The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) - film review

Content in having dealt the Spanish a resounding naval defeat at Cadiz, Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, returns to England, expecting a hero’s welcome.  Instead of showering him with words of gratitude, Queen Elizabeth condemns him for his failure to capture the Spanish treasure fleet.  The criticism is a double blow for Essex, since it downplays his achievement and wounds the profound love that he has for his monarch.  Fearful of Essex’s growing popularity, his rivals manoeuvre the Queen into having him lead an army to quash a rebellion in Ireland.  When this mission ends in failure, an embittered Essex returns to England and organises an uprising against the queen.  Essex confronts Elizabeth and offers to submit to her will if she will agree to share the crown with him.  Although she is deeply in love with Devereux, Elizabeth knows that her duty to England must come before all else...

Warner Brothers spared no expense for this grandly flamboyant historical drama, an adaptation of a popular Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson.  The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex was one of the most lavish period dramas to come out of Hollywood in the 1930s, one that offered the unbeatable pairing of two iconic film stars, Bette Davis and Errol Flynn.  (The two had appeared together once before, in the 1938 film The Sisters).  Although little of what the film shows us has much factual basis, this doesn’t prevent it from being a great piece of cinema, beautifully shot in the recently perfected Technicolor, with compelling performances (watch out for Vincent Price in a break-through role) and an appropriately majestic score from the legendary screen composer Erich Korngold.

The tensions between the various leading players in the production has been well documented, particularly the friction between the two lead actors.  Bette Davis’s lack of respect for Errol Flynn as an actor was surpassed only by her loathing for him as a man, and she would regard the casual way in which he approached his work with nothing less than contempt.  Davis’s antagonism towards her co-star was partly down to her failure to persuade the studio to hire Laurence Olivier, an actor she greatly admired, for the part of Essex. Meanwhile, Flynn had his own bête noire, in the shape of director Michael Curtiz, whom he often had difficulty working with.   After her glorious triumph in Gone With the Wind, Olivia de Havilland found herself flung into a minor supporting role, a kindly "Welcome Back" gesture from studio boss Jack Warner, who didn’t want her to get above herself now that she was famous.  With so much combustible material in such a confined space, it’s a miracle the whole production didn’t end up as a raging inferno of temper tantrums.

Errol Flynn has been widely criticised for his performance in this film, which does mark a slight departure from his previous roles.  No one does the swashbuckling adventure hero better but his limitations as an actor become apparent when he is asked to play straight dramatic roles.  That said, here he is up against Bette Davis, one of the greatest screen talents of his era, and despite their feelings for one another off-screen, on screen they make a convincing couple, bringing immense charm and poignancy to what would appear, on the face of it, to be an implausible romance.

Bette Davis was destined to play Elizabeth I and looks so right in the part that you wonder how anyone could ever dare to play it after her (she reprised the role in the 1955 film The Virgin Queen).   The actress undertook considerable research to portray the monarch as accurately as she could and the result is one of her finest performances.   Davis’s Elizabeth is no caricature, but a sensitive yet tough woman who is visibly torn between her duty and the only love she has known.  The realism and intensity with which she conveys this inner conflict is what makes the film so powerful and its ending so extraordinarily heart-rending.

© James Travers 2009

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