Anna Boleyn

Ernst Lubitsch: Anna Boleyn (1920) with Emil Jannings (Henry VIII), Henny Porten (Anne Boleyn) and Ludwig Hartau (Duke of Norfolk).

Anna Boleyn / Anna Boleyn.
    DE 1920. PC: Messter-Film / Union. D: Ernst Lubitsch. SC: Norbert Falk, Hanns Kräly. DP: Theodor Sparkuhl. Technical Director: Kurt Waschneck. AD: Kurt Richter. COST: Ali Hubert. Starring: Emil Jannings (Henry VIII), Henny Porten (Anne Boleyn), Hedwig Pauli (Queen Catherine), Hilde Müller (Princess Mary), Ludwig Hartau (Duke of Norfolk), Paul Hartmann (Henry Norris), Aud Egede Nissen (Johanna Seymour), Ferdinand von Alten (Marc Smeton), Adolf Klein (Cardinal Wolsey), Paul Biensfeld (the court jester).
    Originally 2793 m /19 fps/ 128 min.
    Restored Transit Film / FWMS version based on the tinted and toned print from Milan, /19 fps/ 124 min.
    E-subtitles by AA.
    Viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 7 Feb 2008.

This is the greatest Lubitsch spectacle, a strong historical tragedy. The tinting and toning is subtle, the print is superb, the best I have seen of this film, could hardly be better.

As always with the Lubitsch spectacles, this is a woman's story. Certainly it is no great historical drama, the epochal events (the break with Rome, the English Reformation, the creation of the Church of England, the dissolution of the monasteries, the union of England and Wales, the creation of many national buildings, the story of Thomas More) are ignored or reduced to a background of the private story, Henry the Renaissance Man is reduced to a lecher, and Anne Boleyn elevated to a saint.

Jannings does look the part, very much like the Holbein painting. His brutality as the most fearsome English absolute monarch feels close to the reality. This is another German tyrant film from the Weimar era, and one of the best. The final sequences with confessions elicited in torture chambers are chilling, and the abrupt ending is very effective. Henny Porten at her best, Theodor Sparkuhl at his best.

Among the related films I was thinking about A Man for All Seasons (Robert Shaw as Henry VIII, Vanessa Redgrave as Anne Boleyn, Paul Scofield as Thomas More, Orson Welles as Cardinal Wolsey) and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (Bette Davis as Elizabeth I, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, her birth depicted so movingly by Lubitsch).