Trafalgar

Both this film The Divine Lady and the better known That Hamilton Woman hardly give the correct portrayal of Emma Hart Hamilton. There was nothing saintly or divine about that woman. If you want to see a correct interpretation of her, I would recommend Bequest To A Nation, written by Terrence Rattigan and starring Glenda Jackson as Emma and Peter Finch as Lord Nelson.

However for those who love romantic stories be they true or fictional this restored transitional classic and the much better That Hamilton Woman will be your cup of tea. The Divine Lady was a mostly silent film with no dialog, but a dubbed singer for Corinne Griffith singing English airs of the period. I don't think anyone believed that soprano was Corinne's voice.

For those who don't know any of the films I've cited or English history, Emma Hart played by Corinne Griffith and her mother Marie Dressler are employed as cook and maid at the home of Ian Keith as Charles Greville. Griffith catches the eye of Sir William Hamilton who is in the diplomatic service of Great Britain and she marries him to skip quite a few rungs on the English social scale.

But while H.B. Warner as Hamilton has eyes for her, Griffith spots an up and coming naval officer Victor Varconi as Horatio Nelson. They begin one of the most notorious extra-marital affairs in history. That affair and the influence that Emma gains at the court of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies where Hamilton has been made ambassador has a great deal to do with saving Great Britain. That much is true.

What's not true is how noble Emma Hamilton was. She was quite the bawdy character in her day, her common origins did more than slip. She could be vulgar and cruel, she was very cruel to Lady Nelson in real life played here by Helen Jerome Eddy. But her place in history is secure as is her place in legendary romances.

The Divine Lady won an Oscar for Director Frank Lloyd, his first of three the others also being subjects concerning the United Kingdom, Cavalcade and Mutiny On The Bounty. Corinne Griffith was nominated for Best Actress although that seems to be a subject of dispute and the film got an Oscar nomination for cinematography. Probably the award it should have gotten was for special effects, but that category had not been established yet.

The Divine Lady is a cinematic and historical anachronism, but worthy of a viewing for those reasons.

The Divine Lady,the Oscar winner for Best Director,Frank Lloyd, has recently been restored and has shown up on TCM. I saw it on the big screen at a Vitaphone film festival. Since it was a very late silent,it had a vitaphone soundtrack and even a theme song.The film tells the story of the romance of Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton The movie has some lovely visual moments. The most memorable being,the two lovers on a swing and a battle at sea. But the film is a little slow going and the male lead is stiff and lacks charisma. Frank Lloyd is best remembered for the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, which shares with this film,historical characters and sea experiences.However, Mutiny on the Bounty is a much better film. For the best version of the story of Hamilton and Nelson, see the wonderful,Vivian Leigh- Laurence Olivier-movie-That Hamilton Woman.

I saw the 1941 Vivien Leigh vehicle "That Hamilton Woman" a while ago, and while I knew it was about the same subject matter as "The Divine Lady," I did not realize that it was a doggedly faithful remake of the earlier film.

It's hard to review movies from 1929, that dreadful year for film that saw many people in the industry trying and failing miserably to figure out what to do with the new technology known as sound. "The Divine Lady" avoids that problem mostly, since, aside from some music tracks and sound effects, this is a silent film. But it feels like a silent film saddled with the clunky technology that was required for sound, and from today's perspective it has more in common with the static early sounds films than it does the artful and ambitious late silents.

Frank Lloyd won the Oscar for Best Director in this, the second year of the Academy Award's existence. His nomination actually cited two other films, neither of which I've seen: "Drag" and "Weary River." But though rules in the second year allowed artists to be nominated for multiple pictures in the same category, records seem to indicate that they only won for one of them. This is also the second and last year to date that the award for Best Director went to a film not nominated for Best Picture (the other being Lewis Milestone the year before for "Two Arabian Knights," but since the Academy gave two directing awards that year, one for drama and one for comedy, it's not an apples to apples comparison). "The Divine Lady" also brought Corinne Griffiths a nomination for Best Actress (as far as I know, Griffiths did not make the transition to sound, or at least did not last long if she did) and John Seitz a nomination for Best Cinematography. Seitz would go on to become a frequent collaborator on Billy Wilder's films.

Grade: B-

I give it 8 rather than 9 because of Griffith's acting when falling in love; her romantic feelings, as opposed to her ambassadress motives which were allied with her patriotism, seemed to spring from nothing. Varconi did all the wooing, and before you know it, whammo, a full blown affair. Griffith was more effective in portraying a girl's enthrallment with her first lover, Keith; I could believe that she trusted too deeply in his motives. Speaking of Keith, he gave an excellent performance of a man attracted to his servant's charms but hypocritical about so much more of her personality; he disgusted me, but in a good way.

