Great Catherine * (1968, Jeanne Moreau, Peter O’Toole, Zero Mostel, Jack Hawkins) – Classic Movie Review 8209

Director Gordon Flemyng and producer Jules Buck’s struggling 1968 British historical comedy drama Great Catherine stars Jeanne Moreau, Peter O’Toole, Zero Mostel and Jack Hawkins.

George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 one-act play is too flimsy for an epic production about a handsome English soldier, Captain Charles Edstaston (O’Toole), coming to Russia his fiancée Claire (Angela Scoular) hoping to visit the empress Catherine the Great (Moreau) in St Petersburg. Her drunken but crafty courtier and chief minister Prince Potemkin (Mostel) helps him – and you can imagine Edstaston’s luck when he gets to visit her in bed! But soon Edstaston blows his opportunity and is trying to escape the clutches of the sex-crazed Catherine with his life. Hawkins plays the British Ambassador, who is happy to let Edstaston see the Empress for any possible diplomatic advantage.

Great Catherine boasts a sumptuous production (designed by John Bryan) in Technicolor and an excellent cast, plus a a top cinematographer (Oswald Morris) and composer (Dimitri Tiomkin), but neither Hugh Leonard’s tepid script nor Flemyng’s off-the-boil direction can keep the pudding bubbling.

Alas, though Great Catherine has its moments and its charms, it is by and large a dud, mostly wasting its special stars at their peak, though Moreau, O’Toole, Mostel and Akim Tamiroff as a comic guard Sergeant are all zesty and impressive.

Also in the cast are Marie Lohr, Akim Tamiroff, Kenneth Griffith, Marie Kean, Angela Scoular, Kate O’Mara, James Mellor, Henry Woolf, Gordon Rollings and Sean Barrett, Gerald Lawson, Lea Seidl, Oliver MacGreevy and Norma Foster, with Scobie as the Ambassador’s Dog.

It was made at Shepperton Studios, Surrey, England.

It was the last film in which Jack Hawkins’s real voice is heard before his problems with throat cancer.

Battleship Potemkin in the classic Eisenstein silent film is named after the Mostel character.

Other great Catherines: Elisabeth Bergner in The Rise of Catherine the Great (1934), Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress (1934), Tallulah Bankhead in A Royal Scandal [Czarina] (1945), and Bette Davis in John Paul Jones (1959).

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8209

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