Directed by Alexander Korda
Starring Charles Laughton, Robert Donat and Franklin Dyall
Produced by London Film Productions
History and culture have a way of condensing figures over time to an easy shorthand. I say “Benedict Arnold, “ you think “traitor.” “George Washington” brings on thoughts of cherry trees and river crossings. And if I say “Michael Bay” three times in a darkened bathroom, a helicopter somewhere explodes.
The thing about this condensation of historical fact and myth into bullet points is we end up minimizing the humanity of these figures. We forget that they had to eat and sleep, love and hate, and deal with all manner of human emotion even as they dealt with world-shaping events.
Which brings us to the titular king as played by Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII.
You hear Henry VIII and you think about his wives. The monarch as womanizer. He married a lot and this fact more than any is what popular culture understands and remembers about him.
Laughton and director Alexander Korda start with that myth and systematically blow it up.
We first see Henry VII at his most familiar. His second wife Anne Boleyn is about to be executed so he can marry Jane Seymour. It is the most perverse of set ups: killing your wife to marry another because you need the male heir, all made perfectly lawful by the fact that you happen to be the law. This is the king we all think we know, a ruler who leads with his loins. And Korda gives us a remarkable juxtaposition, intercutting the wedding and the execution to show just how alike the two events may be.
But then Jane dies in childbirth. Henry grieves, but must move on for the sake of England. He agrees to marry Anne of Cleves in order to help cement an alliance with a German duke. Henry is disappointed in her appearance and Anne herself is not thrilled about the match.
They marry, but never consummate the relationship. On their wedding night, Anne plays Henry in a card game. The stakes? A divorce. And Henry’s marriage for political advantage comes to a quick end.
That leaves the king free to marry Katherine, an ambitious maiden who had caught the king’s attention by speaking against his treatment of Anne Boleyn. He becomes intrigued with her and, perhaps for the first time, starts falling in love.
For her part, Katherine had fallen for Thomas Culpeper, an advisor to the king. After she marries Henry, she continues seeing him. And in betraying the king, she dooms not just herself and Thomas, but Henry as well.
See, Henry is 100 percent in love with his latest wife. And when he learns that she is seeing another man, he’s impotent. The human side of him loves her and always will, but he is a king and cannot afford to be weak. So he does what he must. And executing the woman he loves shows him the truth of being a king: that for all his power, he is a slave to his title.
His final wife is merely what he needs to live out the remainder of his life: a nurse and a mother, but not a lover. Not someone who stirs the king’s passions. She’s there to roust you from your bed, not to climb into it.
Laughton inhabits the title role with all of Henry’s reputed larger than life excesses, but grounds him with insecurities. All his bravado serves only to spackle over all his mundane humanity. By the end of the movie you are not shocked he married six times; you understand why he did, and even the burden his nuptials sometimes required.
The Private Life of Henry VIII may lack historical accuracy, but through Laughton’s performance, it gets at more fundamental truths. Even the most powerful man in the world can be brought low by love lost.
Final Grade:
B+
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