A bit stuffy and quite talky, so it’s a good thing Bette Davis does most of the talking. Although she was in the youthful prime of her career, Davis chose to play an older Queen Elizabeth I—beneath pasty makeup and a red fright wig—opposite Errol Flynn’s younger, dashing Earl of Essex in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Aside from some elegant, matte-painting background landscapes and an overall rich use of color, director Michael Curtiz (who made The Adventures of Robin Hood with Flynn the year before) largely cedes the screen to his two stars, as they try to evoke the romantically charged, politically tangled, and frankly sadomasochistic relationship at the film’s center (the plot is a merry-go-round of betrothals and betrayals). They’re never quite believable together, but Davis delivers a tremulously terrifying Elizabeth, a queen who unapologetically exercises her royalty while quietly acknowledging the personal costs. (You mostly see this tension in her constant fidgeting, which causes the elaborate Elizabethan collars she wears to tremble with both indignation and desire.) With a hungry-eyed Olivia de Havilland as a scheming courtier, a slippery Donald Crisp as Francis Bacon, and a stuffy Vincent Price as Sir Walter Raleigh.
(9/20/2022)
