Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
The title is a misnomer: nothing these two get up to is private.
Bette Davis brings Queen Elizabeth I to twitchy, mercurial life here, as if she’s embodying Elizabeth’s political might and will and then expressing it as the jangled, overwhelmed nerve endings of the physical body containing it. She has incredible power, but her outlets for it are narrow: she’s supposed to be a nation—royalty loves synecdoche—but remember to behave as a woman, but she’s also supposed to constantly remember that she’s not only a woman but a nation. If that sounds complicated, it’s because the first use of “woman” here is gendered and the second isn’t, or is less so. She’s supposed to be feminine but not a person.
This is all more or less embedded in Davis’s kinetic and sometimes exasperating performance, which saves the movie from being a “won’t someone think of their majesties” film. It takes Elizabeth’s position for granted and moves on from there, finding drama rather than sentiment and resolving her core dilemma in an unexpected way.
Elizabeth has a lover, the Earl of Essex (Errol Flynn). Everyone knows he’s her favorite, and that sets some of her other high-ranking courtiers scheming against him; she’s also some years his senior, which makes her fret over him receiving attentions from young women. This is “poor Elizabeth and Essex” material, but it’s energized by screenwriters Norman Reilly Raine and Aeneas MacKenzie1 keeping their history in mind in focus as well as outcome. Ultimately, this is always about the big picture.
There’s a Shakespearean quality to these larger-than-life human disasters, because no matter how petty they get—and they get exceptionally petty: at one point, Elizabeth is essentially losing a war because she thinks Essex has left her on Tudor-era read—they commit when it comes to what matters to them. Not love. Not human life. Power. As Elizabeth tells Essex, when he tries to have both her and England, but not in that order: “What you really wanted, you have taken.”
Their private lives are supposed to be the story; this is a title that promises scandalous, intimate secrets, as if these quiet embraces and this unverified love affair will remake history for us. But it’s the public story here that resonates, because no amount of sweet nothings can outweigh an execution. And—in a paradox this intense, vibrating Elizabeth could probably appreciate—it’s in accepting that they want to be public figures, not private citizens, that these two do achieve genuine pathos and tragedy after all. I’m not especially moved by their thwarted love and all its attendant high school-style drama, but Elizabeth ordering her lover’s death so she won’t lose sole command of her throne? Essex willingly walking to his own beheading because he won’t pretend he doesn’t want to be king? That’s where the film hits hardest.2
They’re not really people anymore. They decided not to be. They’ll never need privacy again.
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex is streaming on HBO Max.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Streaming Shuffle
A beautiful slice-of-life film that helped make a career.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Justified, Season Five, Episode Ten, “Weight”
“Who’s more important? Him, who’s almost certainly gonna get you killed, or me, who’s most certainly gonna get you rich?”
“You seem to care about Dewey. Makes sense – sort of a lost puppy quality.”
What do you do with a stupid person like Dewey? I have a longer answer I intend to put into an essay when I finish the show, but for now, Raylan’s answer is to simply tell him what he’s going to do. There’s an inclination most people have to tell stupid people what they actually should do, which ironically is a stupid thing in itself. Raylan makes the more sensible decision to tell people like Dewey what he’s going to do, which is more inclined to make the practical answer also look like the moral answer.
The last scene here is one of the saddest I’ve ever seen in the show. My childhood wasn’t anywhere near as bad as Kendell’s, but I do know enough to know people who go through experiences like that will usually claim it made them stronger, when in fact the only good thing it did was make their art more interesting. Certainly, I look back on anything like this, I realise it only ever made me worse to be around. The trick, unfortunately, is to not think of yourself as the victim.
Biggest Laugh: “Since you’re my own personal problem which I must deal with, I’ll handle it myself. If that’s okay with you.”
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “What’s in the attache?” / “Condoms. We gotta wash ‘em out before we reuse ‘em, this is a green whorehouse.”
Top Ownage: Technically it doesn’t count, but Danny Crowe doing a White Boy Bob on himself. “Like an act of God, really.” Wendy taking on Darryl at the end is a great traditional one though.
Raylan apologizing to Danny is so bleakly funny. “Honest to god, Danny, I didn’t see it.” He knew he’d kill him but not this way.
MLB on TBS, Cubs-Barves – A pretty average game of the sort that defines May. Good teams but not high energy. What was interesting, though, is that this was purely by coincidence the first game played in ATL after the deaths of former Barves owner Ted Turner and long time manager Bobby Cox. So the team and the broadcast paid tribute to both. And of course this game was on TBS, so the tribute was as much about Turner as media mogul as anything else. A bit self serving, but also pretty accurate.
