Film Review: The Lion in Winter
Katherine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole Go Head to Head
The Lion in Winter is a 1960s classic beloved of medieval history buffs and Katherine hepburn fans alike.
The Lion in Winter (1968), like Becket (1964), is one of those gloriously colorful '60s films about the Middle Ages (mid-12th century England, in this case) that appear to be accurate, but are very fictional. Becket, for example, is based on the erroneous notion that Thomas à Becket was a Saxon when he was actually a Norman.
Similarly, The Lion in Winter skillfully melds the pomp and circumstance of '50s films about the Middle Ages with the darker and sadder view that '70s films like Robin and Marian (1976) introduced. This film is about as cynical as you can get, with its portrait of vicious family strife. But it also has a heart under the glittering knives.
Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn star as Henry II and this week's article and blog on Eleanor of Aquitaine. The story is set in 1183, during Christmastime at a nonexistent family reunion of Henry, Katherine, Henry's latest mistress Alais and their three sons: Richard, Geoffrey and John. Ostensibly, Henry is expected to decide which of his three surviving sons will inherit his throne. But he has a secret plan. Alais is pregnant and he wants to supplant all of them with her unborn child. Once they and their mother find out, it's going to get ugly. There's a further wrinkle-Alais is the daughter of Eleanor's ex-husband, the King of France, by a second wife and was meant to be Richard's wife. Worse, Henry took her as his mistress when she was still a child. Icky.
We don't know if Alais was really Henry's mistress-it was an excuse that Richard used to avoid marrying her after Henry died in 1189. Nor do we know for sure what the relationship between Henry and Eleanor was like. It does seem too convenient that Eleanor (like Elizabeth I during Hollywood's Golden Age) is portrayed here as an old woman, bitter about her lost youth and beauty, rather than at her sexual prime. Here, she seeks to keep her power through her sons and Aquitaine isn't a duchy so much as a pawn that she and Henry bat back and forth. One can't help seeing more of Hollywood convention about women and men over forty than 12th century reality. In the film, Alais glories in her sexual power over Henry while playing the innocent. But the real-life Alais seems to have been a bewildered pawn, while it was Eleanor who held considerable sway over Henry long after she had her last child. It's probably no coincidence that Henry's mistresses, particularly his midlife crisis love, Rosamund Clifford, were all the opposite of Eleanor-sweet, compliant and obscure. Eleanor had no equals.
