To Kill a King, directed reviewed by LIAM MAC UAID W riting about Oliver Cromwell
in 1845 Thomas remarked that he had to drag his subject from under a mountain of dead dogs. Historians of the time were not well disposed to the revolutionary king killer. With this film director Mike Barker and screenwriter Jennie Mayhew have thrown a couple of poodles onto the pile.
The action starts in 1645 just after the Parliamentary forces have defeated the Royalists. The victors are divided amongst themselves. Some, such as Thomas Fairfax, who had been the leader of the parliamentary army, are prepared to accept a monardhy with restrictions.
Another group, like Baron Denzil Holles, were ready to let themselves be bought off by the kingOthers, of whom Cromwell was the most significant, were not prepared to accept a return to monarchical government and eventually drew the conclusion that the monarch had to be executed if consistent democracy were to prevail.
The filmmakers' sympathies are enthusiastically with the reformist Lord Fairfax. He is a handsome, dashing compassionate lord Carlyle Cromwell: the greatest British revolutionary played by Dougray Scott. His political debates are mainly conducted through arguments with his pro-royalist wife.
He makes his choice by refusing to sign the king's death warrant and was rewarded with a pardon after the restoration of the monarchy.
Cromwell, who had been Fairfax's deputy, and remains the greatest revolutionary these islands have produced, is well played by Tim Roth. He arrests the corrupted parliamentarians, shouts down the king and eventually organises the world's first revolutionary regicide.
This much is good. But this film makes these supremely rational political actions seem to be the fruit of Cromwell's twisted, -psychotic personality. He did not kill the king because he hated the man.
He loathed the institution and wanted to domly shooting royalists. triumphing. revolution is revised into a hero. bourgeois revolution. Oliver Cromwell?
Tears replace it with a form of participatory democracy. He was not, as the film suggests, prone to riding around London ranTo Kill a King disappoints on many levels. The bloody disputes between Royalists and Parliamentarians are depicted as a few bad marital disagreements with love ultimately
A negligible amount of time is devoted to Charles I's trial and an aristocrat who baulked at the necessary consequences of
There is still a great film to be made about Cromwell's achievements and the
Mel Gibson did it for William Wallace in Braveheart and Liam Neeson did it for Michael Collins. Who is going to do it for or otherwise. dynamic underlying capital is raised.
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socialist resistance Summer 2003 27 Letters/ Socialist Resistance