The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex

Maxwell Anderson, a reliably dull playwright, scored a Broadway success with The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex -- a melodrama about an alleged love affair between Queen Elizabeth and Essex, one of her cavaliers.  Michael Curtiz adapted the play to film for Warner Brothers in 1939 and the movie was a prestige production -- it stars Bette Davis at her most imperious and the perilously handsome Errol Flynn as Essex.  It's not a very good movie, but one that is important I think. 

The plot is static, revolving around the aging Queen's hopeless desire for the much-younger Essex -- it's really just a situation with variations and the unhappy end for Essex is pretty clearly presaged from the first encounter between them dramatized by the movie.  Essex has come from a great naval victory in which he has sent the Spanish fleet to the bottom of the harbor at Cadiz.  Elizabeth, however, petulantly berates him for failing to save for her the Spanish treasure, gold and jewels, on the ships that he has destroyed.  She pouts and, when he expresses dissatisfaction, exiles him to the thankless task of exterminating Irish rebels.  Of course, the whole time Essex is hunting Irishmen on the Emerald Isle, Elizabeth is pining away for him back at the palace at Whitehall.  She writes him letters, but these are intercepted by vicious courtiers, apparently Sir Francis Bacon (played by the ever-stalwart Donald Crisp), and Elizabeth ultimately assumes that Essex is snubbing her.  She cuts off his supplies and troops with the result that the doughty Irish rebels humiliate him in the field.  When he returns to London, she summons him to her throne-room for a long duet in which both the Queen and Essex express love for one another.  Essex has essentially staged a coup -- his men are occupying the castle.  When the Queen says that she loves Essex, he withdraws his troops  as a gesture of good faith whereupon she has him promptly arrested and thrown in the Tower of London.  He broods.  She broods.  There is another duet and, then, Essex has his head cut-off ending the film.  This is all staged with maximum pageantry and the colorful costumes, particularly the Queen's gowns, are truly spectacular -- the film is shot in Technicolor.  The speeches are in faux-Elizabethan verse that is not really effective -- it's more irritating than really poetic.  Bette Davis is astounding as the tormented, unrequited Queen -- she stutters and makes her hands flutter around her hips hidden by the grandiose bustles that she wears:  her performance is integral to how we think a queen should act.  Indeed, Davis' performance seems to have been taken as a model for just about everything (including TV interviews) that Katherine Hepburn did after The African Queen.  And Davis is an utterly bizarre apparition in the film -- her make-up is not so much pale white as a sort of metallic leaden pallor.  Her lips are pinched and her hair is pulled so fiercely back away from her forehead that she seems to be bald.  Her eyes are impenetrable and, oddly enough, here seem very tiny, almost Asian in their configuration -- this is curious because Davis, of course, was famous for her large, seductively luminous eyes.  She seems to be two-dimensional, flat as a paramecium -- she has width but no breadth.  Her gowns are breathtaking -- layers of shimmering satin, pearl brocades, and ice-white ruffs under her throat, but the garments are ultimately inhuman:  they shape her in two dimension and her waist is so tightly corseted that her form looks monstrous.  Indeed, Davis' Queen Elizabeth is conceived as a sort of monster -- she looks nothing at all like the other women in the movie, most of them ruddy-faced and showing lots of décolletage.  The Queen, by contrast, is an eerie mannequin.  She's so scary that it doesn't seem possible that the remarkably handsome, but robust Errol Flynn could possibly love her -- she is like some creature from another planet compared to the other humans beings in the movie.  (The Queen recognizes that she looks exceedingly strange -- in one spectacular scene, she smashes up a bunch of mirrors in recognition that she is too old and ugly to love Essex; this is while her court ladies are both taunting, and regaling her, with Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his Nymph" together with Raleigh's reply -- Raleigh is played by Vincent Price.)  As I watched the film, a number of the sequences seemed familiar to me -- the monstrous queen lurking under the groined vaults in her huge, gloomy palace, the shadows of henchmen and musicians limned on the dark, heavy walls, the ever-present sense of violence surrounding the Kabuki Queen.  It's my contention that this film, particularly with respect to its bizarre portrayal of Elizabeth, is a direct source of Eisenstein's even more peculiar and radically strange Ivan the Terrible, particularly the Technicolor sequences in Part Two.  Both Curtiz's Elizabeth and Eisenstein's Ivan are monsters surrounded by relatively normal people.

The dialogue in the film is spectacularly tortured.  In some respects, the interplay between Elizabeth and Essex is like some queer imperial version of Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage.  Long sequences are just campy bickering. At the climax, Elizabeth asks Essex if he loves her.  Somewhat improbably Essex says he loves her, wants to marry her, and desires, in that way, to become King.  She demands that he love her without requiring that he rule over the country.  He refuses.  She, then, tells him that he would be a terrible King because of his lust for glory and fame.  After sulking a little Essex agrees with her.  He says that she's right to point out that he would be a terrible king.  He, then, says that he supposes he could love her without being king but, if it were suggested that he made this accommodation with her to avoid beheading, he would be shamed.  So, then, Elizabeth agrees he can become King.  But now he is convinced that he lacks "kingly stuff" and sulks some more  before stomping down through a trap-door that somehow connects the throne-room with the Tower.  As he departs, Elizabeth cries out that she'll give him anything to be with him as his lover.  But it's too late -- the bitchy Essex has abandoned her for the tender mercies of the headsman on the scaffold.  This stuff is ineffably silly and shockingly dull, but the film is mounted lavishly and, from a purely visual standpoint, it's surrealistic to see the lively robust Errol Flynn embracing the emaciated, gaunt and monstrous corpse-queen played by Bette Davis.

(An interesting sidelight, this was the first film in which Nanette Fabray, here credited under her actual name Nanette Fabares appeared.  Nanette Fabray was a later fixture in Hollywood, most famous for playing Betty Comden in the Fred Astaire - Vincent Minnelli masterpiece The Band Wagon.)