Soixante années de gloire

Before Sept. 9, 2015, Queen Victoria had been the longest reigning monarch in the history of England. Her rule lasted for 63 years and nearly five months. Born on May 24, 1819, she was 18 when she ascended to the throne after the death of William IV on June 20, 1937. She was 82 when she died on January 22, 1901.

On Sept. 9, 2015, Queen Elizabeth II surpassed Victoria's length of reign. She became the longest reigning English monarch at 5:30 p.m. British Standard Time. Her tenure at that time was 23,226 days, 16 hours and about 30 minutes. Queen Elizabeth was 89 years old at that time. She was born on April 21, 1926, and ascended to the throne at age 25 on Feb. 6, 1952.

"Queen of Destiny" (aka, "60 Glorious Years"), is a film about Victoria's reign. Much of the film is devoted to her marriage to Prince Albert and their great love. They had nine children, but as Prince consort of the United Kingdom, Albert had no special duties or powers. The film shows their relationship and Victoria's support as Albert took on many causes for the public good. Besides running the royal household, office and estates, Albert worked on educational reform and abolition of slavery. He was one of the founders of the Great Exhibition in October 1851 that was the first of the World's Fair events to be held.

Albert died on Dec. 14, 1861, at the young age of 42. Victoria went into a long period of mourning that included seclusion from most public appearances for the next decade. She wore black all the rest of her life. The film shows some of this and then glosses over the last few decades of her reign.

Victoria was generally well liked by her people, but she had a couple of periods of discontent. This film and others seldom include mention of the number of attempts on her life. Most were men who shot guns at her as her carriage passed. There were no global wars during her reign. But, Victoria supported the lesser wars that the U.K. was part of, including the Anglo-Afghan War (1839-42) and the Boer Wars in South Africa (1880-1881, and 1899-1902). She also supported English expansion. And the empire continued to thrive during her rule. Three powerful prime ministers served among the 11 who were in office during Victoria's reign – Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, and the Marquess of Salisbury (Robert Gascoyne-Cecil).

Her reign was not without problems. The Great Famine (Potato Famine) of 1845-1852 affected all of Europe. Ireland was hurt more than any place. More than one million people died and one million emigrated. Ireland's population dropped by 20 to 25 percent. And, while England was progressing and the economy flourished overall, rank poverty was also a problem in poorer areas and in the back streets of London.

But the reign of Queen Victoria will always be known as the Victorian era or age of England. And that refers mostly to the revival in architectural styles, flourishing of the arts and an especially rich time of English literature. Many of the greatest authors, poets and playwrights lived and worked during the Victorian Age. These include the Bronte sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne), Mary Ann Evans as George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, Samuel Butler, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

This film has an excellent supporting cast, especially C. Aubrey Smith as the Duke of Wellington. It presents us a genteel portrait of the beloved queen. Anna Neagle and Anton Walbrook give good performances in their roles as Victoria and Albert. It's a nice look at an historical period in England, but one must realize that the life of Queen Victoria is highly sanitized.

A couple of other reviewers have noted one of the best assets of this movie. That is its shooting locations. It has beautiful scenes of Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace and Balmoral. I doubt that any other movie production has been allowed such access since this film was made. This would be a good movie to bring out on DVD. I obtained a copy made from a TV broadcast. Consequently, its of quite poor quality. But the story makes it worth watching nevertheless.

I caught this when it was shown on a digital channel as a last-minute replacement recently. In the UK at least there has been a lot about Queen Victoria recently as last month was the one hundredth anniversary of her death.

I understand that this film is largely a colour remake of the earlier 'Victoria the Great', made in black and white with much of the same cast a year earlier, but which concentrated much more on the Queen's early life. This film opens with her already Queen and largely deals with her life with Albert until his death in 1861. The rest of the film is a very quick gallop through the political ups and downs and technological achievements of the last 40 years she was on the throne.

Dame Anna Neagle, whose husband Herbert Wilcox was the producer of this, is less imperious than perhaps she could have been, but I suppose one must remember that this was made 62 years ago and the Queen had only then been dead some 37 years.

The sets and costumes are sumptuous, the expense when this was made must have been immense. It would also appear that the Palace, having seen the success of the earlier film, and the Royal family being shell-shocked by in the Abdication, saw this as a blessed piece of positive spin. The result is that this has exteriors shot at Balmoral, Windsor Castle, Osborne House (where much of 'Mrs Brown' was filmed) and Buckingham Palace, where they appeared to have had access to the inner courtyard which has probably unprecedented for the time. I don't believe any other commercial film has had permission to film inside Buckingham Palace.

The history is accurate if sanitised but it all seems a little stilted to modern ears but is still worth a look, museum piece as it is.