Tales from the Crypt, S1E5 “Lover Come Hack to Me” directed by Tom Holland gets a terrific performance out of Amanda Plummer, playing out both her cutesy appeal and sinister side, and has fun with the reversals the show holds up as a characteristic. The show/comic’s storytelling is very Medieval and Renaissance-era in the belief in the Wheel of Fortune and how it can reverse and turn in and out of your favor.
“Complete Collection” directed by Mary Lambert, the season finale and a nasty piece of work with M. Emmett Walsh as a guy working so long that on retirement, he reacts very badly to his dotty wife’s love of animals (Lambert motif!) There’s a clear satire here of the kind of inattentive working American man that Walsh plays into well, someone so concentrated on work that he doesn’t realize he himself is insane.
Season 2 premiere is “Dead Right”, probably the best performance from Demi Moore I’ve seen outside The Substance as a 1940’s moll too reliant on a fortune teller who can’t give her the complete truth. Jeffrey Tambor, covered in pancake makeup and prosthetics, is a sleazy, fatphobic piece of work, a character who would be offensive if not for the sheer pathetic need in him and how cartoonish he comes off, with several stills resembling comic book panels. This show rocks.
Live Music – Artificial Go, visiting from Cincinatti. For the most part they’re a fairly straightforward jangly post-punk / new-wave band, like a slightly less poppy B52s perhaps. But their singer has a distinctly odd vocal style and stage persona (dressed in full marching band uniform, also) which was initially jarring but then mostly quite fun. Classic “enjoyed the show, didn’t feel tempted to buy the record” stuff. Local supergroup that specialise in fast, short songs supported and their usual quick-fire flow was held up a bit by technical issues, which I think actually made for a better show? Impressive as it is when a band smashes into each song without a pause, I enjoy a little breathing room. And the openers were my girlfriend’s odd surf-pop duo and they had a new song about pencils that included a dance move, disappointingly only about a quarter of the crowd joined in, it would have been pretty cool if everyone had gotten on board.
Wooo, live music! Agreed on the pleasure of having a little breathing room between songs: I want time to digest what I’ve just heard, especially if it’s new to me.
Would love to see this and Private Life of Henry VIII and compare. There’s also Elizabeth: The Golden Age about her and Essex but I’ve heard it’s not too good.
I saw The Golden Age when it first came out, but all I remember is a shipwreck, which isn’t helpful! Ditto on wanting to see Private Life of Henry VIII now and do a comparison. Off the cuff, just from what I know about Henry, he feels like someone who never achieves the clarity Elizabeth and Essex do at the end here (maybe because he didn’t have to: being a king meant he could marry his bit on the side and still keep his power, whereas Elizabeth would have to share or even yield hers, which is unacceptable to her; he’s not forced to know his priorities in the same way).
I’ve seen this, it was included in an Errol Flynn box set that I bought years ago and it took me quite a while to drum up the enthusiasm for this EVEN though it has Vincent Price in it (admittedly in a small role). I quite enjoyed it though, Michael Curtiz knows how to make an entertaining film even in a genre I often find quite hard work.
Yeah, it’s probably my least favorite of the many Flynn and Curtiz (often but not always overlapping) films I’ve seen at this point, but that’s such an appealing heap of movies that there’s no shame in being at the relative bottom of the pile. Curtiz really makes the adventure elements and the transition to the larger scope at the end shine. Will we ever see his like again? Perhaps not.
I haven’t seen The Sea Hawk or Dodge City but they both look like good times. Curtiz has 169 credits on Letterboxd, directors these days should be ashamed of themselves!
Year of the Month update!
This May, we’ll be opening the doors for your writing on any movies, albums, books, etc. from 2014!
TBD: Cori Domschot: Earth to Echo
TBD: Cori Domschot: Jack Ryan
May. 17th: Tristan Nankervis: Whiplash
May 23rd: Ben Hohenstatt: Plowing Into the Field of Love
May 31st: Tristan Nankervis: The Imitation Game
And in. June, you can write up any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1958.
Jun. 5th: Gillian Nelson: Paul Bunyan
Jun. 12th: Gillian Nelson: Grand Canyon
Jun. 14th: Tristan Nankervis: Vertigo
Jun. 19th: Gillian Nelson: Elfego Banca
Jun. 26th: Gillian Nelson: Disneyland Gay Days
Jun. 28th: Tristan Nankervis: Touch of Evil