THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE (1994) MOVIE REACTION!
Added 2024-09-05 16:00:10 +0000 UTCNigel Hawthorne in all his glory.
Comments
I enjoyed the comparison of the United States to a five legged sheep. 😉
Lee Hallam
2024-10-30 06:16:47 +0000 UTCExcellent film
Stephen Giles
2024-09-17 13:06:06 +0000 UTCDidn't you notice the actor Adrian Scarborough playing one of King George's aids? ..He's in Gavin and Stacey as Pete.
Martyn Dawson
2024-09-06 23:47:37 +0000 UTCYes, porphyria hasn't been completely ruled out but there is more scepticism about such diagnoses, especially from this distance, with little to go on. It would be interesting to establish what the cause was.
Ash X
2024-09-06 15:12:19 +0000 UTCA very good film choice, thank you! It was based on Alan Bennett's stage play so it may seem quite disciplined in terms of what it focussed on. There's no greater compliment to a film than to say "it should have been longer"!
Ash X
2024-09-06 15:09:52 +0000 UTCWhat an unexpected surprise to see this pop up today! This film was originally a play by Alan Bennett right? I remembering they ran it on UK TV as a play during the pandemic. Easily one of my favourite historical movies in this time period. I studied about lots of mental disorders in Uni and my lecturer brought up porphyria which is what they thought (at the time) George III had, but I think it's not clear anymore and several historians/ doctors worked together to compile his symptoms carefully. A lot of the doctors of the time (as you saw), had their own agendas, so it's tough to know if they omitted or just didn't write down lots of important details that would be considered today. Either way, I ended up checking out the film and it sent me down the rabbit hole for this time and it's still my favourite time to read about! The assassination attempt is true - the woman was called Margaret Nicholson! By the way, notice how the prime minister here also carries a red briefcase just like the ones in the thick of it?
Chaitra
2024-09-06 02:54:44 +0000 UTC1:55:08 - Unfortunately, the postscript about George's madness being caused by porphyria has now ended up as the one major inaccuracy in the film, although the filmmakers can't be blamed as that was the consensus among historians from the 1960s right through to 2010, when a re-examination of the contemporary records of George's doctors revealed that the King never exhibited most of the key symptoms of porphyria, and frequently did things during his illness that a sufferer of porphyria wouldn't have been able to. Evidence that his urine was ever blue is flimsy at best, and explainable (if it happened at all) by the various medicines he was given. It's now pretty much universally accepted that George was simply bipolar, and his recurring "madnesses" were manic depressive episodes. For further reading, I strongly recommend the fairly recent biography of George III by Andrew Roberts; an absolutely comprehensive account of the King's life.
Ian Richards
2024-09-06 02:06:44 +0000 UTC1:10:00 - Aside from a bit of sleight of hand blending separate incidents together in one episode, yes, Reverend Willis's introduction to George was pretty much as it's portrayed in the film. Certainly, the exchange "our Saviour himself went about healing the sick!" "Yes, but he had not seven hundred pounds a year for it," is genuine, having been recorded by the diarist James Harris. The restraint chair (which George soon ironically nicknamed his Coronation Chair, slyly alluded to in the film by the use of Zadok The Priest as a soundtrack to that scene) wasn't actually used on the King until 24th January 1789 when he punched an attendant, but his initial meeting with Rev Willis on the evening of 5th December 1788 did result in George violently shoving Willis, being manhandled into submission and then shown a straitjacket with an explicit warning that he'd be restrained from now on whenever he turned violent. Interestingly, it was around January 1789 that news of the King's madness first reached America, prompting George Washington to write to a friend that "his situation merits commiseration."
Ian Richards
2024-09-06 00:39:32 +0000 UTCMy understanding was that Kings being selected by God went away with Charles I's head. After a period of republicanism a constitutional monarchy was established by act of Parliament, so it was very clearly Parliament who were choosing the monarch.
Stephen Morris
2024-09-06 00:04:39 +0000 UTCCheers for doing this KB, been looking forward to it all evening since the notification dropped in my inbox! Saw it when it was released at the cinema back at Easter '95, and every few years I come back to it and appreciate it more and more with every re-watch. As I said in my post that you quoted in the intro, it really is one of the greatest and most faithful historical dramas ever made. 15:18 - Yes, it's true that Margaret "Peg" Nicholson tried to kill George with a dessert knife, but one of the film's few small liberties is that it actually happened two years earlier in 1786, not 1788. George's line "do not hurt her, for she has not hurt me!" was his genuine response to the attack, and he personally intervened in the aftermath to have her committed to Bethlem asylum rather than undergo a trial for treason. "Mad as Peg Nicholson" was a common simile in Britain for the rest of the Georgian era. 26:12 - No, the King hadn't been viewed literally as a representative of God (at least, not in Britain) for a long time by this point. Parliament's ability to exclude Catholics from the throne from 1688 onwards, then the wholesale importation of the House of Hanover in 1714, was pretty much a death knell for the notion that God placed British monarchs on the throne (except among the ever-shrinking number of Jacobites who remained loyal to the "true" heirs of the House of Stuart). However, as the dialogue between the doctor and the equerry demonstrates to the audience, a lot of cultural conventions around the monarch being treated as if he were more than a mortal man lingered, because it was a polite fiction that allowed the constitutional system to go on working.
Ian Richards
2024-09-05 23:24:58 +0000 UTCHe was the Malcolm Tucker of his day. What Tucker does with scary rants Sir Humphrey would achieve with flattery, obfuscation and 10th level manipulation.
Stephen Morris
2024-09-05 22:14:18 +0000 UTCVery good film, and maybe makes more sense of Blackadder 3. The film ends with Prince George failing to become Regent. As memory serves the King's madness was sparodic and during a later bout the Prince did become regent -- enter Hugh Laurie.
Stephen Morris
2024-09-05 21:58:12 +0000 UTCHere's Nigel Hawthorne being as awesome as ever in Yes Minister: https://youtu.be/qVO85anasrA?si=c_HwnBCy6vROBA3M
Neal Murdoch
2024-09-05 20:48:34 +0000 UTC
