The death of King Henry VIII throws his kingdom into chaos because of succession disputes. His weak son King Edward VI is on his deathbed. Anxious to keep England true to the Reformation, a...
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Teenagers Tim Ingram and his friend Rebecca investigate a ghost story involving a boy, Tom Inskip, who mysteriously died in Tim's parents' cottage in 1910. Tim soon discovers eerie parallels between himself and Tim during his final days.
Director:
Lawrence Gordon Clark
Stars:
Stuart MacKenzie,
Suzanna Hamilton,
Vivian Pickles
After a rich Edwardian widow impulsively marries a handsome but poor Tuscan dentist and dies in childbirth, her English in-laws try to gain custody of the baby.
Director:
Charles Sturridge
Stars:
Helena Bonham Carter,
Judy Davis,
Rupert Graves
Muriel, François and René, three childhood friends from a working class neighbourhood of Marseille, suddenly stop their careers as thieves after having killed a jeweller.To keep a low ... See full summary »
A debauched nobleman offers himself to a beautiful woman, but she is repelled by his advances. He dons a mask and tries again, and this time is more successful. But the mask cannot conceal ... See full summary »
Director:
Fiorella Infascelli
Stars:
Helena Bonham Carter,
Michael Maloney,
Feodor Chaliapin Jr.
In a Florence pensione circa 1900 with English guests, George Emerson (Julian Sands) and his dad (Denholm Elliott) offer their rooms with views to Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) and her chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett (Dame Maggie Smith). Lucy and George get acquainted, but Lucy returns to England. George and Lucy meet again, but now she's engaged.
Director:
James Ivory
Stars:
Maggie Smith,
Helena Bonham Carter,
Denholm Elliott
Mini series depicting the turbulent and bloody reigns of Scottish monarchs Mary, Queen of Scots and her son King James VI of Scotland who became King James I of England and foiled the Gunpowder Plot.
Director:
Gillies MacKinnon
Stars:
Vulpe Adrian,
Carmen Ungureanu,
Clémence Poésy
Gavin is thirty-one-years-old and still lives with his parents. He is awfully shy, but before he knows it, there are three women interested in him. Lady Minerva Munday has a casual way of ... See full summary »
Director:
Randal Kleiser
Stars:
Jesse Birdsall,
Helena Bonham Carter,
Jane Horrocks
Shakespeare's comedy of gender confusion, in which a girl disguises herself as a man to be near the count she adores, only to be pursued by the woman he loves.
Director:
Trevor Nunn
Stars:
Helena Bonham Carter,
Richard E. Grant,
Imogen Stubbs
When a man and woman flirt with each other at a wedding reception, the sexual tension seems spontaneous. As they break from the party to a hotel room, the flirtation turns into a night filled with passion and remorse.
Director:
Hans Canosa
Stars:
Helena Bonham Carter,
Aaron Eckhart,
Yury Tsykun
The death of King Henry VIII throws his kingdom into chaos because of succession disputes. His weak son King Edward VI is on his deathbed. Anxious to keep England true to the Reformation, a scheming minister John Dudley marries off his son, Guilford, to Lady Jane Grey, whom he places on the throne after Edward dies. At first hostile to each other, Guilford and Jane fall in love. But they cannot withstand the course of power which will lead to their ultimate downfall.Written by
Samantha Santa Maria <TE7441667@ntuvax.ntu.ac.sg>
In reality, Lady Jane and Guilford Dudley barely knew each other, and were not together during their imprisonment. See more »
Goofs
Through the movie John Dudley and everyone else keeps referring to Guilford as the last of three sons, the true Guilford was the 4th of the 5 sons of John and Jane Guildford Dudley to survive infancy. The 5 sons were, in order of age, John, Ambrose, Robert, Guildford, and Henry. At the time of the marriage negotiations Guildford was the eldest unmarried son of John Dudley and nearest to Jane Grey in age.
John Dudley's 5 sons were all arrested after their father's fall from power. The eldest son John became ill during his imprisonment and died within days of being released. Ambrose survived and regained the family title of Earl of Warwick; he was the only Dudley son to leave surviving legitimate heirs. Robert fought under Queen Mary's husband Philip of Spain at St Quentin and went on to become Queen Elizabeth's favorite and gained the title of Earl of Leicester. Guildford was of course executed hours before his wife Lady Jane. Henry also fought under Philip of Spain and died in battle. See more »
Quotes
Guilford:
So then we will.
Jane:
Yes, we will.
Guilford:
We'll fly.
Jane:
We'll fly.
Guilford:
Away, beyond their reach.
Jane:
So far...
Guilford:
Their touch can't tarnish us, and at last, we will be...
Jane:
Nothing...
Guilford:
Nobody...
Jane:
Each other's.
[...] See more »
It's difficult to know how to take a film that begins with a history lesson (to the self-important sound of a beating drum, no less) and ends with a quote from Plato. Between the two is a narrative that wants to be both a conventional love story and an unconventional period film. It doesn't quite succeed at either, but for viewers of LADY JANE, the pleasure is in the details, and there are plenty of those.
To first dispense with the glaring historical inaccuracy that lies at the film's center, Lady Jane Grey, the Nine-Day Queen of England in 1553, did not in truth have a passionate love match in her husband, Guilford Dudley. Theirs was an arranged marriage, highly political in nature and masterminded by Dudley's ambitious father, the Duke of Northumberland. In reality, Jane resented and distrusted her husband, who was a spoiled and rather empty-headed young man with none of the high intellectual achievement so prominent in Jane.
