This period piece and melodrama produced in Hollywood in the late-'30s and filmed in monochrome features one of Laurence Olivier's flair performances. He sports facial battle scars, a sling, a false nose, a leather eye-patch, flowing cape, tricorn hat, glittering medals and stars and sun-bleached lemon-blond hair pulled into a pony-tail tied with a thick velvet ribbon. His organic, stoical, humanistic 18th-Century character exposition is very English and very human reflecting Nelson - a classical figure from the Age of Enlightenment. The Battle of Trafalgar is full-blooded and is very well realised. His Nelson is a stablemate to his grandiloquent perforance as the Duke of Wellington in 1972's Lady Caroline Lamb in which he sports a Royal Blue silk sash, Regency Era wavy-chestnut hair and hooked false putty nose at ease imbibing a glass of sherry. Olivier seems to capture time and space like no other classical actor.
Review of That Hamilton Woman
