A Practical Guide To Watching The Private Lives Of Elizabeth And Essex
The 1939 film directed by Michael Curtiz starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland is one of those older Pictures that everyone assumes is easy to find but actually turns out to be a nightmare to track down in good quality. I spent about three weeks last month trying to get a clean copy for a screening at the community arts center, and here is what I learned. This is a Warner Bros production from 1939, running approximately 108 minutes, with sets designed by Robert M. Haas and a screenplay by Casey Robinson and Michael Blankfort based on the play by Laurette Taylor. It won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction, Set Decoration, Black-and-White. The film deals with the romantic entanglement between Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex, and it has a notoriously complex rights situation that makes legitimate sourcing trickier than most films from that era. Here is the thing most people miss when they look for this film: there are at least four different cuts floating around. The theatrical release, a 1940 re-release with slightly trimmed runtime, a later television edit that removes roughly eight minutes of court scenes, and the restored version that surfaces occasionally through Criterion and Flicker Alley. The differences matter if you care about the pacing, because the TV edit makes the second act feel dragged out in a way that isn't in the original cut.
I ran into a specific problem last year when a viewer at the center asked about the Blu-ray release. There actually isn't one. The most recent proper home video release is the 2013 Flicker Alley DVD, which is a nice transfer but still stuck at 480p. I tried contacting Flicker Alley directly about a 4K scan because the source material for that film is in decent enough shape at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and they told me they had no plans. That is the current state of availability, and it isn't likely to change anytime soon. The most reliable way to watch it now is through the Criterion Channel, which carries the restored version and updates its library periodically. If that isn't available in your region, Amazon Prime Video sometimes has it for rental at a reasonable price, usually around $3.50. The physical DVD through used retailers tends to go for $8 to $15 depending on condition, and the Flicker Alley pressing is worth seeking out because the audio clarity on that one is noticeably better than the generic warehouse DVDs you find on eBay. I also learned the hard way that several torrents labeled as "restored" are actually just the TV edit upscaled with sharpening filters. If you're checking a file and the runtime comes in around 100 minutes instead of 108, it's the wrong cut. The restored version runs closer to the original theatrical length. This tripped up two people in our group last time we screened it, and we had to scramble to find the right source during the actual event. Not ideal.
One counter-intuitive point about this film that most viewers overlook: the technical work is stronger than the film itself deserves. Robert M. Haas's art direction creates a sense of crowded court space that feels genuinely claustrophobic, and the cinematography by Sol Polito uses shadow in ways that prefigure some of the visual storytelling in Casablanca, which came out the same year. The film gets dismissed as a standard Flynn costume adventure, but it's more deliberate than that. If you're analyzing it for anything beyond casual viewing, pay attention to how the lighting shifts when Essex enters the frame versus when he doesn't. It's a subtle tell about whose perspective the movie actually occupies, and it changes halfway through without any dramatic announcement. The main limitation with this title is purely logistical. It's not a streaming-first film like something from the past decade. The distribution landscape for 1930s Warner Bros library titles is fragmented across multiple streaming services depending on your country, and the physical media options are limited to that one Flicker Alley pressing. If you're in the UK, the BFI Shop occasionally stocks copies. In the US, Criterion Channel is your best bet for a legitimate watchable version without hunting through secondary markets. There is no high-definition remaster on the horizon based on everything I've heard from people in the distribution side, and the source materials at UCLA haven't been prioritized for a 4K project. So manage your expectations about picture quality if you're going to screen this properly. The 480p DVD transfer from Flicker Alley is clean and stable, just not sharp by modern standards. For a theater projection, it holds up okay at 16mm if you're lucky with the print. For a home screen larger than 50 inches, you'll notice the softness.
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