by Susan Bordo
PART III: An Anne for All Seasons
10
It’s the Anne That Makes the Movie: Anne of the Thousand Days
IN THE EARLY 1960s, Hal Wallis, producer of such distinctively American hits as True Grit, Casablanca, Barefoot in the Park, and all of Elvis Presley’s movies, and known as one of the “Jews who invented Hollywood,” was about to realize a deeply held longing. The child of immigrants from Russia and Poland, Wallis had grown up in a Chicago tenement, in an Eastern European Jewish enclave of garment workers and small shopkeepers. And from an early age, he adored all things British. As soon as he had made enough money, from early hits such as Little Caesar and Yankee Doodle Dandy, he built himself a huge manor in the San Fernando Valley, with fireplaces, woodwork, and furniture imported from Britain. And he began to dream of making films that would introduce British history—which he had studied, on his own, since childhood—to movie-going audiences. He so succeeded in this goal that Queen Elizabeth II, at a 1972 Royal Command Performance of Anne of the Thousand Days, shook his hand and whispered, “Thank you, Mr. Wallis. We’re learning about English history from your films.”1 A year later, Wallis was honored with the title of Commander of the British Empire by order of Elizabeth.
Discounting The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Wallis’s first foray into British history had been The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), with Bette Davis and Errol Flynn. He most enjoyed turning distinguished plays into popular movies, and when he saw Jean Anouilh’s Becket in 1960, he knew he had to make the movie version. Becket turned out to be a huge success, starring Peter O’Toole as Henry II and Richard Burton as his wenching buddy Thomas Becket, who become tormented adversaries in a battle between allegiance to king and the demands of conscience. But when Wallis first suggested it to Paramount execs, they balked. “A picture about an archbishop and a king would have no commercial value in today’s market,” they told Wallis.2 And Charles Bluhdorn, who owned Paramount, could not see how mass audiences would accept a “plot predicated on what was essentially an intellectual argument.”3 It was only after Wallis reassured him that he would dress up the intellectual content with beautiful locations and gorgeous costumes that Bluhdorn agreed. The movie went on to receive ten Oscar nominations and encouraged Wallis’s ambition to make a series of historical dramas.
Wallis had seen and admired Anne of the Thousand Days when it was playing on Broadway in 1949, but apparently he didn’t think of making it into a movie until Richard Burton suggested it, begging to play the part of Henry VIII. At least, that’s the story that Wallis tells in his autobiography, Starmaker. Richard Burton, in an interview with Michael Munn for his book, Richard Burton: Prince of Players (these titles don’t shy away from hyperbole), insists he had no interest in making the film. “I thought it was a poor attempt to try to make a ‘classic,’” he told Munn, and after he finally agreed—under threat of a lawsuit—he remained apathetic: “I had rarely begun any film so disinterested.”4 There’s no way of knowing for sure whose version is accurate, but however it came about, in 1964, when Wallis first acquired the rights to the play, the New York Times announced that he was negotiating with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to play the roles of Anne and Henry. According to Wallis, however, he never actually considered Taylor for the role—perhaps he was just leading a reluctant Burton on. In any case, Wallis recalls a lunch with Liz in 1967, in which “Elizabeth hung on my every word. I was surprised by her attention, as there was no part in the picture for her. Over an elaborate dessert she took a deep breath and said, ‘Hal, I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. I have to play Anne Boleyn!’ My fork stopped halfway to my mouth. Anne Boleyn? Elizabeth was plump and middle-aged; Anne was a slip of a girl. The fate of the picture hung in the balance. I could scarcely bring myself to look at Richard.”5 Burton, however, “handled it beautifully. He put his hand on hers, looked her directly in the eye, and said, ‘Sorry, luv. You’re too long in the tooth.’”6 Any hard feelings were handled by a huge fee for Burton ($1,250,000 plus) and cameos for Liz (as a masked dancer at a ball) as well as for Burton’s daughter Kate and Taylor’s daughter Liza.
