Spitball Army

The music bursting from my TV set sounded like variations on Richard Strauss’ Don Juan.  But not even the overbearing – and gloriously Cinematic – score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold could keep my attention fully diverted from the pile of three past weeks worth of Sunday New York Times, or my feline companion Barbara, who seemed convinced that I was holding a cup full of ice cream, her favorite food (it was merely water, her second-favorite ingestible).  Believe me, I tried.

Elizabeth and Essex has an impressive pedigree: marquee actors Bette Davis, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland; future director of Casablanca, Michael Curtiz, at the helm; a stage play by Maxwell Anderson as its source; Korngold’s Austro-Germanic musical influences.  As a whole, it just does not enchant to the degree that the Warner Bros. promotional team would have you believe.

Davis, trapped behind a chalky white face of pancake makeup, gets about as much emotional mileage from her facial expressions as would a drunken mime.  She resorts to excessive hand-wringing and a variety of other gesticulations to convey her feelings from the screen, opting regularly for the intense stillness of a cardboard cutout.  Flynn’s persona is as dashing and dandiful as ever but, with little to act against, he seems lost whenever he’s in the Queen’s prescence.  Often the dialogue is shouted and exclaimed as in a defiantly amateurish production of Hamlet.

Surely, the film could not be that bad, you think to yourself, as I did at several moments during my home screening.  Two recent films of this same history, Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth I (2005), gave us hot-blooded, real characters – with understandable, if disagreeable, motivations – who spoke with a natural cadence.  The women inhabiting those versions of the Virgin Queen, Cate Blanchett and Helen Mirren, acted circles around Davis’ performance.  I stopped to think how well Blanchett or Mirren might do with Davis’ signature role of Margo Channing in All About Eve.  My impression is that they would devour it.