The Mudlark

Watching this film is sort of like expecting to taste a bite of raspberry sundae, and finding only once on your tongue that it’s chocolate instead. Still good, but for a moment psychologically disorienting. I watch this expecting an Irene Dunne film, and find instead only Queen Victoria. After spending six months more or less immersed in Irene’s films, I can’t locate her anywhere in this role, apart from the rare word betraying her real southern-tinged warble, an isolated characteristic facial tic. That’s surely to her credit: her performance goes much, much deeper than the makeup and false pudge they put on her. I mean, given the kind of acting one expects from a movie of this era, the complexity and subtlety of her work is frankly staggering. As I said at the outset of this long venture, she’s such a natural performer she would have succeeded in any period of film history. But for all that, it’s vaguely disturbing to watch, from my position, both admiring her in the particular way I do, and being so personally confounded by self, identity and appearance: that is my Irene, but that is not her face, those are not her eyes, that is not her voice. It is, honestly, unsettling.

Anyway, as to the film, it’s weak as hell when she’s not onscreen, and that’s probably about half the runtime. Anyone should know by 1950 that, as the studio system had been established, in all but the greatest films no one cares about anyone but the stars. Here, the bits with the kid are too cutesy, the romantic interludes between servant and noble couples completely bloodless, the political maneuvering simplistic. As far as I know it does justice to this period in VR’s life, but there’s not much going on. (If one really cared for the subject matter, they should check out the very excellent Mrs Brown). It’s an inoffensively mediocre film with one really incredible (read: freakishly transformative) performance at its core.