The young woman Wallis settled on for Anne, after the usual “exhaustive search,” was a virtually unknown French-Canadian actress named Geneviève Bujold, whom Wallis spotted in an independent Canadian film called Isabel (directed by Bujold’s then-husband, Paul Almond). Finding her, Wallis recalls, was a “miracle.”7 “The minute [Geneviève] appeared on the screen, I was riveted. I saw a tiny, seemingly fragile woman made of steel—willful, passionate, intense. She was exactly the actress I wanted to play Anne Boleyn. Even her French accent was perfect: Anne had been educated in France. I hired the girl without meeting her or testing her. [When] we met, everything about her confirmed my prediction that she was a very special personality: unique, perfect for Anne.”8 Wallis hired a special coach to help Gen- eviève get the accent just right—British tinged with French rather than the other way around—and gave her books to read on Boleyn.9 In a personal interview with me, Bujold recalls him as a wonderful “guide” to interpreting Anne—something that I admit surprised me.10 Before I talked to Geneviève, I associated Wallis with big blockbuster “American” movies. But Geneviève set me straight. “He had an insatiable curiosity that took him outside American films in his search for Anne, and he had a hunger for discovery” that responded when he saw Bujold.11 So much for my stereotypes about Hollywood producers.
Bujold’s performance, and a few key changes in the play, were to make quite a dramatic transformation in the Maxwell Anderson original. Anderson’s play, despite its fireball Anne, was really Henry’s story and, like Hackett’s biography, was intent on exorcising the ghost of Bluff King Hal, described in Hackett’s biography (published well before The Private Life of Henry VIII made it to the screen) as “the sort of man who eats a baron of beef and says Arise, Sir Loin; the sort of man who cuts off his wife’s head, ha-ha, out of a big, jovial, exuberant good humor. Off with her head! Off with the next one’s head! The more, the merrier.”12 Charles Laughton played precisely this kind of Henry with such gusto and ingenuity that many viewers (and reviewers) believed that they were seeing the “real” Henry. John Gamme, in Film Weekly, described Laughton as “drawing a full-blooded portrait of the gross, sensual monarch in whom lust and the satisfaction of vanity are the ruling passions.”13
Hackett and Anderson, however, considered this kind of portrait to be a caricature. Their respective Henrys are not piggy old souls, but tortured monarchs. Hackett’s was a “man of open manner and gracious fellowship . . . and the magnet of a facile imagination”14 who, due to an inability to imagine himself and his personal needs as anything other than orchestrated by God, had “managed to plunge himself and his country in the thick of an inextricable jungle.” Anderson’s Henry is an even more tragic figure than Hackett’s. He truly loves Anne, but gets caught in the net of his own obsession with an heir, masculine pride, and self-indulgence. Ultimately, he comes to see that he has paid an enormous price, but that “nothing can ever be put back the way it was.”15 In the final speech of the play, Henry muses on the magnitude of what has changed for his country (“the limb that was cut from Rome won’t graft to that trunk again”16) and, with Anne’s ghost hovering in the background, he begins to realize that “all other women will be shadows” and that he will seek Anne “forever down the long corridors of air, finding them empty, hearing only echoes.”17 “It would have been easier,” he now recognizes, “to forget you living than to forget you dead.”18
In Anderson’s play, it’s Henry who has the final word, who makes the final pronouncements about history, whose torments we are left to imagine. The film, however, ends very differently. The screenplay, adapted from the play by Bridget Boland, John Hale, and Richard Sokolove, has Henry, in our last glimpse of him, listening for the signal sounding Anne’s death, then galloping off to see Jane Seymour with nary a second thought. In place of his sober, sad reflections at the end of t
he play, we see little Elizabeth, a sprig of flowers in her hand, toddling down the path toward greatness (actually in the gardens of Penshurst Castle) while her mother’s voice in the background predicts her daughter’s glorious future. The voice-over is a repeat of part of an earlier speech, one that has viewers cheering for Anne to this day. As in the play, Henry visits Anne in the Tower, and she lies to him about her fidelity to him. In the movie, however, she embellishes her lie with more detail—“I was untrue to half your court. With soldiers of your guard, with grooms, with stable hands. Look for the rest of your life at every man that ever knew me and wonder if I didn’t find him a better man than you!”—and Henry, rattled and enraged, shouts, “You whore!” Anne, who knows she has hit the mark of his manhood but has even sharper arrows in her quiver, goes on.
