April 15 movie: Young Bess. Jean Simmons plays Princess Elizabeth, who loves Admiral Tom Seymour (Stewart Granger) from afar, except that he's married to her step-mother Katherine Parr (Deborah Kerr). Not a movie for the ages, but as historical melodramas go it was pretty good. And Charles Laughton was excellent as Henry VIII.
My memory of Elizabethan history was never that deep, and is fuzzy at best now. But from what I remember, Tom Seymour actually pursued marriage with Elizabeth as a play for the throne, and took Katherine Parr because he couldn't get the princess, but kept on trying to seduce Elizabeth as a sort of back-up. In the movie it's much more benign (no surprise there): Seymour really loves Katherine, but he and Elizabeth gradually fall in love anyway, then he's falsely accused of having aspirations to the throne. I'd like to know more about the actual story so I added Elizabeth R to my Netflix queue, I heard it was the most historically accurate movie (actually a miniseries) about Elizabeth I.
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