The Lion in Winter
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Movie Reviews of The Lion in Winter
Movie Review: Not an everyday Christmas tale...
Summary: 5 Stars
'There'll be pork in the treetops come morning!' Thus shouts Queen Eleanor of Acquitaine to King Henry II, in a shouting match that never ends during the course of the fabulous film. An inventive historical drama recounting the lives of several of medieval Europe's most colourful characters, I can scarce begin to list the number of lines that stand out from the banter.
`The Lion in Winter' has long been one of my favourite films. I never tire of watching it, and love to find opportunities to incorporate lines from the film into my own `witty banter' as appropriate. Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn, in performances nearly unequalled by either in other works, provide the main action, while the very young actors Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Dalton help fill out the cast in their debut roles (Nigel Terry, later to play King Arthur in 'Excalibur', also plays one of the king's sons). Done in period costume and set (the King emerging from his castle, not on a red carpet, but rather striding among the chickens scrambling to escape the regal steps), there is an air of realism to the visual production that is rarely achieved in more stately presentations of 'lofty' history. There are interesting asides, not the least of which is that King Henry seems make reference to being a bisexual -- a very daring thing in the 1960s, as well as the rumoured love affair between Richard (Richard the Lionhearted) and the King of France. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, it won three, including best screenplay -- no wonder so many delightfully witty, pithy lines come from this film.
The real history of Henry and Eleanor provides the backdrop here. Henry kept Eleanor, one of the most desirable women (apparently in form as well as property) in Europe, a virtual prisoner during much of the later part of his reign. After his eldest son Henry died (an heir crowned in the lifetime of Henry II, a rare thing among monarchs, done in part because of the church-state problems dating back to Thomas Becket, alluded to very briefly in the dialogue of the film), Henry needs a new successor. Contrary to popular belief, the succession does not automatically proceed down the ranks of the eldest children (this would arise as an issue again during Tudor times, when there was first the attempt to skip over Mary and Elizabeth in favour of Lady Jane Grey; then later, the Stuart claim comes from their having been skipped over previously, by some definitions).
Of course, Richard (Anthony Hopkins) expects to be the heir - next in line, he is also the best soldier and general. Henry (for some unknown reason) prefers John (Nigel Terry), the youngest. Geoffrey (John Castle) is all but forgotten - history will have him die prior to Henry in any event, but he has the poignant line that speaks of Geoffrey's forgotten place in history. `No one ever mentions crown and thinks of Geoff, why is that?'
The family has been brought together for Christmas in Chinon. This is a family best left apart, with great distances between them, as the sparks fly. All of the action here takes place in the course of two days at most and in the end, nothing is really resolved here. Plots keep spinning and turning, more Byzantine than the Byzantines could ever hope to be, without any real conclusion. I guess politics never change after all.
The sets are great, realistic, filmed in castle settings in Ireland, Britain and France. Nice touches include the juxtaposition of the commonplace with the royal - unlike today's royal cocoon, there wasn't much distance between the lordly types and the regular folk. The costuming is likewise well-done, understated but entirely appropriate.
However, this is a film of dialogue, based on the play by James Goldman (who also did the screenplay). The plots and twists are non-stop, rather like a chess game conducted with real careers and acerbic, witty commentary designed both for pleasure and pain as the situation progresses. In the end, there is a merry stalemate, and Eleanor returns to her confinement, and one assumes history proceeds apace. One almost forgets this is supposed to be a Christmas gathering!
At several points in the activity, the characters confess exhaustion and faint from the efforts of continually trying to outflank each other. Yet the politics, here both national and family in character, goes on.
A fantastic film, one that holds up well with age.
Movie Review: Tennessee Williams meets Ivanhoe!
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie shares the top spot on my personal ten best list with "2001: A Space Odyssey". Play/screenwriter James Goldman had the idea of putting the spirit and dialogue of a Tennessee Williams family-centered drama into a well known medieval setting: The household of Henry II, Plantagenet, of England, brilliantly played by Peter O'Toole, and it works unlike any other medieval period piece you've ever seen!
