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After Sweden (Queen Christina) and Russia (The Scarlet Empress), the regal muse on the isles. Mary Stuart (Katharine Hepburn) in her kingdom, fog and scheming lords on one side of the sea and on the other the desiccated paranoia of Elizabeth of England (Florence Eldridge). "I'm going to begin to be myself." Bagpipes drown out the fulminating John Knox (Moroni Olsen) and announce the Earl of Bothwell (Fredric March), who unnerves foppish Darnley (Douglas Walton) by facing the fireplace and lifting his kilt. Marriage to one produces an heir, marriage to another a doomed bond. "What's my throne? I'd put a torch to it for any one of the days I've had with you." The weight of history and the suffocation of palatial interiors, a political poem from John Ford. The gloom that encircles the conspiratorial dagger aimed at Mary's confidante (John Carradine), Donald Crisp alone with looming shadow and shattered saber, the cloaked figure aboard the vessel, imagistic eloquence amid prolix pageantry. Coup, abdication, a life of lavish dungeons—the "Jezebel of France" glowing like a Madonna in the eyes of an infatuated filmmaker. (The true subject is Hepburn, whose spontaneous giggle at a baby's sneeze cracks the stiffness of Maxwell Anderson's blank verse.) Dreyer for the cavernous courtroom, maiden and judges in close-ups beatific and harsh. "I prefer to stand... symbolically." Duty and emotion, individual and ruler, topics of the debate between cousins before the chopping block. "And I learned how a woman may be a queen one day and stand on the scaffold the next." The camera ascends heavenward, and Rossellini in Giovanna d'Arco al rogo takes it from there. With Ian Keith, Robert Barrat, Gavin Muir, Ralph Forbes, Alan Mowbray, Frieda Inescort, Robert Warwick, William Stack, David Torrence, Monte Blue, Alec Craig, and Ivan F. Simpson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |