A lot of good ideas went into this Gainsborough drama that professes to be the biography of Lord Byron and sadly left me without really knowing anything about Bryon as the film progressed. Made during a time when you would have to take a trip to the library and pull out an encyclopedia to find out information on a subject like this, the audience did not have the ability to look up on Wikipedia or other sites the facts about a biographical subject.
This film is trying so hard to be artwork that it's basically a blank slate. Dennis Price was a fine actor but I didn't feel he was getting into the role, simply acting out as if he was any number of cads circa 1820, and going through various stages of the subject's life without any sort of linear understanding of where the character had been. I wouldn't call this a complete disaster, but it seems rather half baked and missing the zest it needed to be something special.
This is presented as a sort of fantasy in the dying Lord Byron's mind where he is looking back on his life as the subject of a trial, with the many women in his life basically speaking against him, and none of the testimony really jamming, just unconfirmed gossip as if read from the angry witness's diary. Linden Travers is the wife, Joan Greenwood the subject of Byron's greatest poem and Mai Zetterling and Sonia Holm as other female witnesses. After the first two witnesses, the female witnesses begin to seem similarly alike, making all but Greenwood rather dull.
We get it. He was a rogue. But so were so many other men, and they didn't leave behind a legacy of poetry like Byron did. Perhaps if presented as a warning in darker terms, this might have succeeded a bit more (it appears to have been a huge box office bomb), and the sepia tone really doesn't add any effect. In fact it's rather distracting and in some moments extremely unpleasant to be stuck watching. What is sad is that a film about a great poet should be so unpoetic, and all of the ambition put into making this great only works against it.
This film is trying so hard to be artwork that it's basically a blank slate. Dennis Price was a fine actor but I didn't feel he was getting into the role, simply acting out as if he was any number of cads circa 1820, and going through various stages of the subject's life without any sort of linear understanding of where the character had been. I wouldn't call this a complete disaster, but it seems rather half baked and missing the zest it needed to be something special.
This is presented as a sort of fantasy in the dying Lord Byron's mind where he is looking back on his life as the subject of a trial, with the many women in his life basically speaking against him, and none of the testimony really jamming, just unconfirmed gossip as if read from the angry witness's diary. Linden Travers is the wife, Joan Greenwood the subject of Byron's greatest poem and Mai Zetterling and Sonia Holm as other female witnesses. After the first two witnesses, the female witnesses begin to seem similarly alike, making all but Greenwood rather dull.
We get it. He was a rogue. But so were so many other men, and they didn't leave behind a legacy of poetry like Byron did. Perhaps if presented as a warning in darker terms, this might have succeeded a bit more (it appears to have been a huge box office bomb), and the sepia tone really doesn't add any effect. In fact it's rather distracting and in some moments extremely unpleasant to be stuck watching. What is sad is that a film about a great poet should be so unpoetic, and all of the ambition put into making this great only works against it.