The film Disraeli depicts a key moment during the reign of Queen Victoria and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. It has something to do with the purchase of the Suez Canal and ensuring British control of India in 1874. There are also Russian spies who are trying to find out what Disraeli and his government are doing, but to be frank, I’m not sure that any of this is all that interesting to a current audience. The film’s origins as a stage play are too obvious, and the quality of the print that I had access to was quite bad.
Today, Disraeli is perhaps best known for starring George Arliss, who became the first Best Actor Oscar winner to portray an actual person and the first British actor to win the honor. Since then, of course, neither of those is rare. Oscar voters have shown their preference for actors portraying real-life people, and British actors have certainly accumulated quite a lot of Oscar gold over the following decades. The rest of the cast of Disraeli is, comparatively, a bit amateurish, including Arliss’s own wife, Florence Arliss, playing Lady Beaconsfield, Disraeli’s wife. Oddly enough, she seems to be calling him Dizzy throughout the movie, or is she trying to say Dissy? I could never figure that out.
At the start of the film, Disraeli is already old and quite controversial. He’s denounced – to his face – by fellow politicians in the House of Commons and regularly spoken of in unfavorable terms in Hyde Park. He also has to deal with those Russian spies, one of whom he hires to be his personal secretary in order to keep tabs on the fellow and the other a very nosy woman who has access to the gossip of high society types. Disraeli pretends to be ill in order to get Mrs. Travers (Doris Lloyd) to reveal what she knows, and he’s able to turn the information around on her. That sequence might be the most entertaining in the entire film.
I don’t recall from my British history classes all of the fuss that the film makes about the Suez Canal’s importance to Great Britain and its empirical tendencies. It’s dismissed by one of the characters as being nothing more than an “Egyptian ditch.” Nowadays we understand the significance of such canals, but I’m not sure I ever fully understood from the film how securing the canal would give control of India to Great Britain and make Victoria the “Empress of India,” which seems to be Disraeli’s goal. Certainly, British expansionism was a key aspect of this period in their history, so the film is rather accurate in that respect, I suppose.
There’s a subplot involving Lord Charles Deeford (Anthony Bushell), a young and handsome and dull fellow, trying to woo Lady Clarissa Pevensey (Joan Bennett), who finds him just as boring as the viewers do. He’s certainly handsome, but he only becomes truly interesting when Disraeli dispatches him to help negotiate for British control of the canal. When he’s gone from the screen, she and we get a chance to forget how stuffy he is. His return, at least, guarantees success for Britain and a sense of how he might actually be smarter and more energetic and even useful than he initially appears.
I’m surprised – even though I probably shouldn’t be given when the film was made – that more wasn’t made of Disraeli’s Jewishness. Yes, the “old money” class of Britain certainly didn’t look favorably on him because he wasn’t “one of them,” but how much of their dislike of him might be attributed to antisemitism? The movie only mentions his Jewish identity a couple of times, and once is in connection to a Jewish banker who supposedly will help Disraeli secure the money to pay for the canal. Otherwise, the film remains rather silent on how the reactions to Disraeli might have been motivated by the feelings of British aristocracy to his ethnicity.
Like many stage productions that were adapted into films in the early years of “talkies,” Disraeli is really, truly quite talky (talkie?). Dialog takes clear priority over action, and the sets too often reveal the stage origins of the film. When you don’t have to change the sets as often, you could provide more furniture, for example, to represent better what Victorian homes and offices looked like. I mean, they weren’t known for this kind of rather comparatively austere minimalism.
The version of the film that I saw had a very hazy quality to its cinematography that I can’t quite determine where it was the result of deterioration or just how it was almost filmed originally. It almost looks out of focus at times. Some of the outdoor sequences are quite nice, but I didn’t understand the camera’s obsession with the swans and peacocks that populate the Disraeli home. The DVD (probably a bootleg copy) I watched was actually recorded from a Turner Classic Movies screening, so I’m wondering if we just don’t have access to a good print nowadays.
I’ve often said that you shouldn’t rely on a movie to provide historical accuracy. If you want what really happened, a book or a documentary might be more helpful than a fiction film. However, after watching Disraeli, I was left wondering if the actual events were truly this boring. If you need evidence that this is a fictional story, look at the Hollywood ending the film gives you. Disraeli’s wife is suddenly sick even though I don’t recall any sense that she’d been all that frail throughout the rest of the movie, but she makes an astonishing recovery just in time to join her husband to meet Queen Victoria at the film’s end.
Oscar Win: Best Actor (George Arliss)
Other Oscar Nominations: Best Picture and Best
Writing
