Hollywood Anglophilia runs alarming high in this wee bit of fancy about a guttersnipe of an orphan boy, a Thames river-rat scavenger, who takes it into his head to go off to visit the Queen. Victoria that is, wallowing in Windsor Castle 15 years after Prince Albert’s death. Made in England with Hollywood talent on top (scripter, star & director/Nunnally Johnson, Irene Dunne, Jean Negulesco), it grows on you as it goes along, largely because of Alec Guinness’s remarkable Benjamin Disraeli, by turns warm, deferent & acerbic. Dunning Dunne’s Victoria to rejoin the living, he tops all other Disraelis on film from George Arliss to John Gielgud (and Ian McShane on video tape). Climaxing in a speech to Parliament on a progressive program Victoria herself has championed, pulled off in an astonishing uninterrupted half-reel single shot that Negulesco managed to keep 20th/Fox chief Darryl Zanuck & his editors from disrupting with reaction shot inserts. Dunne is an unlikely Queen, but you adjust; Finlay Currie a rather massive Mr. John Brown, the other motivator in getting the Queen back to her self*; and Andrew Ray a pleasingly unpolished juvenile playing out borrowed bits from OLIVER TWIST and PYGMALION. A castle romance between classes (soldier & Lady’s maid) lets Johnson tweak British snobbery for Stateside audiences, but a celebratory tone largely rules the waves in this one. An indulgence, but a good one, handsomely shot by Georges Périnal and neatly scored in Elgarian fashion by William Alwyn.
DOUBLE-BILL: *Judy Dench & Billy Connolly cover similar ground from an entirely different angle in MRS. BROWN/’97.
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