Mary of Scotland (1936)

(On Cable TV, November 2019) Considering the sheer number of 1930s historical dramas, no one will blame anyone for overlooking Mary of Scotland—neither a terrible nor extraordinary example of the form. But there are a few interesting names here, and a vexing historical conundrum to resolve. Considering that the real story of Mary of Scotland does not end well, history-minded viewers will be most interested by the film’s almost-desperate attempts to rewrite history so that the ending is palatable to audiences. (I’m not sure how the Catholic propaganda played in 1936, but let’s just say that it has not aged well.)  But so did nearly every other historical costume drama of the time—and Mary of Scotland certainly fits within the lavish production means used for those movies—extravagant costumes, scripts that combined historical material with accessible dialogue, and sets that crammed the most they could fit in a Hollywood sound stage. Where the film gets interesting, perhaps for the wrong reasons, is in the top names involved in toe production. Fredric March, sure (I’ve never been much of a fan), but Katharine Hepburn yes! She wasn’t particularly well suited for the role at that stage of her career (her take on royalty in The Lion in Winter would be far more successful) and the film seems to be using her for royal demeanour and little else. But the surprise here is seeing John Ford, best known for all-American westerns, undertake an early job-for-hire here as the film’s director. None of his trademarks show up here, which is reasonable considering that this was a fairly early effort limited by mid-1930s Hollywood technical means. None of this makes Mary of Scotland particularly interesting, unless you’re using the film as a parallax measure against other films or later entries in the principals’ filmography. Or if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool fan of 1930s period dramas, of course…

(On Cable TV, March 2021) I hoped that a second viewing of Mary of Scotland would help me warm up to the movie, but I don’t think it changed much: Katharine Hepburn’s royal performance is the film’s single best asset, and the film spins its wheels for a very long time before delivering a rather good final sequence in which our two strong female protagonists finally meet face to face. It’s mildly interesting to put Mary of Scotland up against more recent historical epics and see how they did things back in the 1930s, but there are probably more engaging films in which to do this kind of comparative analysis. John Ford directs a picture as a costume drama that we wouldn’t necessarily associate with his later career or favourite themes (scuttlebutt has it that he and Hepburn had an affair during the film’s production), but that only brings marginal interest to a surprisingly average film.