The Plantagenet family is as dysfunctional as anything you've seen in "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" or "Suddenly Last Summer", with covetous children, ("Excalibur's" Nigel Terry, "Blow-Up's" John Castle and Anthony Hopkins, doing a bad Richard Burton imitation,) lusting after their parents' land and power, and a king who has imprisoned his wife, Queen Consort Eleanor of Aquitaine, mother of his three sons, for ten years due to conspiratorial behavior. This role is played by the brilliant Katherine Hepburn.
This is topped off by a near familial connection with the truly Machiavellian, newly crowned king of France, Philip II, played by an unrecognizable Timothy Dalton. He plays the Plantagenets like a harp, corrupting the oldest, Richard (yes, the "Lionhearted",) and holding the betrothal of his sister to Richard over Henry's head like the Sword of Damocles. Through all of this, Henry and Eleanor spar with each other AND their sons over the heirs they prefer to succeed Henry, the king PLAYING like he favors the gimpish John so as to get concessions out of Eleanor and Richard, and Eleanor favoring Richard, who she has apparently turned into the ultimate momma's boy. Both of them generally ignore the vastly more presentable and level headed Geoffrey, whom Henry and Philip see as a bit of a weasel. Geoffrey makes his resentment for generally being ignored by Henry and Eleanor known throughout the movie, and you have to wonder, as the brood is portrayed by the actors here, why DID they disdain him?! Henry states HIS take on Geoffrey pretty succinctly: "Geoffrey...! There's a masterpiece! He isn't flesh, he's a DEVICE! He's wheels and GEARS...!"
The deep, personal bollides are thrown back and forth like ninja stars in this drama, gouging each character to the bone. Henry:"How about a pillow, a shawl, a footstool....? Your promises mean nothing, your words are all profanity, and your name on paper is a waste of pulp....! I'M VILLIFYING FOR GOD'S SAKE! PAY ATTENTION!!" Eleanor: "How many spindly, ricket-ridden, milky, wizened, dim-eyed, gammy-handed, limpid line of THINGS, will you beget?" Geoffrey: (Dripping sarcasm) "I know...you know I know...I KNOW you know I know. We know Henry knows, and Henry knows we know it. We're a knowledgeable family!" Eleanor: "Be Richard's chancellor!" Geoffrey: "Rot!" Eleanor: "Sons? That is the SINGLE THING of which I would think you've had enough! We could populate a country town with country girls who bore you sons! How many are there? Let me count the [...]!" John: "If I should suddenly burst into flames, there isn't a living soul who would pee on me to put the fire out!" Richard: "Let's strike a flint and see..." I'm not even sure "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" was this entertaining, dysfunctionality-wise!
Geoffrey and John ally themselves with Philip and things really get heavy as they witness the most shocking scene in the movie from behind a tapestry in Philip's guest quarters. This scene may actually be the basis for the erroneous assertion that Richard the Lionhearted was gay. He probably wasn't. If he were, and considering that this was roughly taking place during the same period as the Spanish Inquisition was getting started, chances are both Philip AND Richard would have been excommunicated SOOOO fast, their heads would have spun, if not been lopped off!
O'Toole and Hepburn chew the scenery like pros, and you'll wonder why O'Toole didn't win an Oscar for best actor for what is easily his best role ever. This film revived Hepburn's career, energized O'Toole's and launched those of Dalton, Hopkins and Terry. (And only won FIVE Academy Awards!)
NOWHERE will you find a more effective and entertaining movie with a medieval setting, and I defy you to come away from viewing this film without becoming a MAJOR fan of Peter O'Toole or Katherine Hepburn's prodigious acting talents!
HIGHLY recommended!
Movie Review: Easily One Of The Greatest Films Ever Made
Summary: 5 Stars
It is the Christmas season of the year 1183 and England's wise but mercurial king, the aging Henry II, greatest figure in Europe since the death of Charlemagne, does what any good father would: he gathers his feuding family together for the holidays. Ah, but this is not merely any royal family, it is the Plantagents, a clan into whose roiling hearts treachery and violence have been bred as a way of life. There is Henry's oldest surviving son, Richard, later King Richard the Lionhearted, a cruel man who lives for war. There is also Henry's middle son, the cold, calculating Duke Geoffrey, and lastly, Henry's favorite, the spineless, conniving brat of the brood, the seemingly foolhardy but inwardly clever teenaged John, whom Henry wishes to one day succeed him as king. And above all this there is the greatest woman of the twelfth-century, Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, Henry's wife, whom Henry has locked away in a castle for much of the recent past, revenge for one of Eleanor's many attempts to wrest the kingdom from her much younger husband, a man she loves and hates with vying, passionate emotion. So into the mix they all go, each of these four dangerous individuals wishing to either wear the crown or see that a favored child does so.
