Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter was released in 1968, the screenplay adapted by James Goldman from his long-running play. Loosely based on historical fact, the Lear-like plot charts an ageing King Henry II’s futile attempts to choose a successor after the premature death of his eldest son.
The film’s pleasures are many. A hyperactive Peter O’Toole chews up the scenery as the monarch, aided by a superb supporting cast. Crucially the film looks right: filmed on location in France, we really do get a sense of the era’s grubbiness. Badly-dressed peasants and numerous chickens flood the few crowd scenes. The candle-lit interiors (well captured by cinematographer Douglas Slocombe) anticipate those in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.
Henry’s three remaining sons are all compromised. The youngest, Nigel Terry’s John, is a spoilt twit (“He has pimples and smells of compost!” cries the king’s mistress in an early scene), whilst middle son Geoffrey (a snarling John Castle) is an oleaginous panto villain. More promising is the soon-to-be Richard Lionheart, played by Anthony Hopkins in his debut film role. Alas, among his flaws is a potentially scandalous relationship with Timothy Dalton’s King Philip of France, whose snazzy outfits confirm that he’s not a man to be trusted. And there’s an Oscar-winning turn from a luminous Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine (pictured right), spitting out her lines as if she’s in a screwball comedy.
This is frequently a very funny film, despite the melodrama. “I don’t much like my children,” she drawls, greeting her sons on being released from a 10-year imprisonment. O’Toole spends much of the film pacing down dark corridors SHOUTING VERY LOUDLY, but his more intimate scenes with Hepburn contain tenderness among the offbeat dialogue: “Sleep, and dream of me with croutons,” says Henry at one point. It's almost a medieval soap opera.
Studio Canal’s new print both looks and sounds impressive (John Barry provided the score), as we see when viewing the unrestored clips shown in a bonus interview with Hopkins. There’s an astute director’s commentary and an enjoyable chat with John Castle, comparing the different demands of stage and cinema acting to “coal mining and needlework”. And hearing that Hepburn gave one of Spencer Tracey’s old cardigans to Castle during a chilly exterior shoot makes one like her even more.
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