The fad of filming two movies back-to-back does not belong exclusively to Italian genre cinema, Jess Franco or recent Hollywood fantasy blockbuster franchises; this prestigious (shot in Technicolor by future triple Oscar-winning cinematographer Freddie Young) historical epic dealing with the lengthy reign of British monarch Queen Victoria came hot on the heels of the previous year's VICTORIA THE GREAT made by the same team of stars Anna Neagle and Anton Walbrook, producer-director Wilcox and co-screenwriter Miles Malleson. Unlike most follow-ups, this does not pick up where its predecessor left off but rather depicts events that were left out of the first movie; this entails that some actors reprised the same roles here: Felix Aylmer (as Lord Palmerston), Derrick De Marney (as Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli), Walter Rilla (as Prince Ernst), Gordon McLeod (as Mr. Brown) and Joyce Bland (as Florence Nightingale). Incidentally, Neagle would later portray the latter role herself in Wilcox's biopic of THE LADY WITH THE LAMP (1951) – where Aylmer would return yet again as the Hon. Lord Palmerston, M.P.!; having said that, in the film under review, the part of The Duke of Wellington is given more screen time than in VICTORIA THE GREAT and is in fact entrusted to one of the great character actors of his time, C. Aubrey Smith (apparently graduating from a bit-part in the earlier film). Before concentrating on the film proper, here are two final pieces of trivia: George Arliss won an Oscar for portraying Disraeli in the eponymous 1929 film that I recently caught up with, as well as Wellington in THE IRON DUKE (1934; which I own but have yet to watch)! Besides, I am also familiar with another screen encounter between Queen Victoria and Disraeli in THE MUDLARK (1950; with Alec Guinness and Irene Dunne) and have THE YOUNG VICTORIA (2009) in my unwatched pile…

Although I have watched VICTORIA THE GREAT on Italian TV many years ago – I cannot sensibly compare the two movies – this second installment certainly does not strike me as being made up of footage which had ostensibly been left on the cutting-room floor the first time around or a compilation of B-sides as it were; for one thing, unlike the case here, its predecessor only used Technicolor sparingly. Even so, the film does follow a rigorous episodic structure in order to confine its 60 years of eventful history into just 95 minutes of screen time: from foreigner Albert's unpopular coming to Britain as incumbent Prince Regent to reaching his zenith as the brains behind the Great Exhibition of 1851 to his early death; from Victoria's battle-of-wills with the old-fashioned Duke of Wellington over his opposition to Albert to his becoming one of their closest confidantes and his own death as they are adjudicating a traditional Scottish dance contest; from Lord Palmerston's impassioned speeches in Parliament that leave no alternative but for Britain to engage in the Crimean War (including a re-enactment of the famous incident of "The Charge Of the Light Brigade") to Disraeli's scheming to acquire the Suez Canal for Britain; from General Gordon's defeat in Khartoum to Lord Kitchener's triumph at Omdurman, etc. The film obviously ends with the death of the Queen herself at the turn of the 20th century and the people's verdict that an era had veritably been brought to a close with her passing. The end result is less an epic that a glorified depiction of the family life of the elite British society but it is no less entertaining for that; indeed, the engaging central performances, the familiar faces and events and the solid production values (including Anthony Collins' music score) carry the day admirably.

In conclusion, although the hazy print I watched was preceded by the unmistakable logo of U.S. distributor RKO Radio, the title displayed on the opening credits is still SIXTY GLORIOUS DAYS rather than QUEEN OF DESTINY – which is how it was retitled in 1941 when it was paired with the Charles Laughton-Carole Lombard comedy THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED (1940) on the other side of the pond; what is more, a compilation movie called QUEEN VICTORIA was released in Britain in 1943, which re- edited the two films together in chronological order and accidentally destroying their original individual negative into the process!

I saw only the first fifteen minutes of this talking-waxworks show, but that was more than enough. This picture is lame and prissy, the kind where the viewer is expected to feel a naughty thrill and a glow of pride at Victoria's daring--"Oh, look! the Queen is dancing the waltz!" Anton Walbrook is debonair but demure, and Anna Neagle is a typical dim debutante. After seeing several real-life royal weddings live on TV, the spectacle of actors stiffly pretending to get married is less than overwhelming, especially with no attempt at characterisation or humour. People who worship the royal family on bended knee may like this kind of thing, but anyone wanting a movie with intelligence or charm had best look elsewhere. Give me The Smiling Lt., with Maurice Chevalier in the title role, who raises havoc in the bedrooms of the royal palace, any day!

I envy the previous individual who had the opportunity of viewing this in the UK as, to my knowledge, it has never appeared on home video or been broadcast on American television in recent memory. One interesting fact that I found about this film is that, while all reference sources list the USA release title of this British film as QUEEN OF DESTINY, some research I was doing for something else turned up an interesting fact. This film premiered in the US at Radio City Music Hall (December 1938)under its original British title. Subsequent releases may have used the alternate, but it at least played in New York as Sixty Glorious Years.