Called together to celebrate the festive season, Henry's family hosts a rival king, the cerebrally-adept Philippe Auguste of France, barely more than a boy but clearly quite taken with being king. It is to Philippe's lovely sister, Alais, that Henry's son Richard is nominally betrothed, but whom Henry has amorally made his mistress for the past several years. Philippe arrives with a demand: marry his sister to Richard at once---in effect making his future nephew king of England---or return those substantial French territories Philippe's father turned over to Henry as Alais' dowry. In an odd twist of feudal legalities, Henry, himself a king, is also a vassal of Philippe, even though there is the curious fact that Henry controls virtually as much of France as Philippe himself does. In their negotiations Henry dismisses Philippe as an inexperienced boy, and Philippe in return explains the cruel math of their situation, that simply put, time is on his side, and all he has to do is wait for Henry, a lion in winter, to die. When the two monarchs reach an impasse on the matter of Princess Alais, Philippe is only too ready to deal with Henry's plotting sons and wife, and the deal-making, each scheming side trying to gain better terms than the other, is a thing of great beauty to behold: like a venomous dance of dueling cobras.
In one poisonously-contested night the lives of each of the six principle figures of The Lion In Winter will be irrevocably changed, and how they all reach their end-points is an intricate tale well worth seeing. The performances in this production are without flaw, the dialogue is spoken in a rapid-fire pace simply unseen in films today---"When the king's off his arse, no one sleeps!"--- and the settings, all created in an age before computerized digital effects, are on a sweeping scale.
In the end one gets the sense that Henry, a man who conquered everything but time itself, a force against which no one is safe, was THEE man of his age, as Caesar was before him, Leonardo later was in his, or Bonaparte farther along. And yet we watch as despite all his stubborn brilliance the world Henry has made closes in on him through the course of one familial betrayal after another. Though The Lion In Winter ends on what passes for an optimistic note, anyone familiar with English history of the time knows, as Henry did not, what came next, and that shadow this knowledge casts across the near-jollity of the closing scene makes the conclusion all the more poignant.
Simply one of the greatest films that will ever be shot.
Movie Review: Shakespeare comic strip makes great entertainment
Summary: 5 Stars
I once saw a comic-book version of _Hamlet_, in which the plot was still Shakespeare but the dialogue was pure Stan Lee. Towards the middle we get this exchange: Hamlet: "What the-? There's someone listening behind the curtain! Ha ha! I'll fix them!" [Stabs.] Polonius: "ARRRGH! You've got me!" Or something like that. Shakespeare never got round to writing a _Henry II_, but if he had, the Classic Comix version might have been a little like _The Lion in Winter_. I do mean that as a high compliment. The poetry is missing, but the structure is there. In particular we have the Shakespearian habit of personalising politics, reducing affairs of state to clashes between individuals in a way that makes bad history but good drama.
The imitation of Shakespeare in James (brother of famed scriptwriter William) Goldman's script even extends as far as giving soliloquies to both Henry II and his estranged consort Eleanor of Aquitaine. These are prosey, posy and not completely successful. His imitation of Shakespeare's ruderies, on the other hand, works very well, including a vomit joke addressed (by Hepburn of all people) straight to camera, or - as Shakespeare would say - "aside".
The cut and thrust of Goldman's dialogue is also much more successful than the more self-conscious soliloquising. And Goldman provides no shortage of opportunities for his cast to shine: all the characters are written much larger than life, whether in grandeur or villainy: or both, in the case of O'Toole's blustering, bitter and occasionally charming Henry II and Hepburn's Eleanor of Acquitaine, a cunning, controlled strategist occasionally melting into something like warmth. Each actor gives one of the best performances of their careers: neither is "realistic", but both are utterly compelling.
