The Lion in Winter 4K 1968 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

1183. During the Christmas festivities, the aging King Henry II of England must name an heir. The event is attended by the king's wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, who spent ten years in prison for her part in a plot against the monarch, the king's mistress, the vain princess Alais, her brother, King Philip II Augustus of France, and Henry II's three sons, Richard the Lionheart, Geoffrey and John. All members of the family hate each other. They have only one thing in common - an exorbitant thirst for power and willingness to commit any treachery for its sake.

Review 4K Movie

The real King Henry the Second was dirty, formidable and combative. Just like his later French namesake, he liked to fight and get drunk. Once drunk, he fell asleep. He slept in a stable, and in a palace, on straw and in a bed, which, if he met in his marching life, was immediately inhabited by all kinds of creatures of God - from women to sheep. And when he was awake - created one of the largest medieval kingdoms - Anjou Empire, strugal new English dynasty - Plantagenets, juggled crowns, argued with popes, endlessly fought with his wife and sons, killed popes and fought with unruly vassals. Oh yes - he also wrote poetry in Provençal and Old French. In short, the man lived a rich medieval life. This, undeservedly forgotten, medieval ruler is now known to the public only as the father of the glorious Richard the Lionheart and the inglorious John of the Earthless, and it is a pity - he was a good ruler, but the heirs were not lucky. James Goldman's play 'The Lion in Winter', screened by the British, is devoted to a few days of Henry's life.

The setting of the drama is Shannon Castle, Christmas Day, 1183, and a vast and turbulent family of chess pieces flocking to the board of the coming game. Henry himself with his mistress and, in parallel, Prince John's fiancée Alice, the princes Richard, Geoffrey and John. Somewhere on the horizon looms the imminent arrival of the young French King Philip. And in the first frames the central character of the movie - Queen Alienora, whom her loving husband, after another rebellion lost by her, put under the castle, but for the sake of the holiday for a couple of days decided to let out of confinement. Alienora arrives with pomp, knowing full well that in a few days she will be sent back to her royally furnished dungeon, so the precious time of freedom must be spent to the full. A couple of Christmas days is an occasion for everyone to avenge previous offenses, to try to win back what was lost in the past turmoil, to redivide provinces and crowns once again, and simply to dot numerous family “i's”.

The most useless thing is to try to criticize and look for flaws in this, practically a reference film. There are none. Perfectly constructed composition and dialogues. Realistic, in some places even too much for the sixties, directing. Seven main actors, five of whom were still unknown at the time, competing with each other in the game. Perhaps the director Anthony Harvey tried to play on the dissonance - the already great Hepburn and O'Toole and swarming at their feet crowned youth, but it did not work. Good Richard is a young Hopkins, Philip - Dalton, and ungraceful, bastard John brilliantly played Nigel, the future King Arthur in 'Excalibur'.

Peter O'Toole, a couple of years before that has already performed the role of young Henry in “Beckett” - a handsome duck, a brilliant young man, capable of wresting a wife from the French king, here, thanks to the art of makeup artists and a superimposed belly, appears huge, a block, flabby, aged, but has not lost strength and grip of the ruler. His zenith has already passed, but the forces are still enough to kick the ears of the young French king-Dalton and roar to suppress family intrigues. Katharine Hepburn frankly enjoys the role of Alienora, by the way her distant relative on the line of John's unlucky. Her eyes shine like lamps, her body is relaxed, but her mind is as sharp and lightning fast as a razor. Just a few days to try to settle scores with the past and gain hope for the future. Neither neurotic pederast Richard, whose exploits here are only the desecration of the French king by his uncircumcised zeb, nor pimply evil dwarf John, who is vainly trying to get out from under his father's wing, nor predatory Geoffrey, whose spider mind is vainly looking for a coveted way to sell everyone to everyone, and with the earnings to buy his father's crown, well, or finally get parental attention, can not compete with her either separately or together. All the more pass Philip and Alice, whose gentle French natures the boisterous family immediately grinded and cast aside by the second half of the movie. Only O'Toole can serve as a counterbalance to the demonic Hepburn - in his scraggly beard and powerful figure are stuck and scattered the most angry philippics of Kathryn. Her game is frenetic, soaked with monstrous energy so much that sometimes you have to take your eyes off the screen. It was for this role Hepburn received her third Oscar, and an unprecedented case in Hollywood, the year after the second - for 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner'.

Modern drama in a medieval setting does not become contrived and far-fetched. The inhabitants of the mossy twelfth century generously pour out witticisms, anachronisms and aphorisms picked up at the tables of New York's intellectual cafes. The air is saturated to the limit with pique and insults, mutual hatred and betrayal. To deceive, to change sides over the course of an evening, and then to deceive and betray again, and so on ad infinitum. Henry, beginning as a laurel-wreathed triumphant, à la Lear in the first act of Shakespeare's play, watches all his carefully constructed plans and hopes crumble in a couple of days, tries to snap back and feverishly counteract it. But there is nothing he can do about it - history, time, family and the sharp pen of one of the best American writers of the second half of the twentieth century are against him, who, out of intellectual interest, leads the character further and further down the curved spiral of Dante's hell. The play is an interior family portrait, only the crowned relatives are not arguing in whispers in the kitchen, but starting wars against each other. The old story is that the common folk always have to pay for broken pots.

The English legend of King Lear was already well known in the Middle Ages. I wonder if Henry remembered it on the slope of his years, when his sons, sitting in their estates, distributed by their father's generous hand, were sharpening their teeth and blades on the inheritance of their not yet dead parent. The movie's finale is marked by a confusedly optimistic multiple dots, but the story itself ends simply. Henry died of grief during another war with the kiddies after learning of the betrayal of his favorite son John, the last man who still held his father's side. Machiavellian Geoffrey died in some petty Breton backwater, never reaching the coveted throne. Richard fought Jerusalem, sat in prison, pawned half of England for debt, and remained a legend. John, through folly and weakness, signed the momentous Magna Carta, which was his most notable act. The powerful kingdom, riveted and assembled with hamster-like persistence by Henry, lasted another three centuries, though it did not benefit either the French or the British, only dragging both nations into an endless century-long massacre. And Alienora lived a long time, flitting between her children, which she managed to sit on half a dozen European thrones, became the ancestor of many royal dynasties, for which she was nicknamed by modern historians - the 'grandmother of medieval Europe'.