Leofwine_draca This slow-moving piece benefits from a very effective performances by star Basil Rathbone as a corrupt duke whose ambitious nature leads him to gradually destroy all those who stand between him and the crown. Rathbone exudes cunning evil in this enduring film, and his scheming and wicked ways are the chief reason to watch. Not many other actors could have done this better. Although Rathbone is best known for his role in over a dozen Sherlock Holmes films in the 1940s, this remains one of his best performances ever.Some people have complained that this melodrama is too slow, not in my opinion. I think a lot of people are simply disappointed that this isn't exactly a horror film after it was recently re-released in misleading packaging. Sure, it's not horror, but there are plenty of frightening moments (plus the usual torture, beheadings, sword fights, you name it...), and Boris Karloff stumps around in makeup which wouldn't look out of place in any spooker you care to mention. Karloff here adopts the role of a faithful manservant to Rathbone, a bald executioner with a club foot who carries out his master's bidding unnervingly. Karloff isn't given much opportunity to act here, apart from in a scene with a young child, and mainly trades in on his terrible Frankenstein image. But then there's no harm in that.The time period of the film is very good, as we gradually watch Rathbone rise through the various ranks in the royal court. Absolutely nobody stands in his way in the film until the final moments where a heroic opponent escapes and paves the way for a full-scale battle. The acting is uniformly good, as is the score, and it's nice to see a young Vincent Price in an amusing role as a drunkard who meets his end in a vat of red wine. Price sports a terrible British accent here and plays a very effeminate character, but his portrayal of drunkenness is accurate and you can see the seeds which eventually led to him becoming a famed actor some two decades later in the likes of THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH.As for the horror content, there are a few choice moments in a torture chamber to delight the genre fan. Karloff is a master of pain, casually tossing water over a floor for a prisoner to lick up and dropping a weight on a man's chest in passing. I was surprised how graphic some of these tortures were, and one man has to survive whipping, branding, and even being stretched on the rack at the end of the film. Some battering! If you want to see a Shakespeare play given a top-notch treatment by some forgotten stars, then TOWER OF London is the film for you.

Spikeopath Tower of London is directed by Rowland V. Lee and written by Robert N. Lee. It stars Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Barbara O'Neil and Ian Hunter. Music is collaborated by Ralph Freed, Hans J. Salter and Frank Skinner and cinematography by George Robinson.Out of Universal Pictures, film is a reworking of how Richard III (Rathbone) rose to become King of England by scheming and killing off those ahead of him in line to the throne.No square headed or fang sprouting monsters in this Universal Picture, this is about human monsters, splendidly played out with historical observation. It's 1471 and we are involved in shifty shenanigans, torture, war, infanticide and depravity. All played out amongst classic Universal backdrops; of which the titular Tower is a prominently gloomy force. There's much decadence to be found and gruesome deaths are interlaced with medieval malarkey such as a wine drinking competition to the death! Some deliciously macabre scenes land in the conscious and stay there, none more so than with Richard's returning visits to his Royal figurines! All good dastardly fun.Story has a lot going on, so paying attention is heartily recommended to get the best out of Lee's screenplay. Characterisations are rich with period flavours, especially the villains, where Rathbone is wide eyed, edgy and maniacal, and the irrepressible Karloff a hulking grotesque who takes pride in his position as chief torturer. Robinson's photography is suitably atmospheric, with the misty marsh laden battle at the finale particularly striking: the latter of which also finding director Lee on good camera form as he fluidly tracks the mud, blood and swinging of steel.Sure some of it's unintentionally smile inducing, and that final battle needed to be considerably longer, but all told it's classical period stuff that does have some serious humanistic themes at its core. 7.5/10

Mart Sander As this film premiered a mere week after The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, I can't help but think how the viewers compared the two historical spectacles. In this case Universal comes in second (as might be the case when you compete against Warner Bros) even though The Tower of London is great fun to watch. The ensemble of the male actors is perfect: Karloff, Rathbone and Price at one go means a good show. They look great and are well fit for historical parts. The ladies are, nevertheless, hideous. They are required to wear unidentified period costumes with weird wigs and head-gears combined with very thirties make-up which make them appear as some kind of crossbreeds between Isolde and Mickey Mouse. Perhaps the smell of mediocre production values could have been suffocated by the use of color photography, but alas, the b/w images never take off as they should. The film still moves along effortlessly and if you can look past the obvious thirties liberties taken with the subject and artwork - or indeed, if you enjoy these - then the film is a plate of definite dessert.

