There are really no words to convey the beauty of this movie, its intelligence, its cleverness. All the casting is brilliant, but Bette Davis here is something unbelievable. Every gesture, every tiny detail is perfect: it makes perfect sense that even an handsome and brilliant man like Flynn's character could fell in love with such a woman. I started to watch this movie just out of curiosity towards a combination that seemed totally absurd to me: old, charismatic Bette Davis, and handsome, vacuous Flynn. And yet from the first scene where the two main actors are together alone, after Essex returns to the court, I was just amazed. They were perfect. They matched perfectly. I do not think Bette Davis was larger then life here: she IS a queen, the most powerful woman of her century, and she just acts so, and does that with such a wit an energy and a charismatic force to draw you to her. You fell in love. Like Essex did. De Havilland characters in all the others Flynn's movie just can't hold a candle. She's the perfect match. Seeing her laughing, fidgeting, sitting! This is one of the interpretations that impressed me the most, among the little I've seen so far. And Errol Flynn can be next to her without fading away, and this says a lot about the acting ability of one who was "famous only for his good looks". To the devil his good looks! Go on, putt Brad Pitt there, and see if good looks are enough to stand side by side with something like queen Bette Davis. He's warm, delicate, passionate... The incredible appeal of this movie to me is its cleverness. The whole movie is an incredible metaphor of how little does beauty mean in terms of emotion. The couple Essex/Elizabeth is made out of intellectual passion and wit and their outstanding quarrels prove it: so different from the mundane "love bickering", they are fight of brains and power, between two passionate souls. And the movie is just the same: its strength isn't the lush historical setting, or the good looking of anyone, but the intelligence of every single detail of it.
