Mrs. Brown (BBC Scotland, Bord Scannán na hÉireann /The Irish Film Board, Ecosse Films, WGBH, PBS, Miramax, 1997)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I watched an interesting recent movie on Turner Classic Movies: Mrs. Brown, directed by John Madden (just before he made his Academy Award-winning film Shakespeare in Love, another heavy-duty slice of Britainiana from the same studio, Miramax, and the same producer, Harvey Weinstein) from a script by Jeremy Brock. The film takes place from 1863 to 1883 and deals with the quirky relationship of the recently widowed Queen Victoria (Judi Dench, superb as usual) with John Brown (Billy Connolly). John Brown had previously worked as a stable hand and groom for Victoria’s late husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who had died of typhus in December 1861. Victoria was so inconsolable after Prince Albert’s death that she withdrew from all public functions for nearly two years, and it’s known that she tried to keep his physical presence alive in her life (and her bed) well after his death. She had a life cast made of his arm so she could have it next to her in bed and hold his hand the way she’d done when he was alive, and she had a portrait of him hung over her bed so she could look at him and feel his presence even though, of course, he wasn’t there. Henry Posonby (Geoffrey Palmer), head of the Queen’s household, hits on the idea of recruiting John Brown to join the Queen’s service staff as a sort of living reminder of her late husband, in hopes that will shake her out of her grief and get back to the business of being Queen.

When Brown arrives he’s refreshingly insolent and impatient with the routines at court, and at first the Queen can’t stand him. But eventually, like a good movie couple,their initial hatred ripens into a sort of love – though Madden and Brock remain coy about whether or not they actually had sex. Apparently John Brown actually existed and lived at Victoria’s court from 1863 to 1869 or she’s shown doing that in the movie – but my guess would be that they didn’t actually make it to the bedroom. It’s hard to imagine someone as brusque and impatient with court B.S. as John Brown (at least as he’s depicted here) to have tolerated an affair with a woman who still slept with a life cast of her dead husband’s arm. John Brown’s brother Archie (a young Gerard Butler well before the … Has Fallen movies) is already part of Victoria’s household when John arrives at court, but the crux of the movie is the various ways in which British politicians, including prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (Antony Sher), try to use John Brown’s influence over the Queen for their own political ends. Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz (whom I’ve previously described as “a nodule off one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees”), cited a new book by the former film curator of the Los angeles County Museum who’s just published a book arguing that films like Mrs. Brown, The Queen (about how Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, handled the death of their former daughter-in-law Diana Spencer Windsor in 1997) and others jeopardized the existence of the British monarchy and might have brought about its dissolution and replacement by a republic.

There’s talk of republicanism in this movie, too, as Disraeli’s arch-rival political leader, William Gladstone, who seizes the opportunity to introduce a bill in Parliament to dissolve the monarchy and declare Britian a republic. Eventually the revivying presence of John Brown gets Queen Victoria out of her shell and she resumes her royal duties, after first giving her daughters a prepostereous swimming lesson at Balmoral Castle off the coast of Scotland, where Brown is from (and where the rheal Queen Elizabeth II just died) in which the three women wade into the water dressed in full gowns, complete with petticoats. The film begins and ends with an odd scene in 1883, in which John Brown claims to hear a noise outside the palace, goes outside with a gun ready to shoot the intruder (who doesn’t really exist), and catches pneumonia and dies after he fires on the nonexistent intruder and cries out, ”Long live the Queen!” The illness quickly turns fatal, and for the second time in her life Queen Victoria has lost a man she deeply cared about. Also, one of the film’s least sympathetic characters is Edward (David Westhead), nicknamed “Bertie” after his full name (Victor Albert Edward Saxe-Coburg and Gotha), Victoria’s oldest son and heir to the throne (which he took when Victoria died in 1901; she was Britain’s longest-serving monarch until the recent Queen Elizabeth, and I’ve joked on occasion that for most of the last 185 years the United Kingdom was really a United Queendom). Edward is portrayed as a stupid ninny, barely qualified to tie his own shoelaces, much less run a country even on the nominal sense of ”rule” the British royals actually do.

Mrs. Brown was a success in the U.S. and was produced largely by American companies, including PBS (which for a while was showing so many british programs the joke was it was “BBC West”) and, of course, Miramax. (Given how many creepy stories eventually emerged about Harvey Weinstein, who founded Miramax with his brother Bob and named the company after their parents, Miriam and Max, it’s awfully creepy to see the Miramax logo on a film – and it’s even creepier to see it on a film like The Best Years of Our Lives which the Weinstein brothers had nothing to do with actually making.) Mrs. Brown was a successful movie and it’s quite entertaining in the sort of stiff-upper-lip way of a lot of British historical dramas. It has the usual strengths and weaknesses of the genre; the strengths include a literate script and a first-rate cast (just what is it about Britain that enables it and other countries in the British Commonwealth to produce the finest actors in the world?). The weaknesses are a stiff manner of presentation and the lack of any real cinematic distinction; a lot of these British movies are based on plays, and even ones like this that weren’t definitely could have been. Many British actors regard the stage as their true calling, and films only as a way to make money and/or fill time whent he theatres are closed.