Lucifer Sam
الموت لأمريكا
Today I watched That Hamilton Woman! (1941). The exclamation mark is only found on some of the promotional posters. Sometimes it is called Lady Hamilton and other times just That Hamilton Woman. The exclamation point makes the woman sound pesky, as if the speaker wants to be rid of her, like That Darn Cat! But I suppose the British public did find her an annoyance of sorts, as an item of gossip, and the seductress of their naval champ Lord Nelson. A quote on a poster reads, "I forgot that once I was a nobody and that today they call me that Hamilton woman!"
Exposition schools us in how Emma Hamilton was a poor country girl who parlayed her good looks and talent for exotic dancing into a position of favor with the men of high society. She's the muse of a portrait painter until a fiancé with gambling debts sells her into marriage to his middle-aged uncle, the British Ambassador in Naples. She takes her lumps and manages to settle in there, becoming Eliza to his Higgins. She blossoms into a popular hostess on the scene. This goes on until Nelson's fleet arrives in Naples; she assists him in some Italian diplomatic matters where her husband was not coming through as quick as needed. Their affair begins.
The movie is best in its second hour, when the Hamiltons (now refugees from Naples) arrive with Nelson in London, and the affair is known. Here it becomes a delicious little chamber drama, with all the tension between the admiral and his wife Frances, and between Frances and Emma. "It's the oldest story in the world, the most sordid & contemptible. Find a public hero and there you'll find, sure as fate, a woman parasite," says Lady Nelson. She takes her own lumps. She keeps her dignity and refuses her husband a divorce. Nelson's vicar father takes her in, considering his son a disgrace. We are told that she lives out a simple life dispensing Christian charity to the poor—what should've been the lot of a repentant Magdalen, when all she ever did was have the misfortune of being jilted by her sailor man. This aspect of her biography makes her more interesting to me than Hamilton's or Nelson's.
It ends with twenty minutes of heavy-handed "Rule Britannia" bombast of cannons and sea foam at Trafalgar. Yawn. I would've preferred a film about Lady Nelson, who went off into obscurity with an Anglican priest. It could be modeled on Hester Gibbon living like a renunciant in perfect chastity with William Law, praying the Psalms every morning, noon, and night, and working in soup kitchens, a meager and sexless existence. This sort of thing can be cinematic in its own way, like the 1986 film Thérèse about the Little Flower.
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