Sherry Chandler

Elizabeth and Essex

Something seems to have put Errol Flynn off his stride in the royal soap opera that is The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Maybe it was the fact that Bette Davis despised him. But I think it’s all the talk. Poppysmatus said the sentences are too long for him.

I thought at first that was a cruel remark but upon reflection I think it may be true. Based on the Maxwell Anderson play Elizabeth the Queen, the movie is all (often brilliant) talk, with quite a bit of pageantry thrown in, but blessed little real action. All the fencing is with words. And Flynn was a very physical actor.

But then that is part of the point about Essex. He is a warrior, not a courtier.

Davis had wanted Laurence Olivier as her foil, and no doubt he would have been easier with the speeches, though he didn’t have the same insouciance that made Flynn so irresistible. Olivier’s was often a brooding presence, too thinky, like Hamlet. Anyway, Olivier’s only dimple was in his chin.

In her later years, Davis recanted and proclaimed Flynn’s performance brilliant.

All performances seem a little fraught to my modern eye. Davis, perhaps hampered by the farthingales and corsets of her utterly gorgeous costumes, opens, closes, shakes, and drums her fingers so frenetically that my son asked me whether Elizabeth I had a palsy. Her hands were about all that she could or was allowed to move. And Alan Hale, as the Irish rebel Tyrone, is a wonderful example of how not to do an Irish accent. It is fun to see Vincent Price in pink tights as Sir Walter Raleigh and Nannette Fabray makes her debut performance as a lady in waiting.

Donald Crisp is fine as an ambiguous Sir Francis Bacon. What exacty, asked my son, did Francis Bacon do when he wasn’t writing Shakespeare? In fact, it is amazing what all these courtiers did accomplish in a lifetime. Maybe it was because they didn’t have television.

The technicolor is gorgeous, especially compared to something like The Black Pirate (1926), which was done in a very early two-color Technicolor. The amazing thing about that is that the process worked at all. Elizabeth and Essex is eye candy. One of its five Oscar nominations was for cinematography. Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s satisfyingly bombastic score was also nominated.

For all my praising with faint damns, I don’t want to leave the impression that this is a negligible movie. The script is wonderful, the characters fully realized, and the performances better than I may have led you to believe.

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