The Private Life of Henry VIII

'Am I a king or a breeding bull?' Laughton sulkily roars down the dinner table in what is probably the most commercially successful British film ever made. Throughout the film, he manages to hold in tension Henry's greedy enjoyment of the trappings of power and his weary loathing for a life where everything, especially his sexual performance, is a matter of public interest. Laughton's transformation from bullying womaniser to henpecked glutton is a masterly study of a man's decline into dotage, but it is still only the icing on the cake of an amazing exploration of the morbid doubts and fears underlying a seemingly virile masculinity.