ultimately an attempted coup d'etat.  And it feels like it doesn't give the first shit about satisfying that expectation, and even that this $1 million film (a substantial if not world-shaking sum in 1939) has spent all its money on palace sets—and then probably double that on just one actor's costumes—so "war in Ireland" is effectively a single, stagebound bog that is, arguably, more stagebound-looking and certainly more claustrophobic than any of those fanciful palace sets I just pointed out, and while the movie goes through the motions as grimly as Essex's army (Robert's arrogant generalship makes for a perfectly good passage in the screenplay, at least), it's ever more indicative of "warfare" than actually presenting something either experientially resembling it or even schematically representing it, and frankly comes off as mildly resentful that they even had to bother flooding the stage.  (Perhaps I should've also made clear that the exploits at Cadiz are long finished before the movie itself starts; and don't expect Robert's army of rebellion to be more than maybe a dozen guys, either.)  Still, this isn't my actual complaint: my actual complaint is that the plot-pivotal villainy is the childish simplicity of all communications between a monarch and her general being severed by a conspiracy that involves two dudes and one lady-in-waiting, rather than something even slightly more subtle and conceivable, not even forged letters.

And since I have brought it up, while action isn't much a part of the movie, that does not mean it does not achieve spectacle in other ways, and I've mentioned two of them.  Curtiz had come out of Middle Europe and brought with him a certain expressionist influence, which waxed and waned over his Hollywood tenure but is frequently still visible in his collaborations with art director Anton Grot (likewise a product of Middle Europe), so that even if you wouldn't necessarily call it "expressionist" there's something more and less than fully "real" about Elizabeth's Whitehall, a detailed storybook rendition of the palace, shiny and prone to recursive imagery down corridors that don't actually exist; it looks cool and takes full advantage of (another usual Curtiz collabator) Sol Polito's Technicolor photography.  Though as far as the color is concerned, nothing takes fuller advantage than Orry-Kelly's costumes, which is somewhat true for everyone but principally true regarding Davis and the ornate mech suits which he's built for her, sometimes as heavy as sixty pounds and shimmering with metallic (and I certainly wouldn't rule out plastic) interventions in the fabric that pull them well outside of simple historical accuracy and into some dreamy—arguably even nightmarish—idea of the Tudor queen that's at the disorienting business of being a 1930s reinterpretation of Tudor England's very own artistic tendency to render their queen as some sort of splendorous, superhuman, sometimes inhuman, goddess-like force.  (That everyone else is still dressed more-or-less like a period dipshit, and certainly not always the most forcible version of a Tudor dipshit, is arguably a "miss" for a more totalizing aesthetic, but only emphasizes Elizabeth's simultaneous isolation and centrality.)  The added challenges of Technicolor, meanwhile, have only slightly slowed Curtiz and Polito down—it probably behooved Curtiz to limit his typical constant camera movement, which is not, necessarily, a bad thing—but if it's a statelier construction than usual, it doesn't preempt that expressionism from coming out and landing rather hard when it does, increasingly so towards the end, especially a doom-inflected Curtizian shadow of Elizabeth (and Elizabeth's collar) that casts itself, powerfully and perhaps malignantly, across a room-dominating tapestry from English history (the metaphor needing no explanation) in a movement that upon its return finds the queen, mighty but alone (so... likewise).

I could glibly say Elizabeth's costumes would justify the film by themselves; it'd be true enough.  But it is all in support of a terribly investing story that, while it's not very concerned with historicity, feels agreeably Shakepsearean as an examination of ambition, love, gender (some gender-swapped version of this story might be virtually unimaginable for the 1500s, but, interestingly, not today), and power.  (Even the dumb plottiness somewhat goes to the Shakespearean vibe.)  Davis and Flynn, for their part, have the material and skill to realize an affair between two human beings that earnestly does mean a great deal to both of them, though that 106 minute runtime, and the fact that Elizabeth and Robert are separated for, probably, the majority of it, means it must be pursued efficiently, and they manage well; at the same time, it isn't remotely pure and at least Elizabeth knows this the entire time, Davis fully recognizing (and loathing herself for) the vain and quasi-predatory nature of using her court as her harem, while Flynn lies to himself about his motives until Davis forces him into reckoning them.  But what makes it heartrending is how two things always remain simultaneously true: Elizabeth and Robert do love one another, yet for precisely the reasons they do love one another, one of them must destroy the other, either by laying a queen prostrate before a man in Robert's case, or much more literally in Elizabeth's.  (Of course, as Elizabeth says, he'd probably have to kill her eventually, too, as she chides her boyfriend that he's not taking his coup sufficiently seriously.)  That they could be reconciled occurs to them; that their natures will never allow it in the long run seems undeniable, and even if they could change that much, in the end, Robert is given the chance to preserve his life, and takes, instead, the opportunity to give his only love a gift of infinite expense, that will cause her pain but is, at least, proof.  This arrives with a perfect series of ending shots, desolate but splendid (Flynn's denouement in particular suggests an actor of more insight than he's sometimes given credit for), punctuated by the reprise of composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold's theme for Elizabeth, a majestic march that now feels as ironic and mournful as the fate of the man and woman unfortunate enough to be Elizabeth and Essex.  It's at least as ironic that my favorite Errol Flynn movie might be the one where he doesn't stab even one guy; this is a near-run thing, but I could be talked into it.

Score: 10/10

*Davis played Elizabeth again in 1955's The Virgin Queen—essentially a knock-off of this with none of its emotional complexity—meeting the monarch in the middle, with that film's Elizabeth being, hypothetically, a decade younger than the one here.

**She'd hoped for Laurence Olivier, and allow me to express my customary bafflement at the cult of Olivier that already existed, even in the 30s.  Olivier's style would've been absolutely fatal here.