Yes. But Elizabeth is yours. Watch her as she grows; she’s yours. She’s a Tudor! Get yourself a son off of that sweet, pale girl if you can—and hope that he will live! But Elizabeth shall reign after you! Yes, Elizabeth—child of Anne the Whore and Henry the Blood-Stained Lecher—shall be Queen! And remember this: Elizabeth shall be a greater queen than any king of yours! She shall rule a greater England than you could ever have built! Yes—MY Elizabeth SHALL BE QUEEN! And my blood will have been well spent!
Yes, it’s overblown. And it’s utterly without historical foundation. Henry never visited Anne in her room in the Tower, and Anne never delivered a speech like this; indeed, at this point, Anne knew the chances of Elizabeth ever becoming queen were extremely slim. Two days before her execution, her marriage to Henry was declared null and void by Henry’s lawyers, and Elizabeth was bastardized. In the movie, she is given a choice that the real Anne never had: To live, if she will willingly end the marriage, freeing Henry to marry Jane Seymour and making Elizabeth illegitimate in the bargain. Or to die, with Elizabeth still a rightful heir. She turns Henry down flat.
It was all invention, but of a particularly potent and timely sort for 1969. This was a period of convention smashing in film: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Midnight Cowboy, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Easy Rider. But with the exception of Bonnie Parker and Mrs. Robinson (but strikingly not her daughter, Elaine), the female characters in the New American Cinema played by the rules. It was the men who challenged the status quo, and the men who paid heroically for it.19 Hale and Boland’s Anne, long before Thelma & Louise, is the first female heroine to ride off the cliff, in full consciousness of what she is doing, to preserve her own integrity (and, in this case, the future of her daughter and England).
It struck a chord, even with me. In 1969 I was a pretty cynical moviegoer. The antisentimentalist Pauline Kael, who did movie reviews for the New Yorker, was my idol, and I hated anything that smacked of pretention or high-mindedness. I was not a feminist in anything but the most inchoate sense of the word. While friends of mine were joining consciousness-raising groups and attending demonstrations, I scorned and was made anxious by what I thought of as “groupthink.” My own personal rebellion was to drop out of school, have a lot of mindless sex, marry someone I didn’t love, and then suffer a nervous breakdown that made me unable to leave him. But I did manage to make it to the movies—and Anne of the Thousand Days was one of them. It was my first introduction, since the boring, sexless Tudor history I’d read in high school, to the story of Henry and Anne. I had no idea what was invented and what was historically documented, but it made no difference. I loved fiery, rebellious Anne. I loved the way she bossed Richard Burton’s Henry around like a surly twentieth-century teenager. I loved the fact that Geneviève Bujold’s hair was messy as she delivered that speech to Henry, loved her intensity, loved her less than perfectly symmetrical beauty, loved the fact that someone that small could pack such a wallop.
Anne’s speech in the Tower might have seemed melodramatic if it had been played by a young Bette Davis—or, heaven forfend, Elizabeth Taylor! But Bujold’s fire, issuing from her petite frame and elfin face, her hair disheveled, her dark eyes glittering with pride, desperation, hurt, and vengeance, transformed the potentially hokey into an indelible, iconic moment. Even at a recent festival of Burton’s films, held by the British Film Institute, the audience was stirred, crying out, “Go, Anne, go, you tell him!”20 “After watching this,” writes one contemporary Tudorphile, “you come away with the feeling that if that ain’t the way it really happened then it should’ve. I love the pride she displays even after Henry slaps her. She’s right, he’s wrong, and they both know it. As she goes on talking down to him, you can see him shriveling little by little and he nevermore was the man he’d once been. Seems she got the last laugh in more ways than one.”21
Bujold also did something with Anne’s famous—and famously ambiguous—behavior in the Tower that contributed to the believability of that final speech. Anne’s actions and comments, as she awaited her sentencing and then her death, provide some of the most intriguing clues to her personality. Unfortunately, they were recorded by Constable Kingston, a man who seems to have been tone-deaf to her sense of irony. In one iconic moment, for example, Anne had said to Kingston, upon arrival at the Tower and being told that she would be housed in the apartment she stayed in before her coronation, that it is “too good for her.”22 Kingston reports that she then “kneeled down weeping, and in the same sorrow fell into a great laughing.”23 One can interpret the weeping as relief and the laughter as hysterical, but Anne also laughed—in the same conversation with Kingston—when he told her that “even the King’s poorest subject hath justice.”24 It’s hard to read that laughter as anything other than mocking Kingston’s naivete about the King’s “justice.” Similarly, Anne’s laughter over being housed in her coronation room can be read as a reaction to the bizarre, bitter irony of her situation. For a queen, of course, the apartment would hardly be “too good.” By saying so, Anne may have been pointing out to the clueless, uncomfortable Kingston that she was still, after all, the queen of England.
