by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I screened the 1955 film The
Virgin Queen, the second and last film in
which Bette Davis played Queen Elizabeth I of England. Last Monday Turner
Classic Movies screened it back-to-back with the earlier one, The
Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, made
at Warner Bros. in 1939 with a prestigious literary source (Maxwell Anderson’s
Broadway stage hit Elizabeth the Queen), a major budget for the time and — much to La Davis’s disgust — Errol Flynn as her co-star (she wanted
Laurence Olivier, who would have brought the part of Essex far more emotional
depth but wouldn’t have been as big a draw at the box office) as well as a
phenomenal musical score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, which like many of his
film scores in this period might almost have been an opera based on the film’s
story if the characters had been singing instead of speaking their lines:
certainly the music was strong enough it could have been used as the basis of an opera on the
Elizabeth-and-Essex story rivaling the efforts of the two major composers who did set this story, Gaetano Donizetti and Benjamin
Britten. Elizabeth and Essex also
offered a lot of resonances; made in 1939, at a time when Hitler and Stalin
were both still alive and at the peak of their powers, it wasn’t just an historical spectacle but a serious film about
absolute power and what it does to the psyches of both the people who have it
and the people who want it. Alas, The Virgin Queen has few if any of those resonances; it’s basically a
swashbuckler and was in fact based on a story by Harry Brown called Sir
Walter Raleigh in which Elizabeth was
supposed to be merely a minor character. Only the producing studio, 20th
Century-Fox, signed Bette Davis to play Elizabeth, and she not surprisingly
demanded that her role be increased and that she, not Raleigh, be the title character — it still
rankled her that Errol Flynn’s casting in Elizabeth and Essex had meant that his character horned in on a title
that in the stage original had named only Elizabeth the queen.
Davis always
said she liked this film better than Elizabeth and Essex, partly because she was 16 years older when she made
it and therefore didn’t have to wear as much age makeup as she had in the
earlier movie (though for both films she had her head shaved about two inches
up her forehead so she would look
like she was balding, as the real Elizabeth was — as I’ve noted before, one
thing I’ve long admired about Davis was her willingness to make herself look
ugly when she felt a role required it) and partly because she thought Richard
Todd, who played Raleigh, a far better actor than Flynn. Ironically both Flynn and Todd played Robin Hood on film, and Todd
comes off here as a strong screen presence but with only a fraction of Flynn’s
charisma. The main problem with The Virgin Queen is the plot: like Elizabeth and Essex it revolves around a romantic triangle between
Elizabeth, a young man at court she has the hots for and a young
lady-in-waiting who’s the young man’s real love interest: this time around
she’s called “Beth Throgmorton” (the name sounded more like “Throckmorton” to
me but maybe that’s just because I grew up in Marin County, California and was
familiar with the Throckmorton Street in Mill Valley) and played by Joan
Collins, who’s attractive and right for the part whereas in Elizabeth
and Essex the third point in the triangle
had been the monumentally overqualified Olivia de Havilland. (Fortunately for
Olivia’s career, she got to make Gone with the Wind the same year.) [Note to Charles: At least both
Richard Todd and Joan Collins pronounced the “t” in “often.”] Whereas Elizabeth
and Essex had dealt with such serious
political issues as pointless imperialist wars, wasteful spending on them and
the lure of absolute power, just about the only dramatic issue in The
Virgin Queen centers around Raleigh’s
desire to explore the Americas, for which purpose he’s designed a radical new
ship and wants Elizabeth to fund the construction of three of these vessels for
his expedition.
The script by Harry Brown and Mindret Lord features a lot of
the similar back-and-forth Elizabeth and Essex did, in which a bipolar Elizabeth oscillates between
love (or at least lust) for Raleigh and rage at him — just about every time
they get together Raleigh is understandably uncertain whether Elizabeth is
going to want to have sex with him or send him to the Tower. There’s one
genuinely poignant scene in which Elizabeth receives Raleigh in her bedchamber
and takes off her wig, under which is a white wrapping that makes her look like
a particularly malevolent spirit in a fairy tale, pointing out to him that
she’s twice his age and bald and
is all too aware that she’s a lot more turned on by him than she can expect him
to be turned on by her. But too much of Davis’s performance is just a Xerox of
her work in Elizabeth and Essex,
where she had a far stronger director — Michael Curtiz instead of Henry Koster,
a German expat who was fine in Deanna Durbin’s musicals and a fey fantasy like The
Bishop’s Wife but was totally out of his
depth handling an historical spectacle. The Virgin Queen was also hampered by being in CinemaScope, and in
particular by the dictum 20th Century-Fox had laid down in their
guide to making CinemaScope films (which not only got issued to their own
employees but also to anyone at any other studio licensing the CinemaScope
name, logo and technology) that because the screen was so big, close-ups were
no longer necessary. Directors with the level of independence and clout of
George Cukor on the 1954 A Star Is Born ignored this piece of idiotic advice and shot and cut as they always
had, but Koster either couldn’t or wouldn’t defy the no-closeups edict and so
he and his cinematographer, the usually reliable Charles G. Clarke, shot the
film from miles away in a series of static tableaux that made this movie more
like a stage play than Elizabeth and Essex, which actually had
started as a play, did.
The Virgin Queen is an O.K. movie that largely wastes a capable cast: among the
supporting players are Herbert Marshall as Robert Dudley, Lord Leicester (who
had been one of Elizabeth’s most trusted advisers and, according to some
accounts, her secret lover, but had died well before the events depicted in
either Elizabeth and Essex or The
Virgin Queen); Dan O’Herlihy as Lord Derry (an
Irishman whom Raleigh hired for the Queen’s guard, which got him into hot water
with others at court who didn’t think someone from a country with which England
was in the middle of an extended guerrilla war was appropriate for her guard);
Robert Douglas as Sir Christopher Hatton; Romney Brent (a friend and
collaborator of Cole Porter) as the French ambassador; and Jay Robinson, the
marvelously queeny Caligula in Quo Vadis?, largely wasted as Chadwick. If you’d never seen Elizabeth
and Essex you’d probably like it just for
the ferocity of Bette Davis’s performance — but not only had she done the role
much better in the earlier movie, the overall production was much more
interesting, the story was deeper and richer and Korngold’s music was far
superior to the score for The Virgin Queen — whose composer, Franz Waxman (father of Congressmember Henry
Waxman), turned in a score that “works” for its role in the film but has
nothing like the sweep and scope of Korngold’s music for Elizabeth
and Essex. It’s a nice try, but compared to
its illustrious predecessor The Virgin Queen comes off as decidedly second-best.
