Lady Caroline Lamb

Only a besotted husband could send a love letter as wacky as this movie as Robert Bolt did to Sarah Miles; on which he squandered all the critical capital he'd amassed with 'Lawrence of Arabia' and 'A Man for All Seasons'.

The real Caroline Lamb (1785-1828) probably wasn't much like the unhinged pixie Sarah Miles plays here (and there never was another woman like Joan Greenwood in 'The Bad Lord Byron'). Lord Byron was certainly nothing like Richard Chamberlain in Freddie Mercury eyeliner. But dull it ain't.

Boy, can women make fools over themselves and over such a cute little boy as Lord Byron!!! Lord Lamb is made to look a lamb indeed, as he continually forgives his neurotic/crazy wife for affairs that other women, including his own mother, have left and right but with discretion!! It reminded me of the hooraw over poor Pres. Clinton and his dalliance with the hooker/I mean aide, and the hypocritical rantings of Newt Gingrich who was doing the same thing all the time,.....but DISCREETLY. My goodness, aren't we just like the English!!! Since I don't really know the history, other than that the Brittannica says that she made a scene at some Lady's party...boy, did she ever!!! cutting her wrists and bleeding all over everybody's ball gowns. The mother, former mistress of George IV is quite intelligent and not half-bad. I loved all the costumes and the histrionics myself. Just to look at all those palatial estates was worth the price of the movie!!

And of course, Olivier is different in every movie! How I miss him!

On a day in 1812, following the publication of his poem 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' a certain George Gordon Byron awoke to find himself famous. This celebrity proved to be a poisoned chalice. A disastrous marriage together with accusations of incest and sodomy caused him to quit these shores four years later, never to return. His brief but destructive affair with the already married Caroline Lamb is the centre piece of this film written and directed by Robert Bolt. The critical drubbing the film received deterred him from directing again which is a pity as he exhibits a sense of the visual and an eye for detail which is hardly surprising as he could not fail to have learned from the masters Lean and Zinnemann. Apparently Lean was offered the chance to direct but showed little interest. Bolt is well-served here by the cinematography of Oswald Morris, production design by Carmen Dillon and an excellent score by Richard Rodney Bennett. Unsatisfactory screen portrayals of Byron underline the near impossibility of capturing the complex, contradictory and mercurial nature of one of our greatest poets but given the limited opportunities here American actor Richard Chamberlain does extremely well although one has to question Bolt's decision to dispense with Byron's club foot. I may be in the minority but I feel that the generally negative response to the performance of Bolt's wife Sarah Miles in the title role is unwarranted as she has captured well the character's obsessiveness and emotional instability. This instability was not exactly helped by an addiction to Laudanum which Bolt again has chosen to ignore. Byron wrote that "Maidens, like moths, are ever caught by glare" but one senses that her feelings for him ran far deeper than mere infatuation with fame. Not for the first time it is the actors of the 'Old School' that provide real substance, including Laurence Olivier as Wellington, Ralph Richardson as George 1V, John Mills as Canning and especially Margaret Leighton who is gifted the best lines as Lady Melbourne. One of our classiest actresses whose performance is one of infinite subtlety and grace. This is a co-production with Italy which explains the presence of Silvia Monti as Byron's future wife Annabella Milbanke. She looks ravishing but is totally miscast and needless to say is 'dubbed'. There are inaccuracies, omissions and 'compromises' in this to be sure but that is the nature of biopics, take them or leave them.

A sherry-trifle of a biopic and period drama from '71-72, Lady Caroline Lamb captures the pneuma of 1972 - that greyest of hippie years so well. The early-'70s were pioneering years and 1972 was the year that saw the release of Andrey Tarkovsky's Solaris, Bill Douglas' My Ain Folk, Jack Couffer's The Darwin Adventure and Charlton Heston's Antony & Cleopatra. The scenes filmed in Italy at twilight at a palazzo and Roman amphitheatre are very evocative and have a sense of enchantment and stillness as do some of the interior shots featuring Lady Caroline and Richard Chamberlain's Lord Byron, while the score composed by English composer Richard Rodney Bennett is quite superb . Maudlin and melodramatic - Sarah Miles in appearance in some scenes prefigures the punk style of the mid-'70s - she sports a shock of grey/pinkish spiky hair. Jon Finch 'Frenzy' (1972) is good as the liberal Lord Melbourne while Sir Laurence Olivier's flair performance as the Duke of Wellington is splendid:- he sports a royal blue silk sash, Regency-Era wavy chestnut hair and a hooked putty false nose and is every inch the classical figure from the Age of Reason. Sir Ralph Richardson ( an actor born in 1902) as King George IV is both lyrical and amusing.

After enduring Robert Bolt's rather turgid retelling of Lady Caroline Lamb's ill-fated love and finding myself, once again, unable to warm to his real-life wife (at the time), the rather tiresome Sarah Miles, the whole enterprise was redeemed by that fabulously funny curtain line. When told that Lady Caroline has died of a broken heart, one of her chief female detractors faces the camera (through the lace curtains of a window, I seem to recall) and hisses, (Alas! I'm not quoting verbatim, since I haven't seen this since its theatrical release, but here goes...) "She would!, wouldn't she?!?" I laughed all the way out to the parking lot. Not available on video, apparently, and if they do unearth this bit of cinematic costume jewellry (not really a precious gem, mind you), let us hope that it will be on DVD where the Panavision/widescreen ratio will be preserved.