A pair of films in the boxed set "Alexander Korda's Private Lives" (Criterion Eclipse) prove that the producer-director Korda and the idiosyncratic star Charles Laughton were, in their prime, as formidable a filmmaking team as John Ford and John Wayne or Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. In "The Private Life of Henry VIII" (1933), Laughton may well be the exemplary glutton—he's hilarious when he complains about the end of delicacy and refinement while scarfing down a meal with both hands—but he's also smart and charismatic in the King's dealings with the court, his military ambitions, and his verbal duels with the clever Anne of Cleves, his fourth wife (the delightfully arch Elsa Lanchester, who was Laughton's wife). Most surprising of all, he's touching in his affection for his fifth wife, Katherine Howard (Binnie Barnes), who discovers, alas, that she cannot live without the love of Thomas Culpeper (Robert Donat). Laughton does a magnificent job of conveying how potent a monarch can feel in his prime: when Howard tests Henry's virility and then cheats on him, his pathos is truly king-size. The Korda-Laughton "Rembrandt" (1936) is a remarkable reverie on art and life. It succeeds because the script (by Carl Zuckmayer, from a story by June Head) makes Rembrandt as articulate verbally as he is visually, and Laughton shades the painter's words with melancholy and an inchoate yearning. What unmoors him near the start is the death of his wife, Saskia; no off-screen character has ever got a greater sendoff than the tribute Laughton's Rembrandt pays to her in public when, unknown to him, back home she is dying. As Rembrandt's practical housekeeper and mistress, Gertrude Lawrence displays the unsentimental emotional attack that fuelled her theatrical legend; Lanchester is spunky as his common-law wife, Hendrickje Stoffels. Whether reciting the story of King Saul or munching on a herring, Laughton imbues his Rembrandt with a Biblical vitality, and Korda captures every resonating feeling, gesture, and syllable. Korda's "The Private Life of Don Juan" (1934) features Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., in both a spoof of Don Juanism and a satire of its middle-aged star—an action hero past his prime playing a different kind of action hero past his prime. And "The Rise of Catherine the Great" (1934), produced by Korda and directed by Paul Czinner, features Fairbanks, Jr., near his peak, in a Byronic interpretation of Grand Duke Peter as a man hopelessly conflicted in his feelings toward Elisabeth Bergner's vivacious Catherine. But Laughton's movies, with their meatiness, anchor this set and elevate it to rare artistic heights.
Da The New Yorker, 1 giugno 2009
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/events/revivals/2009/06/01/090601gomo_GOAT_movies_sragow