Goldman's script, at its best, gives us some of the pathos of age, where vital people are not yet ready to relinquish power, or lust, or lust for power: at times it achieves an elegaic feel of better times lost and regretted, and a genuine pathos that I suspect Richard Lester drew on as a model for his wonderful film _Robin and Marion_, also about fighters and lovers past their prime, made some ten years later.
Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Dalton make creditable film acting debuts as Henry's sons Most Likely to Succeed (pun intended), though the scripts gives them less to do. Dalton's portayal of the future Richard III as homosexual, and therefore weak, malicious and nasty, roots the film firmly in the late 1960s: brave enough to mention homosexuality at all, but not yet brave enough to go beyond stereotyping.
But there's nothing wrong with the film being obviously an artifact of its time. Part of the pleasure of Shakespeare is observing ancient Greeks, or Romans, or Medieval Venetians through Elizabethan English eyes. In this script we see two periods of history, the Medieval period and the "sixties" intersecting, one period interpreted in terms of the other. This doesn't detract from the interest of the film, as a couple of reviewers suggested, but rather adds to it.
I've reviewed script and acting because that's what this film is about: half a dozen actors gather in and around a draughty old castle and talk and chew scenery. And incidently they make history: a king is chosen, and of course if we know our Shakespeare (or our history) we know it's a bad choice.
The cast conspire, argue, fight and make up, or make love: and it's gripping to watch. Goldman's script may not have been a great play, and some earlier reviewers have identified some of the reasons why not, but the point is that it made a great film. Not all of it is deep, though some of it is, and all of it holds the attention. This is a Damn Fine Film.
Cheers!
Laon
Movie Review: This Lion still has bite
Summary: 5 Stars
This is where I fell in love with the written word. More importantly, it's where I recognized that acting gave life to these words. James Goldstone's brilliant screenplay and the sharp direction of Anthony Harvey (a long time editor for Stanley Kubrick with Dr. Strangelove and Lolita to his credit)brought these characters to life for me. The film (like the original play)centers around Christmas. Henry, King of England, is being circled by his vulturous children Richard The Lion Hearted (Anthony Hopkins in his first film role), Jeffrey and John. During the holidays Henry always trots out his Queen (Katherine Hepburn) for show. They despise each other almost as much as they love one another. Queen Elenanor is pushing for the brutal Richard to be king while King Henry has been grooming his sniveling pouting son John. Everybody over looks the manipulative Jeffrey (who, ironically enough is the most like both his parents).Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn light up and burn the screen with their powerful and withering performances. Hopkins plays Richard as a stiff, stoic individual which is perfect for the character. His best scenes include the interaction between O'Toole and Hepburn. Nigel Terry (who later starred as King Arthur in John Boorman's Excalibur)displays a spoiled and petulant character to John. Lord knows why Henry wants him to be King. Timothy Dalton (also in his first role and a long way from James Bond)brings a cat like grace to King Philip of France. He's hardly recognizable to those who know him from the Bond films.
What transpires is the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe of the 12 century (yes, amazon says this, too but they're not the only ones to realize it). The witty, barbed dialog does occasionally crowd the little bit of action in the film but the dialog is so witty and well delivered that it doesn't matter.
Very little has been said by John Barry's uncharacteristic score. Best known for his Bond film scores, Barry delivers a musical score rich with the traditional music of the time but also oddly contemporary given the music that inspired him. It's a brilliant score that, sadly, was not recognized as such when the film was first released.
Given that Harvey got his start as film editor for Kubrick, I would have expected a film that was rich in the use of montage; instead Harvey's unobtrusive use of editing only enriches the scenes. Douglas Slocombe's cinematography demonstrates why he's the master that Spielberg and other contemporary directors have used over the years. His natural use of light and shadow enriches the drama adding an additional subtext to the project.
The DVD transfer has a fair amount of analog artifacts in the way of scratches and spots on the film this despite the fact that this is a fresh print drawn from the original negative. Still, the colors are vibrant and dance across the screen capturing your attention. The mono sound is very good although there is a considerable amount of tape hiss and other analog artifacts. That's not a problem though as the use of No Noise or one of the other digital filter systems might have robbed the music and dialog of some of its vitality.
There isn't an insert card nor is there much in the way of extras. Harvey provides an enlightening commentary on the film and the original theatrical trailer is included as well. There really didn't need to be many extras to make this film an essential addition to a DVD collection.