These are matters of interpretation that can make a huge difference in an actress’s portrayal of Anne. When Anne delivered her best-known line—“I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck”—then put her hands around her neck and “laughed heartily” (as Kingston described it), he took her to be showing “much joy and pleasure in death.”25 The actresses who have played Anne have been too smart to accept that interpretation, but then they have been left with the task of figuring out just what was going on. Merle Oberon and Dorothy Tutin eliminate the laughter entirely and have Anne say the line wistfully, as if in resigned acceptance (and in the case of Oberon, with a touch of narcissism) of the reality of the coming confrontation between steel and flesh. Natalie Dormer plays the “little neck” speech as a moment when the unimaginable stress that Anne is enduring breaks through her composure, and both the absurdity and the terror of her situation erupt in a crazy joke and then, hysterical laughter—an interpretation that fits well with the evidence that Anne’s behavior in the tower was frequently unhinged. But Bujold chooses to emphasize Anne’s intelligence and pride rather than her emotional instability, and plays the line as a sardonic response to Kingston’s lame reassurances that the blow would be so “subtle” there would be no pain. Her Anne recognizes cowardly, self-serving bull when it’s thrown at her, and will have none of it. She was, and probably always will be, the proudest of Annes.
The enthusiastic critical reception to Bujold’s performance was an exception to the lukewarm—and frequently hostile—reviews that the movie received when it opened. Vincent Canby complained that it was “unbearably classy” and “conventionally reverential.”26 But he also said (somewhat condescendingly, I think) that Bujold was “a constantly delightful surprise” whose intelligence was “an unexpected dividend” to her beauty.27 John Simon, in a piece for the New York Times called “Oscars: They Shun the Best, Don’t They?”, described the movie, which had garnered ten nominations, including Best Picture, as “a sluggish d
ullard of a film [that] conforms to Hollywood’s and, for all I know, Dubuque’s idea of a grand, historic document in which regal, larger-than-life-size dummies bestride the screen with pachydermous portentousness, their mouths full of spine-chilling platitudes.”28 Time magazine began its review by saying that “it appears to have been made for one person: the Queen of England.”29 After describing The Private Life of Henry VIII as “a superior treatment of the same subject,” the magazine singled out Bujold as nearly, but not quite, saving the movie. “It would have been easy to play the spider ensnared by her own web, but Bujold knows better . . . The performance establishes the star, but not her setting. A great king may be enough to restore a country; a noble queen is insufficient to save a base film.”30 The New York Times attributed the film’s ten Oscar nominations to the beef stroganoff and champagne served at the thirty-five special screenings for Academy members.31 But many critics complained when Bujold, nominated for Best Actress, lost to Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and celebrated when Geneviève won the Golden Globe.
The critics’ harsh reaction to the film was in part due, I believe, to the tenor of the times. The year before Anne of the Thousand Days was released, American soldiers massacred 347 civilians at My Lai. President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the target of antiwar rage, said he would not seek reelection. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated on the balcony of a Memphis motel, and the inner cities exploded. Just days later, SDS students at Columbia barricaded themselves in the president’s office while black students occupied a separate building. In May, Parisian students went on strike, tearing up the cobblestones of Paris. A few weeks later, moments after victory in the California primary, Bobby Kennedy was murdered in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel. A few days before, a marginal member of Andy Warhol’s circle, Valerie Solanas, also the founder of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, shot him in the stomach. Prior to the shooting, she had written a manifesto calling for “systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder.”32 It was not a time for reverence, not a time to romanticize the privileged, and not a time for “stuffiness” of any sort. In 1969, the once-daring Anne of the Thousand Days seemed tame and “conservative.”
