Kattiera Nana I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Alicia I love this movie so much

Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

TaryBiggBall It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Robert J. Maxwell The love life of a queen! Stupendous! Colossal! Mind Numbing! Dull! Bette Davis is Elizabeth I, desperately in love with the dashing younger Lord Essex, Errol Flynn, who loves her deeply in return but whose character is tainted with ambition to share the throne. Or to just sit on it by himself, what the hell.Watch the palace intrigue as the queen's courtiers, including the ever-evil Henry Daniell, try to screw up the love affair -- and succeed! See the lovely and always virginal Olivia De Havilland reduced to a secondary role as the young woman whose adoration Flynn blithely flips off.Gape at the battle between two titans of the silver screen, each in love with the other, each too proud to give up the contest for power! Flynn and Davis hated each other. In the first few minutes the two have an argument, at the end of which Davis must slap Flynn across the face. She does. Hard enough to jar his cheek. He looks genuinely surprised.The plot is laid out in the first five minutes when Flynn returns from a battle in Cadiz and Davis chews him out for wasting the tax payers' money on an unnecessary war or something. The love affair is made clear but so is the conflict. Over and over (and over) we hear that the queen cannot allow her feelings as a woman to interfere with her responsibilities as regent. First, Flynn is in. Then he's out. Then he's in her favor again but he must go conquer Ireland. He loses, so he's out again. But then he's back in, until -- finally -- he's REALLY out of favor once and for all. The story is not a swashbuckler. There are less than five minutes of battle in a studio-bound Irish swamp. It's a love story that repeats itself repeatedly.You have to hand it to Bette Davis, though. She presents us with a Queen Elizabeth who is a neural shambles. She rolls her eyes, twitches, paces back and forth in the cavernous rooms of Whitehall, wrings her hands. And she has this thing she does with her left fist, constantly clasping and unclasping her fingers, worse than Captain Queeg and his steel balls. She puts everything she has into the role and it's too much. Any more energy and she'd perform some kind of on-screen Big Bang and create her own planetary system.Flynn has never looked more handsome nor been so miscast as the earnest lover who is filled with ambition and conceit. He treats nothing lightly, which is a great big mistake, because what he does best as an actor is treat things lightly, even his own degradation. However, it's not all his fault if he fails, nor is it Davis's. Who can conquer such lines as, "Don't you 'Your Majesty' ME, you slimy toad!" (That a direct quote.) Good for a few laughs but, OMG, does it drag.

JoeytheBrit Errol Flynn always complained about being typecast in action roles, but the reasons why are clearly evident in this sometimes ponderous, and sometimes affecting historical drama based on the play by Maxwell Anderson. While Flynn's performance isn't bad it looks positively bland when compared to Bette Davis's superlative performance as the ageing Queen Elizabeth I. Davis furnishes the Queen with all sorts of mannerisms and vocal inflections (while banishing all traces of her American accent) which may or may not be factually accurate (as my only other reference point for Elizabeth is Miranda Richardson's madcap turn in Blackadder it's impossible for me to know). Whether it is accurate or not, Davis delivers a performance that is never less than riveting and dominates the entire film.The film itself is something of a Jekyll and Hyde. The first forty minutes border on tedium as we are subjected to endless conversations between the dowdy queen with fading looks and the dashing young knight who courts her, and it's clear that the writers struggled (and failed) to escape from the material's stage origins. It's all scene-setting for the second half of the film, however, which makes it worth sitting through, because once the political intrigue and back-stabbing begin the film takes off and becomes a richly absorbing slice of history. The supporting cast is straight out of Hollywood's Who's-Who of the 1930s, but my only gripe would be the casting of Alan Hale in the small but important role of an Irish rebel leader. The jolly Hale looks more like a well-fed butcher than a fighting man who's been squelching around Irish bogs for weeks on end!

evening1 Bette Davis's Elizabeth is the best thing about this costume drama. Errol Flynn is a lightweight in comparison, but then again the queen was 30-plus years his senior. Davis embodies the realist queen in all her fierce intelligence and hair-trigger perception.She beautifully invokes the poignancy of a woman fiercely loyal to her people to the point of having to sacrifice the only man she ever loved. Yet the movie never really makes clear what she saw in him, other than a pretty face. Flynn seemed like a baby on the Irish battlefield and though I indeed found him handsome -- does anyone else see a resemblance to Kevin Kline? -- I didn't find him very interesting. However, it's clear that Elizabeth died spiritually when he did. What an amazing final scene!One minor aside: I'd hoped the movie would find a way to show at least a snippet of a play by the man referred to as "Master Shakespeare," but it never happened. (Though the drama herein would certainly have interested the Bard.) This movie leaves me curious to see the more modern version with Cate Blanchette...

Michael_Elliott Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The (1939) *** 1/2 (out of 4) An elderly Queen Elizabeth (Bette Davis) and the younger Essex (Errol Flynn) battle their hatred through their wild passion for one another in this historical drama, while not accurate, still manages to hit all the right marks. Once again it's director Michael Curtiz pulling all the strings and getting every right. Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Donald Crisp, Vincent Price, Alan Hale and Henry Daniell all deliver wonderful performances but even they look poor next to Davis who is absolutely remarkable. I just love the way Davis is constantly fidgeting around during every scene. You can just look at her and see a tormented woman burned by her love for this younger man. The scene that starts off with her playing chess to having all the mirrors removed is among the greatest work I've seen from any actress in any film. The love story is beautifully told and is quite touching especially the ending, which is pulled together very nicely. Also, is it just me or at the start of the film when Davis slaps Flynn, did it strike anyone else that Flynn really wanted to knock the hell out of her?