The Abdication * (1974, Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann, Cyril Cusack) – Classic Movie Review 10,523

Queen Christina: ‘I, Christina, Sovereign of Sweden, do hereby abdicate my throne.’

‘She shook the Vatican like an earthquake. Shocking whispers had preceded her. Debauchery. Unspeakable acts. A reign of scandal… And now she had cast her spell over one of them.’

Ingmar Bergman’s star Liv Ullmann plays Sweden’s 17th-century Queen Christina, who goes to Rome to convert to Catholicism, falls for Cardinal Azzolino (Peter Finch) and is replaced on the Swedish throne.

Director Anthony Harvey’s 1974 historical epic The Abdication is uninteresting, uninspiring and unsuccessful, with the good actors at sea amid an intractable, talky screenplay, too obviously taken from a play, and a stagey, dully reverential air. However, at 103 minutes, it is exceptionally brief for an epic.

Anthony Harvey direction isn’t a patch on his work in The Lion in Winter.

Greta Garbo’s 1933 film Queen Christina is far more inspiring.

Ruth Wolff adapts her own play.

Also in the cast are Cyril Cusack, Paul Rogers, Graham Crowden, Michael Dunn, Lewis Fiander, Harold Goldblatt, Kathleen Byron, Tony Steedman, James Faulkner, Paul Rogers, Noel Trevarthen, Richard Cornish, and Edward Underdown.

Ullmann and Finch appeared together the year before in Lost Horizon (1973).

Christina (Swedish: Kristina) (18 December 1626 – 19 April 1689) was Queen of Sweden from 1632 until her abdication in 1654.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,523

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