The dead giveaway are the frame-busting close-ups of Katharine Hepburn as Queen Mary. Unheard of in a John Ford film, a cinematic sign the guy had fallen seriously for his miscast star in this misbegotten adaption of the 1933 Theatre Guild hit Maxwell Anderson wrote for Helen Hayes. People still debate what sort of affair it was. Intellectual pals? Physical?, Platonic?* Whatever it was, it didn’t translate to screen in their sole collaboration, a costly flop Hepburn's career couldn’t afford about the doomed Scottish Queen who ran afoul of Elizabeth I when she gave birth to Britain’s likely heir; pissed off the Scottish reform movement as a Catholic; then married for love after a politically appropriate marriage blew up . . . literally. (Real story: the bomb missed the husband so he was strangled in the adjoining garden by men sent by Mary’s next husband. Yikes!) Plenty to work with here. Too much? With Hepburn aquiver with teary emotion and Ford trying to cover up with marching bagpipers and jaunty Scottish airs. Coming off a jaw-dropping run in the past two years (Will Rogers hits; THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND; making Jean Arthur a top star; his biggest prestige piece in THE INFORMER), Ford settled for getaways with Hepburn on his yacht and a visit with her East Coast family to make up for this one. Only co-star Fredric March (braying Anderson’s faux Elizabethan free-verse) and cinematographer Joe August get out alive.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Many a Queen Mary film out there. Try Vanessa Redgrave vs Glenda Jackson’s Elizabeth I in the unexpectedly tasty MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS/’71. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/01/anne-of-thousand-days-1969-mary-queen.html
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Though Ford & Hepburn retained a close friendship till he died (Ford, whose wife was Mary, signaled his dual devotion renaming Helen in THE QUIET MAN as Mary-Kate), Spencer Tracy, another dark Irish soul with a drinking problem, took over as soulmate.
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