Kirpianuscus
So many reasons for see it ! from the status of testimony about the spirit of a period to the performances - Vivien Leigh is magnificent as Emma Hilton - to the naval battle and the imposible love story. it is not a film for define it. and not an artistic delight. or a masterpiece. after its end, you discover it as a very personal message. sure, romanticism is present. and it could appear as the basic ingredient. but the film gives more than a sensitive story. but a kind of ...spell. about succes and sacrifice and fall. using the perfect couple.
doug-17357
Very beautiful Vivien Leigh is perfectly cast as very beautiful Emma Hamilton, and her performance is one of her very best. Laurence Olivier is very good as Horatio Nelson, although I think that Lesley Howard might have been even better. The movie's chief failing is not showing the love and respect both Emma and Horatio felt for Sir William Hamilton, who was their constant companion while he lived. I suppose that wasn't possible in 1941 under the code. 9/10
evanston_dad
Director Vincent Korda mounts a handsome-looking historical costume drama about the open affair between Emma Hamilton (Vivien Leigh) and Horatio Nelson (Laurence Olivier) during the Napoleonic wars.In fact, I was struck by how frankly their affair was dealt with given the time period, and wonder if it was shocking to audiences in 1941. Alan Mowbray and Gladys Cooper, respectively, play the jilted spouses who resign themselves to the shenanigans, him more willingly than her. Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier do nice work, and Leigh especially makes the viewer wish that she had made more films. She could do more with a subtle facial expression than most actors could with a page of dialogue, and there's something modern and ahead of its time about her acting. The film starts out strongly enough, but it unfortunately settles into a rather plodding rhythm by the end, constrained by the determination of the screenwriters to focus almost exclusively on the love story between Lady Hamilton and Nelson at the expense of the historical events taking place around them, despite the fact that the love story stops being interesting mid-way through the film when we realize it no longer has anywhere to go. Still, if romantic swooning is your thing, you could do far worse than this movie.The film won an Oscar for Best Sound Recording and was nominated in the additional categories of Art Direction (B&W), Cinematography (B&W), and Special Effects, for an impressive sea battle in the film's final scenes.Grade: B+
James Hitchcock
"That Hamilton Woman" is a dramatised version of the love story of Admiral Horatio Nelson and Emma Hamilton, the wife of the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples. Emma Hart (nee Amy Lyon) was a beautiful courtesan who became the mistress first of Sir Charles Greville and then of his uncle Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador; it is said that Greville effectively "sold" Emma to Hamilton in exchange for assistance with his gambling debts. Despite this unromantic start to their relationship, the much older Sir William fell in love with the lovely young woman and married her. She, however, did not return his love, and when Nelson, then a dashing captain, visited Naples on official business she fell passionately in love with him. In this film the story, as the title might suggest, is told more from Emma's point of view than Nelson's. It opens in 1815, ten years after Nelson's death, with Emma, now ageing and impoverished, living in exile in France. She is arrested in Calais for a petty theft and while in prison tells her life story to a fellow inmate. The rest of the story is then shown in flashback. The film was a controversial one, particularly in the United States, when it first came out in 1941. There were two reasons for this. The first is that it violated the Production Code by showing an adulterous relationship as something romantic rather than something sinful. Emma is played as a romantic heroine rather than a wicked temptress, which is how the cinema of this period normally depicted adulteresses. Nelson's wife Frances is here played by Gladys Cooper as a jealous, vindictive and embittered harridan rather than as patient and long-suffering, which is how the cinema of this period normally depicted wronged wives (and how Lady Nelson seems to have been in real life). Emma is not only a romantic heroine but also a tragic one, a woman who gives her love to Britain's greatest hero but who after his death in battle is shabbily treated by an ungrateful nation and ends her days penniless in a foreign land- ironically, the land against whose forces her lover fought so gallantly. The second reason why the film was so controversial was that it was a quite blatant piece of propaganda. The Napoleonic Wars are seen from the British perspective, as a struggle against a ruthless and tyrannical dictator with ambitions to rule the whole of Europe. The parallels between Napoleon and Hitler are quite deliberate and are underlined by the Churchillian speeches given to Nelson. ("You cannot make peace with dictators. You have to destroy them–wipe them out!") Had the film been made in Britain, this sort of thing would have been par for the course in 1941, but it was actually made in America, albeit by the Hungarian- born Briton Alexander Korda, who acted as both producer and director, with a largely British cast. As America was not yet in the war, Korda was bitterly assailed as a warmongering propagandist by the influential isolationist movement, still blithely oblivious to the very real threat which the Axis Powers presented to their own country. According to one story Korda was summoned to appear before an angry Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was only excused attendance when the attack on Pearl Harbor took place a few days before his scheduled appointment. The two leading roles, Britain's Golden Couple of the 1790s, are played by Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Britain's Golden Couple of the 1940s, , then recently married. (This was the only one of their three films together made after their marriage). Leigh, if anything even more beautiful in 1941 than she had been in "Gone with the Wind" two years earlier, has all the glamour needed for her role, as well as the skill needed to make Emma a sympathetic figure, despite her ambiguous past, and Olivier makes Nelson suitably passionate and daring. There is also a good contribution from Alan Mowbray as Sir William, initially urbane and sophisticated but who later seems small-minded and mean-spirited, caring more for his collection of antique sculptures than for any human being, Emma included. The action scenes of the Battle of Trafalgar are surprisingly well done, given the limited special effects available to film-makers at this period. (Nelson's earlier victories at The Nile and Copenhagen, however, are not shown at all and mentioned only in passing; Korda evidently wanted to save the big show for the end). Seventy-five years on, we need no longer worry about the historical controversies which so exercised people when the film was first made. Today we can see it less as a piece of propaganda than as a fine costume drama. Certainly, it can seem a little melodramatic for modern tastes, but it is nevertheless an excellent example of the style of film-making that was in vogue during this period. 8/10