But getting back to the action, the naval battles astounded and I was on the edge of my seat, dodging those cannonballs. The role of the Queen and her interaction with Griffith was unique, I thought, because of the power dynamics balancing the Queen's power with the King's and Griffith's part in the whole shebang. Someone whose real life is completely ready for filming is William Hamilton, here in this film an aged cuckold but actually a vulcanologist and man of science. I would enjoy a film depicting his life very much, showing his happy first marriage and dealings with the political structures of the era. Also good to see would be his menage-a-trois with his wife and Nelson in their small home, prior to Trafalgar. So all in all, this was a good Sunday's silent movie for TCM and I'm pleased to have seen it, with the lovely costumes and other production values, too. Then there's that rose over Griffith's lips when Nelson makes his move ...

Scottish film-maker Frank Lloyd (a would-have-been birthday celebrant on the day I watched the film under review) was one of the founding members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences – best-known for holding the annual Oscar ceremony. He was also the second Academy Award winner for Best Direction for this rarely seen historical epic which, as it turned out, was the only film in Oscar history to win that category without an accompanying nod for Best Picture (a feat which, given the current rules, is practically impossible to repeat itself). However, Lloyd was even nominated for directing two more movies that same year – WEARY RIVER (which I own a copy of but did not manage to locate in time for inclusion in this ongoing Oscar marathon!) and the unavailable DRAG. He would later emerge victorious again for CAVALCADE (1933) and received his last nomination for MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1935) which, like the latter, was also named Best Picture. For the record, his other films that have had notable brushes with Oscar were EAST LYNNE (1931), BERKELEY SQUARE (1933) and IF I WERE KING (1938) – and, although I have all three in my collection, they will have to wait a similarly-themed marathon for their first viewing. After such a distinguished career, Lloyd semi-retired in the mid-1940s and only made the occasional movie in the following decade before dying in 1960.

THE DIVINE LADY – not to be confused with the contemporaneous Greta Garbo vehicle THE DIVINE WOMAN (1928) only a fragment of which exists today – tells the oft-told tale of the controversial affair between Lady Emma Hamilton and Lord Horatio Nelson; I am already familiar with the Alexander Korda version of events entitled THAT HAMILTON WOMAN (1941; the only on screen pairing of then husband-and-wife team of Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier) and also have the Glenda Jackson/Peter Finch- starring A BEQUEST TO THE NATION aka THE NELSON AFFAIR (1973) in my unwatched pile; for the record, I would love to catch Richard Oswald's even earlier LADY HAMILTON (1921), in which the ubiquitous pair of Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss played Nelson and Sir William Hamilton respectively, and Christian-Jaque's international version EMMA HAMILTON (1968) – with Michele Mercier, Richard Johnson and John Mills.

The narrative here starts out with an 'impoverished' aristocrat (Ian Keith) dismissing a newly-engaged cook (Marie Dressler) because of the "vulgar" antics of her daughter Emma Hart (an Oscar-nominated Corinne Griffith, though her name is bafflingly omitted in Roy Pickard's "The Oscar Movies From A-Z" and seems to be disputed elsewhere too!); her entreaties to rethink his harsh decision win him over and impress his artist friend who wants to paint a portrait of her. Before long, she is accompanying her employer on social occasions, until she embarrasses him by bursting into song at a fair thereby attracting the attentions of every male within hearing distance. He is convinced to dispose of her by thrusting her into the arms of his aging womanizing uncle Sir William Hamilton (H.B. Warner!) even though she had fallen for Keith himself in the meantime. He soon gets to regret his actions when the wealthy relative (whom he had hoped to inherit) marries the wench and turns her into Lady Emma Hamilton, Ambassadress to Sicily! Although that island is ostensibly neutral to the ongoing conflict between England and France, the king sides with France while the queen (sister to the deposed Marie Antoinette) secretly sides with Britain. When Lady Hamilton decides to intervene, the latter's allegiance is instrumental in overturning a Royal decree not to help the ailing British fleet headed by Admiral Horatio Nelson (Victor Varconi – who is not shown wearing a black patch over his blind eye but does get to lose a hand!). Apart from helping the British repel the enemy, this fateful event brings Emma and Horatio together for the first time and, as they say, the rest is history...

The understandably battered print – culled from the "Warner Archives" DVD-R – does not really do the film much justice but remains reasonably watchable throughout. Indeed THE DIVINE LADY is a handsomely mounted and well-crafted production (cinematographer John F. Seitz also received an Oscar nomination for his work here), with Lloyd's solid direction smoothing over the crude sound sequences interspersed throughout where we hear Emma Hamilton sing, and only calling attention to itself intermittently, as in the aforementioned fairground sequence.