1939 was a busy year for filmmaker Rowland V. Lee. After Son of Frankenstein (reviewed on this site last month), he made the drama The Sun Never Sets before returning to the darker stuff with Tower of London, an epic but concise fictionalized historical action-drama with plenty of horror movie elements and Son of Frankenstein cast members Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff, with added Vincent Price.
Like Son of Frankenstein, it's an emotionally and narratively complex story skillfully told, with charismatic actors who, true or not, look like they're having the time of their lives. It was a passion project for Lee, who had been planning it for years and also wrote the screenplay. I had a great time with it.
The feeble king of England, Henry VI (Miles Mander), has been deposed by King Edward IV (Ian Hunter, not the Mott the Hoople singer) and locked up in the Tower of London, albeit in a comfortable room, unlike many of the other prisoners, who are shackled and tortured by the chief executioner and head of the prison guards, Mord (Boris Karloff), a bald, club-footed beast of a man who spends his downtime sharpening his blades with a raven on his shoulder and inflicting the aforementioned torture. As our lame duck president once said about Corn Pop, Mord is a bad dude. (The election was horrifying, the country is toast, both major parties are moral failures, nothing I can say about it here will be enjoyable, I hope a better system rises from the ashes or a meteor hits us, back to the movie.)
Henry's brother, Richard (Basil Rathbone), the duke of Gloucester, is a treacherous, scheming little freak who wants the throne and is willing to do anything to get it, often in cahoots with the bloodthirsty Mord. Richard has a secret dollhouse with a doll for each person in the line of succession. When he succeeds at removing the obstacle, the doll is chucked into his fireplace with much glee.
This cast has the juice, as the perpetually online like to say. Rathbone, Hunter, Karloff, Sutton, Cossart, and Price tear into these roles, and O'Neil gets a surprising amount to do despite her more grounded part. (She's basically the straight woman for a bunch of wild dudes.) Hunter plays King Edward as a politically effective but goofy party animal in it for the good times and the prestige of power, lacking in empathy and easily manipulated by Richard. He's hilarious and knows how to ham it up just enough without wearing out his welcome.
Karloff's role is pretty one-note but exceedingly memorable in its physicality and menace, and he's a major reason the film works as a horror film as well as a historical drama. Price and Rathbone are fantastic and immensely skilled at nailing that sweet spot between sincerity and camp. The scene where the two men have a wine-drinking contest to determine the fate of the duke's fortune is one of the great two-person scenes. Price would later play Rathbone's part in Roger Corman's 1962 remake of this movie, which also incorporated some of Shakespeare's Richard III.
Director Lee, so adept at handling the complex, competing interests of his characters in Son of Frankenstein, is equally adept at taking on the large canvas here, which includes all the palace intrigue in the tower, the love and family lives of multiple sets of characters, murders, executions, several exciting swordfights, and two epic battle scenes. He manages all this in just over ninety minutes, without letting the pace drag or hurrying the action along too swiftly. Nearly every major character is explored in depth, and even the minor characters get their moments. Lee had a reputation for going over schedule and over budget, but he got results. (He was also one of the founders of the Directors Guild of America, which was originally called the Screen Directors Guild, a union protecting filmmakers' rights.)
I don't know if 1939 was just a fluke or if most Lee films are as solid as Son of Frankenstein and Tower of London. If they are, I definitely need to dip into the catalog. Based on the two films of his I've seen, the dude had the goods. Lee retired from filmmaking in 1945, with the Charles Laughton-starring swashbuckler Captain Kidd his last movie as director. He spent the rest of his life ranching in the San Fernando Valley, though he turned part of the ranch into filming location property and rented it out to productions, including Laughton's only film as director, the masterpiece The Night of the Hunter, and continued to sell parts of it to developers for corporate offices and family homes. He made a short-lived return to the movies with the Biblical epic The Big Fisherman in 1959, producing and cowriting the screenplay but hiring Frank Borzage to direct. He died in 1975.
