The Crimson Playgoer

"Henry the Eighth," this week's full course at the University, has chosen to concentrate its attention on Henry as a husband; it possesses none of the political flavour of Mr. Arliss' Disraeli. There are, of course, occasional parentheses on foreign policy, but they are pretty half-hearted parentheses, and Mr. Laughton feels with the audience that he had better get on to his business. Each of the six queens is dutifully trotted out, and as some of them were in real life fascinating and unfascinating and some unfascinating, so are they in the picture. But there is neither ebb nor flow in Mr. Laughton himself; he is equal to every demand, be it lusty humour or Henry's regal kind of lechery, and he has made Henry, although a buffoon, a superbly consistent and human one. No comic possibility of the Tudor coarseness has been left unexplored, no detail in palatial decor neglected, no outlet for photographic ingenuity closed.