Terrell-4 When that martyr to morality, that paragon of piety Sir Thomas More had his head chopped off by the order of his master, Henry VIII, it's unlikely in those last moments that he asked forgiveness for the sliming of Richard III's reputation, which he accomplished while ambitiously working to curry favor with the Tudors. Richard was the last of the Yorkist line, a capable and honest king, as ruthless in politics as everyone else was at that time, and most likely, if he had not taken action, to lose his own head to the machinations of the Woodvilles, the family of Queen Elizabeth, widow of Edward IV, Richard's brother, and mother to the two young princes who were the immediate heirs to the throne when Edward died. We know that Richard took control of the princes, that they were lodged with great comfort in the Tower, that he had them proclaimed illegitimate based on a prior morganatic marriage Edward had undertaken, and that there is no record of them having been seen during the last months of Richard's reign. We also know that Henry Tudor, a minor and ambitious offspring from the royal line, returned to England, raised an army and defeated Richard when the forces of Lord Stanley betrayed Richard and attacked his flank in the middle of the battle at Bosworth Field. Tudor took the crown, Richard's body disappeared after being abused, and the Tudor propaganda machine took over. Thanks primarily to Thomas More and, later, William Shakespeare, Richard was turned into a crook-backed, club-footed, amoral monster who slew innocent children, beheaded stalwart lovers of England, wooed widows over the caskets of their husbands and, to put it gently, was an unreliable friend. When Richard was killed in battle, the Tudors saw to it that Richard's reputation as a fair and capable king died with him. And that brings us to Tower of London. Here we have a cauldron of a movie bubbling merrily away that spatters as much rancid stew on Richard almost as vividly as Shakespeare and More did. Basil Rathbone plays Richard with enthusiastic malice. As a henchman, he has Boris Karloff as Mord, a big, club-footed, bald-headed, muscular torturer, eager to use the executioner's axe or the torturer's rack and whip. "You're more than a duke," Mord tells Richard, "more than a king. You're a god to me!" Mord eagerly and admiringly acts on Richard's plans, from thrusting a dagger into the back of the mad old Henry VI to tipping Clarence, Richard's troublesome brother, into a huge vat of malmsey, then sitting on the lid while waiting for the sound of the bubbles to stop. Just as with Shakespeare's Richard, Hollywood's Rathbonian version is great fun, at least as long as Richard has center stage. Things slow down when we spend time seeing how angelic the two royal tykes are. There also is a romantic and conventional subplot between a lady- in-waiting and a young man dedicated to helping Henry Tudor bring down Richard. This is Basil Rathbone's movie, however, and he makes the most of it with icy diction and some good lines. He hands his own dagger to Mord, then sends him to where Henry VI is praying. "A fitting occasion for a blade in the shape of a cross," Richard says. "It will insure the thrust and bless the wound." Karloff gives wonderful, dreadful support. At one point we watch him step heavily on a young royal messenger with his club foot. The boy doesn't survive. Of course, we should know the outcome by now. And who did kill the two young princes? Some say Richard would have been foolish to do so so soon into his reign. Better to wait if he were going to do the deed. The most likely candidate may be the Duke of Buckingham, amoral, unreliable and impetuous, who was eager to have Richard in his debt. My money is on Henry VII. If when Henry won the crown and then found the two princes in the Tower, both with a much better claim to the throne than Henry's, their future would quickly have become their past...as it did. Those who appreciate the gleeful assassination of a person's character will enjoy Lawrence Olivier's Richard III and Ian McKellan's Richard III. Those who might appreciate reading a different point of view should look up Paul Murray Kendall's marvelous biography, Richard III.