The Movie Room

The Lion in Winter 1968, directed by Anthony Harvey

Rating: 10/10

I didn’t have super high hopes when I first saw this movie—it comes from an era of royal historical films that I find very stately and well-made but also very boring and way too long. But even at 134 minutes, this movie went by super fast for me and is one that I think about often.

A lot of the success of this movie rests on the great cast. Peter O’Toole plays King Henry II, four years after he already had done so in Becket, and his familiarity with the part shows in how lived-in (and fun!) the performance is. As for the younger cast, you have amazing actors like Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Dalton; seeing them when they are so young and still able to match up to the older more tested stars is amazing. But the best performance in the movie is Katharine Hepburn as the exiled queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. I feel like as she got older, Hepburn got a lot less of the comic roles that she had relished in when she was younger, but here she gets to play a regal role like she had grown into but with the sensibility of one of her earlier perfornances and it is magical. She won the Oscar for Best Actress here (tying with Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl) and she really deserves it—it is definitely my favorite late-career Hepburn performance, and may be my favorite Hepburn performance ever. She is totally let loose and shows how strong a character Eleanor is, even after being imprisoned she is still plotting a coup and having a freaking blast trying to put it in action, and even having a great time as the coup starts to flail—she is a true agent of chaos just like the characters she perfected in movies like Bringing Up Baby but with more power.

Of course it also looks great and is a technical masterpiece. Like Anne of the Thousand Days, Mary Queen of Scots,Becket, etc. it is a lavishly decorated and put up historical epic. The movie takes place over the Christmas season as the royal family comes together and is trapped as they vie for power and the throne, and the movie’s visuals and sets do make clear how claustrophobic this environment can be while also still a feast for the audience’s eyes. It is the epitome of a gilded cage. You can very easily understand how this palace has led to such violence and familial hatred while also totally getting why everyone wants to be in charge of it—it is both awe inspiring and awful in equal measure and to convey that without pushing one over the other is a feat of great craftsmanship.

This is by far my favorite old historical epic of the British royal family, and it also is a great Christmas film about familial strife. It is the perfect marriage of old-fashioned epic filmmaking alongside a completely unexpected screwball style performance—these two things feel like they shouldn’t work together, but they really do!