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Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Contrary to many an assumption, Tower of London is actually not a horror film, despite the dark and miserable English castle setting, the sight of Boris Karloff as club-footed executioner Mord, and the presence of Rowland V. Lee - a director perhaps best known for Son of Frankenstein (also released in 1939) - behind the camera. There's also the existence of Roger Corman's low-budget effort of the same name, which emphasised the horror and pushed genre legend Vincent Price (who also appears here in a smaller role) into the central role as the deformed, scheming Richard III. In fact, Lee's Tower of London is a historical drama, borrowing much from Shakespeare's Richard III but somewhat confusingly leaving out much of the detail.Edward IV (Ian Hunter) sits comfortably on the throne of England after defeating King Henry VI (Miles Mander) and imprisoning him in the Tower of London. The feeble-minded former king wears a paper crown and lives in the hope that his son will return from exile in France to reclaim his crown. Edward enjoys combat practice with his formidable and cunning brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester (Basil Rathbone), while their soft, drunken younger brother the Duke of Clarence (Price) watches on enviously. Richard is an incredibly capable leader of men, but is way behind in the line of succession. He keeps a mini theatre hidden away where he plans to remove everybody in his way, and despite the many rivals who could challenge him for the crown, the hunchbacked prince will stop at nothing until he is seated on the throne.Although not a horror, Tower of London certainly looks like one. The huge set created for the film became a staple of Universal, and the dark, chilling castle could be seen in many genre pieces produced by the studio in the following years. There's also a few brutal but bloodless murders, almost always involving Karloff's Mord, who is the closest thing the film has to a monster. Yet for the most part, this is more akin to Shakespeare, performed by a ridiculous wealth of acting talent. There are great turns by Hunter, Mander, Price (in only his fourth role) and Barbara O'Neil as Queen Elyzabeth, but the film belongs to Rathbone and Karloff, with the former even eclipsing Laurence Olivier's arguably hammy thesping in the 1955 film. Packing what is an incredibly complex tale into 90 minutes can confuse matters, but this is an entertaining, somewhat lighter alternative to Shakespeare's infinitely more grandiose work.

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.

"Tower of London" (Universal, 1939), directed by Rowland V. Lee, according to the original screenplay by Robert N. Lee, is an historical account based on the brutal rise to power of King Richard III. Mixing fact and fiction, "Tower of London" could easily be categorized as a Gothic horror tale due to the casting of Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff and Vincent Price (in third film role), actors long associated in the horror genre. Aside from reuniting director Lee along with Rathbone and Karloff from "Son of Frankenstein" (1939), it also lifts the underscoring used from that same film. While there are no mad scientists, monsters or tales of the supernatural this time around, the horror is best described from its opening introduction: "No age is without its ruthless men ... who in their search for power, leave dark stains upon the pages of history ... during the middle ages ... to seize the throne of England. In 1471, this has been done by Edward IV ... who has violently deposed the feeble Henry VI and holds him prisoner. Within the deep shadows of the tower walls lives the population of a small city ... some in prison cells and torture chambers ... some in palaces and spacious lodgings ... but none in peace. A web of intrigue veils the lives of all who know only too well that today's friends might be tomorrow's enemies." Following its introductory of Queen Elyzabeth (Barbara O'Neil), wife of King Edward IV (Ian Hunter), as she bathes her three children, comes the main factor with characters of interest: Mord (Boris Karloff, in a standout performance), a sadistic executioner sharpening the blade of the headman's axe for his next victim on the chopping block. Working under direct orders of Edward's younger brother, Richard III (Basil Rathbone), Duke of Gloucester, Mord idolizes him with these words, "You are more than a Duke, more than a King ... you are a God to me." Equally villainous, Richard, who slowly schemes to take control of the throne, is seen to have miniature replicas of royal competitors he intends on destroying hidden in his secret cabinet, removing them one by one, throwing them into his fireplace once that mission is accomplished. The romantic interest falls upon Lady Alice Barton (Nan Grey) and John Wyatt (John Sutton), the latter whom Richard exiles to France. After the death of the Prince of Wales (G.P. Huntley Jr.), Richard tricks his widow, Anne Neville (Rose Hobart) into marrying him. Moving forward to 1483 as Richard takes control of the throne, he orders the execution of his two two young nephews, Prince Edward V (Ronald Sinclair) and Prince Richard (John Herbert Bond). Elizabeth sends for her exiled cousin, Wyatt, to help form a powerful army against Richard, which proves an impossible task after Wyatt's capture, imprisonment and extreme measures of punishment and flogging by the grinning Mord in the Tower of London.Containing many gory scenes, either suggested or acted out, the film's most famous sequence is the wine drinking contest between the cowardly Duke of Clarence (Vincent Price) and Richard, concluding with the unconscious Clarence being tossed into the large tank of Malmsey wine by Richard and Mord where, after shutting the lid, each listening patiently to the sound of the victim's last bubbling breath. According to Bob Dorian, former host of American Movie Classics where the film aired from 1994-1999, the scene came close to becoming reality where Price nearly drowned in the process when the lid was stuck shut. The same was said by Bob Osborne, host of Turner Classic Movies, when "Tower of London" made its TCM premiere October 23, 2006. In spite of his near death experience, it was Price who enacted the role of Richard III the 1962 remake. The actual battle sequences of Barnet, Tewkesbury and later Bosworth's Field are depicted here, but are briefly staged. With its straightforward dramatic theme, only Tom Clink (Ernest Cossart) and his chimney sweep boy assistant (Walter Tetley) offer some lighter comedic moments. The only thing missing is William Shakespeare's "Richard III" recital made famous by John Barrymore.A lavish scale production with sets that could have been replicas for the sound remake of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," a production originally produced by Universal in 1923, but remade by RKO in 1939, "Tower of London", at 92 minutes, regardless of historical inaccuracies, is in a class by itself, thanks to the believable/ unsympathetic performances by Rathbone and Karloff, the noteworthy support of the aforementioned actors along with Leo G. Carroll (Lord Hastings), Lionel Bellmore (Beacon Chiruegeon), Ralph Forbes (Henry Tutor) and little Donnie Donegan (Prince Richard as a child) among others.Formerly distributed to home video in the 1990s, "Tower of London" can be found on DVD with Karloff's science fiction melodrama, "Night Key"(1937) on its flip side. (*** kingdoms for a horse)

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.