Very Entertaining Great Film

Vincent Price was in two films titled Tower of London, 1939 and 1962, playing members of the same family. In the 1939 film he played the Duke of Clarence, a rather cowardly, suspicious (rightly so), and greedy fellow. The film can well be termed Royals Behaving Badly (but what else is new)?

Basil Rathbone portrays Richard, scheming to become Richard III, as the same sort of fiend as Shakespeare wrote him, but using no Shakespeare lines, and is closer to the historical Richard in having a spinal deformity but no limp or withered arm. Rathbone makes a very villainous and vigorous Richard. One of the movie’s many examples of literary license with history is having Richard keep a cabinet full of little figures representing those in the line of succession to the English throne to keep track of who to bump off in what order and tossing each figure in the fire once he does them in.

The sets are spectacular and the costumes lavish. Boris Karloff appears as the evil clubfooted executioner Mord, Richard’s lackey. Casting of Ronald Sinclair as the Boy King Edward V and John Herbert-Bond as Young Prince Richard might well have been done with the famous 1878 painting by Sir John Everett Millais in mind, as they seem to have stepped directly out of the picture. Young Herbert-Bond is particularly angelic. A scene depicting Prince Richard being married off at the age of five manages to be both cute and disturbing. The film doesn’t say what became of his wife who was of a similar age. There is also a young and almost certainly fictional romantic couple. I didn’t find them as interesting as the royals but they served a vital purpose in the story of creating some human interest and not just strictly being about royals bumping each other off. I thought the film was all right and it held my attention and interest.

As for suitability for younger viewers, you might employ caution. It might acquaint them with some historical characters but is not great history. It starts off with a beheading. One scene features heavy drinking. Besides a number of murders, sorry I lost count, but five or six anyway, one more memorable for being done in the rather creative manner of drowning the victim in his favorite drink, a torture chamber is shown with various devices described and used including whipping. In one inaccurate scene, a bloodied man is shown falling out of an iron maiden, a device not written of until the late 18th century and built later. The same mistake appears in another Vincent Price film, The Pit and the Pendulum, identifying that and other devices as being used much earlier than they were. The torture scenes are not terribly graphic, leaving more to the viewers’ imagination than is actually shown. Young viewers may well identify with the imprisoned princes and be saddened at their fate. Whether it’s suitable depends on the age and personality of the individual child. Not for everybody.