International photographer (Jan-Dec 1934)

August, 1934 T h INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHF.R Twenty-nine WHY "HENRY VIM" WENT OVER IN LONDON AND LOUISVILLE (Written for International Photographer) By ALFRED C. MOORE, Journalist, London LEXANDER KORDA'S "Private Lives of Henry the Eighth" has been one of the most over-rated pictures in recent years, and probably nobody knows this better than Mr. Korda. If you had read the London press reports of this picture's preview you would — if you paid serious attention to Fleet Street "film critics" — have been led to believe that some kind of Messiah had arrived in the person of Mr. Korda, and that the beginning of the end was in sight for Hollywood, California. But when you saw the picture you recognized that what you were looking at would have been "just another movie" had it emanated from Hollywood — which it certainly would not have done in the form in which it went through the projector. Here was a number of sequences strung together in a manner which showed you plainly that the person responsible for the stringing had learned a whole lot of useful tricks by the simple process of intelligently watching Hollywood movies, but which, as a production, fell short of the standard of cohesion that the major studios on the coast regard as routinal. You saw Charles Laughton who made you feel that a king could be a man and a man a king. You saw Lady Tree who made you realize that a woman could have a title and still be a motion picture actress. You saw a lot of good shots and a lot that were not so good. You saw promise of minor climaxes that did not materialize. You saw the picture really get moving then miss on a couple of cylinders and threaten to go stone dead on you. There were scenes powerful in emotional appeal, others charged with drama as good as the best from Hollywood. And there were other scenes as dull as English studios ever turned out. So why did "Henry VIII" go over as good entertainment and as a fair revenue propostion in places as far apart as Chelsea, Capetown and Kansas City? Well, you don't have to be a front office wizard to find the answer. It's just this. Korda was smart enough to make, not an historical picture with a kingly king playing the heavy and a lot of footage taken up with the medieval pomp that classbooks, even in English schools, can't "sell" to the kids any more, but a human story of a man with the kind of weaknesses and idiosyncrasies still common to all men. In fact "Henry the Eighth" as conceived by Korda and as played by Charles Laughton was none other than our old friend George F. Babbitt, six times married and conveniently flashed back from Main Street, Zenith, U. S. A. to Hampton Court Palace, Middlesex, England. In lots of places the resemblance stuck out a mile. Too comfortably married to the first Mrs. Henry VIII (Catherine of Aragon to you), this sixteenth century Babbitt wanted romance just like George F. did. Both of them adipose and fifty; the realtor of Zenith sought it in his "dream child, who, when others saw George Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth." Once he thought he'd found it in Ida Putiak, the silly, smiling, black-haired manicure girl. The wife butcher of Hampton Court sought it in Katherine Howard, court lady-inwaiting. Both Miss Putiak and Miss Howard gave their men the run-around. Fundamentally Henry and George's slant on life was identical — "Boosters, Pep!" And Cranmer, Henry's archbishop, and old Matt Penniman, George's "general utility man, collector of rents and salesman of insurance — broken, silent, gray," were blood brothers. 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