Anna Boleyn (1920)

Anna Boleyn is a German film first released in 1920, directed by Ernst Lubitsch.  The film stars Henny Porten, Emil Jannings, Paul Hartmann, Ludwig Hartau and Aud Egede Nissen.  It has also been released under the title: Anne Boleyn.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Once she has completed her education in France, Anne Boleyn returns to England to take up the position of lady-in-waiting to Queen Katherine, the wife of the English monarch, King Henry VIII.  By the time of Anne’s arrival, the King has grown tired of Katherine and intends to divorce her on the grounds that she has failed to supply him with a male heir.  Within no time, Anne wins the favour of the King and he soon offers her a proposal of marriage, even though she has given her heart to another man, Sir Henry Norris.  When Pope Clement VII refuses to grant an annulment to Henry’s marriage to Katherine, the King severs all ties with Rome and proclaims himself head of the Church of England.  By these extreme measures, Henry extricates himself from an unfruitful alliance and takes Anne as his second wife, confident that she will bear him a son.  Alas, it is not to be...

The enormous worldwide success of Madame Du Barry (1919) established Ernst Lubitsch’s international reputation and earned him the epithet of Germany’s D.W. Griffith.  With the German film studio UFA happy to write the very large cheques, Lubitsch would turn out another four equally impressive historical blockbusters, before crossing the Atlantic to begin an even more successful career in America.  The director made such an impact in Hollywood that his German films were soon overlooked and it is only comparatively recently that they have begin to earn the critical attention they deserve.

One of these lavish early German productions is Anna Boleyn, an ambitious and visually arresting account of the tragic life and death of Henry Tudor’s second wife, the mother of Elizabeth I and one of the most ill-used women in history.  It is incredible to think that the film was made during a period of extreme economic hardship in Germany, so grand is the film in its scale, so sumptuous are the sets and costumes, and so crammed with activity and people are the bustling crowd scenes.  The wedding sequence, in which seemingly thousands of ordinary folk throng and cheer at Anna Boleyn’s marriage to Henry, is one of the most extravagant to appear in any of Lubitsch’s films.  

The director’s keen visual sense and his attention to detail are perhaps nowhere more evident than in this film.  Every shot is composed with the eye of a consummate artist.  The camera is used not just to tell the story but to convey the interior mood of the protagonists, a technique that underpinned German expressionist filmmaking and one that would form the basis for subsequent cinema, notably film noir.  The subtly stylised sets and some daring iris effects create a sense of mounting oppression, conveying the impression that Anne’s world is fast closing in on her, and we see her not as an autonomous entity but rather as a mere pawn in a mechanical game of court politics.

Henny Porten has been criticised for her emotionally restrained performance, yet it is her restraint which makes her portrayal of the doomed Anne Boleyn so powerful, particularly in the final sequences.  By contrast, no one could accuse Emil Jannings of restraint in his interpretation of King Henry, and this is also to the film’s advantage.  Jannings’ Henry is a childlike tyrant who is completely at the mercy of his highly developed earthly passions, governed by a not unreasonable desire to obtain a male heir, but all too easily manipulated by his courtiers.  Anne, with her emotional deficit, and Henry, the impulsive hyperactive hedonist, are a tragically ill-matched couple, and Lubitsch’s real achievement is not to give us a grand spectacle but to wring our hearts by acquainting us with the brutal pathos of this ill-fated mesalliance.

© Chris Alderton 2010

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