For the second dispensation, Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Jane, is still unskilled at acting in this, her first role. She can furrow her brow with admirable dexterity to denote every emotion from confusion to embarrassment to sexual fulfillment, but there's little evidence of much going on behind, in the furrows of an actor's brain. However, since those afore-mentioned details surround her, it becomes fairly easy for a more demanding audience to overlook her callowness.
Now for the details, beginning with everyone else in the cast. Has John Wood ever utilised his supercilious half-smile to better advantage? As Northumberland, he's perfect - driven by the need to consolidate his power when Jane's cousin Edward VI falls into a fatal illness, he conceives a scheme that will require relentless control over nearly everyone at court. While his fellow ministers, all burly toughs, inevitably knuckle under to his combination of silken flattery and outright threats, he's thwarted by two seemingly weak women - Jane and Mary Tudor (played with real grit and bitterness by Jane Lapotaire). It's a tossup whether Wood is better at the threats or at two points of emotional breakdown - one, when he must cast the die and order the agonising prolongation of Edward's death to complete his plans, or when, mud-pelted and dishevelled following his defeat by Mary's army, he ends up in the Tower, where all he can offer to his sons and followers is a weary, `I'm sorry.' It's the rare film where Wood's comic instincts don't get the better of his serious performance - this is one of them.
As Jane's equally controlling parents, Patrick Stewart and Sara Kestelman are almost as good. Stewart's character, the Duke of Suffolk, isn't a bright man, but his pursuit of his ambitions never quite overrides his notion of family honor, and this keeps him sympathetic, as all the supposed villains of the film remain. That's another of the details that deserves cherishing - the refusal to go for simplistic characters. Stewart is especially good when he throws all caution to the wind and raises an army to rescue his daughter, overriding even the objections of his formidable wife.
Other details are in the costuming, the suitably squalid tavern and brothel scenes, the bit where the aristocratic Kestelman chows down on her dinner, gnawing on a greasy chop and wiping her mouth with her sleeve, and the achingly beautiful winter deer hunt that runs under the opening credits. All this and more make up for a downbeat ending and a central failure to come up with a satisfying examination of that most enigmatic of queens, Lady Jane Grey.
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It's difficult to know how to take a film that begins with a history lesson (to the self-important sound of a beating drum, no less) and ends with a quote from Plato. Between the two is a narrative that wants to be both a conventional love story and an unconventional period film. It doesn't quite succeed at either, but for viewers of LADY JANE, the pleasure is in the details, and there are plenty of those.
To first dispense with the glaring historical inaccuracy that lies at the film's center, Lady Jane Grey, the Nine-Day Queen of England in 1553, did not in truth have a passionate love match in her husband, Guilford Dudley. Theirs was an arranged marriage, highly political in nature and masterminded by Dudley's ambitious father, the Duke of Northumberland. In reality, Jane resented and distrusted her husband, who was a spoiled and rather empty-headed young man with none of the high intellectual achievement so prominent in Jane.
For the second dispensation, Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Jane, is still unskilled at acting in this, her first role. She can furrow her brow with admirable dexterity to denote every emotion from confusion to embarrassment to sexual fulfillment, but there's little evidence of much going on behind, in the furrows of an actor's brain. However, since those afore-mentioned details surround her, it becomes fairly easy for a more demanding audience to overlook her callowness.
Now for the details, beginning with everyone else in the cast. Has John Wood ever utilised his supercilious half-smile to better advantage? As Northumberland, he's perfect - driven by the need to consolidate his power when Jane's cousin Edward VI falls into a fatal illness, he conceives a scheme that will require relentless control over nearly everyone at court. While his fellow ministers, all burly toughs, inevitably knuckle under to his combination of silken flattery and outright threats, he's thwarted by two seemingly weak women - Jane and Mary Tudor (played with real grit and bitterness by Jane Lapotaire). It's a tossup whether Wood is better at the threats or at two points of emotional breakdown - one, when he must cast the die and order the agonising prolongation of Edward's death to complete his plans, or when, mud-pelted and dishevelled following his defeat by Mary's army, he ends up in the Tower, where all he can offer to his sons and followers is a weary, `I'm sorry.' It's the rare film where Wood's comic instincts don't get the better of his serious performance - this is one of them.
As Jane's equally controlling parents, Patrick Stewart and Sara Kestelman are almost as good. Stewart's character, the Duke of Suffolk, isn't a bright man, but his pursuit of his ambitions never quite overrides his notion of family honor, and this keeps him sympathetic, as all the supposed villains of the film remain. That's another of the details that deserves cherishing - the refusal to go for simplistic characters. Stewart is especially good when he throws all caution to the wind and raises an army to rescue his daughter, overriding even the objections of his formidable wife.
Other details are in the costuming, the suitably squalid tavern and brothel scenes, the bit where the aristocratic Kestelman chows down on her dinner, gnawing on a greasy chop and wiping her mouth with her sleeve, and the achingly beautiful winter deer hunt that runs under the opening credits. All this and more make up for a downbeat ending and a central failure to come up with a satisfying examination of that most enigmatic of queens, Lady Jane Grey.