The Bad Lord Byron

I'm only a little familiar with the life and work of the great Romantic poet Lord Byron who may today still be best known for his description as being "Mad, bad and dangerous to know". Certainly this post-Gainsborough production repeats the phrase often enough, including partly in the title of course. Quite what the celbrated poet and adventurer would have made of his life being condensed into a mere 83 minutes I'm not sure and while he knew a thing or two about unusual verse structure, I rather think, like me, he'd have been nonplussed if not downright confused at the way this movie attempts to encapsulate his tumultuous life.

We join the movie at the end of his relatively short life, fighting with the Greeks against Turkish oppression, having lately done something similar in Italy with the revolutionary resistance there, the Carbonari. Struck down however by illness, we find him on his death bed where he slips into a strange dream where he's put on celestial trial to decide whether he was a good or bad man, in the former guise a great poet and freedom fighter, in the latter a libertine spendthrift who picks up and drops usually titled wealthy young ladies at will, whether they be married or not. Now, I'm a dream sequence fan myself, but this one certainly isn't in the Powell and Pressburger class.

The simple answer to the big question is of course that he was both. Unfortunately the director here misses the point in pompously and disingenuously throwing the matter back in the viewer's lap in a rather silly and misjudged final scene.

Dennis Price is given the task of bringing the notorious Bard to life but fails to project the man's sexual magnetism which seduced so many beautiful women. There is however an interesting selection of contemporary actresses including Mai Zetterling and Joan Greenwood who get to play his conquests although some of these performances are somewhat uneven too.

On the plus side I did get to hear some fine lines of poetry which will probably prompt me to read some of the man's work but on the whole it seemed to me that this pedestrian and portentous movie did its subject a disservice in dulling if not dumbing down the exciting life led by this undoubtedly charismatic man.

Dennis Price had some difficult times himself for his sexual inclinations and should have been the right actor to put Lord Byron on screen, but he is not. He is too gentlemanly and undramatic. The demonic traits of Byron are missing entirely. Dennis Price is a perfectr actor in every way but not enough for Byron. Perhaps the script is more to blame, which is poorly written - there are so many vitally significant parts of Byron's life missing here entirely, for instance is there no word of Shelley throughout the film, which is a catastrophic blunder, since the friendship between those too greatest poets of their time perhaps was the most important and at least most dramatic and significant part of their lives.

Among the ladies, Joan Greenwood is the best, while Byron's sister and wife are lost in the balls and the intrigues. Mai Zetterling as the Countess Guiccioli also makes a rather insipid impression with no real passion but sentimentality. On the whole, the film is bogged down in mostly sentimental nonsense bereaving it of life, interest and any trace of drama, which is a pity, since so much could have been made out of Byron's highly dramatic life.

The film begins when he lies dying, and in his delirium he stands trial for his life concerning his regrets about his ladies. No verdict is pronounced, but the juury of the audience will get the message.

Sorry, it could have been better.

The eternal fate of Lord Byron is decided in this film which seems to give the verdict already in The Bad Lord Byron. Byron's story and fate is decided and we see it by pieces in true Citizen Kane tradition.

The film flopped horribly for J. Arthur Rank and no doubt sealed the fate of Dennis Price as a leading man which began so promisingly in Kind Hearts and Coronets. In fact Price plays Byron in much the same manner he played Louis Mazzini in Kind Hearts and Coronets.

The film opens at the very end of Byron's life where he's lying ill of a fatal fever during the Greek War of Independence where he had gone to serve. As he's in his last stages of delirium, a heavenly court is convened to decide his eternal fate.

Citizen Kane is not the only influence on The Bad Lord Byron, the whole concept of the heavenly court is taken from The Michael Powell film, A Matter of Life and Death where David Niven was having his fate decided before a much more majestic heavenly judge.

Yet I think The Bad Lord Byron could have used the touch of an Orson Welles. The whole thing is rather too pedestrian.

Dennis Price does OK with the material and direction he got. Mai Zetterling as the Italian countess who awoke Byron's political consciousness and Joan Greenwood as the infamous Lady Caroline Lamb stand out as well.

The real Lord Byron wasn't a patch on what Dennis Price gives us. He was all the things his life shows us, an adventurer, a politician, a poet of the first rank, a lover of freedom. He was also one of the most notorious rakes in history leaving a trail of broken female and male hearts throughout Europe. He might also have had an affair with his half sister.

So if you were on Lord Byron's eternal jury where would you put him?

The heavenly tribunal was much better done three years earlier in 'A Matter of Life and Death', while Dennis Price was then still being miscast as soulful heroes before he found his true vocation as a cad; but Joan Greenwood as Caroline Lamb alone justifies the thing's existence, for which the two promptly atoned with 'Kind Hearts and Coronets'.

In 1824 Lord Byron lies dying of a fever at Missolonghi in Greece. In his delirium he imagines himself being tried by a celestial court which will decide his destiny in the afterlife. Apart from his close friend John Hobhouse, the witnesses called before the court are the women in his life- his estranged wife Annabella, his lovers Lady Caroline Lamb and Teresa Guiccioli and Augusta Leigh. In reality Augusta was Byron's half-sister, but here she is referred to as his cousin.

The life of Byron would seem like a natural subject for a biopic. Apart from his status as one of Britain's greatest poets, he was also a noted libertine and seducer, a political activist and a man of action who fought for Greek independence and supported the cause of the Carbonari, the revolutionary Italian secret society. 1949, however, was not the best year in which to make a biography of such a man. Byron's private life- some aspects of which still seem shocking even today- had left him with a bad reputation, and this meant that in the moral climate of the forties a film about him was bound to be problematic. Nottingham City Council, for example, refused permission for filming to take place at Byron's actual home, Newstead Abbey near the city.

The most problematic aspect of Byron's reputation was the allegation that he had an incestuous relationship with Augusta and that he was even the father of her daughter Medora. This was the reason why she had to be made his cousin rather than his sister and why she insists that their relationship was a platonic friendship without physical intimacy. This attempt to sanitise history, however, was not enough to satisfy the American censors, who felt that any film about Byron, even a sanitised one, was not fit to be shown in the United States, and promptly banned it. There were also rumours that Byron was bisexual and had sexual relations with men; needless to say you will not find any mention of these in the film.

Great attention was paid to recreating the costumes and interiors of the period (something which was not always the case with British historical dramas of the forties), and the original intention was to make the film in colour to show these off to full effect. Unfortunately, all the studio's colour cameras were being used to film "The Blue Lagoon", so it ended up being shot in black-and-white, which greatly reduces its visual attractiveness.

Byron was famously described by Lady Caroline as "mad, bad and dangerous to know", a description repeated in the film, but it does not really fit Dennis Price's milk-and-water Byron, disappointingly sane and about as dangerous to know as a kitten. Price had the good looks to convey something of Byron's charisma, but never really achieves it, making the film's hero appear as, at most, a well-bred, well-mannered drawing-room revolutionary. The best of the supporting cast is Joan Greenwood as Lady Caroline; the rest are unremarkable, with Mai Zetterling's weak, simpering Teresa being particularly disappointing. The idea of a heavenly court appears to have been borrowed from The Archers' "A Matter of Life and Death" made a few years earlier, but that was a much better film which made much better use of the idea. There is a great film to be made on the life of Lord Byron. This is not it. 4/10

A goof. It is stated in the film that Byron died aged 37. In fact, he died aged 36.