What movie version did you like more?
Do you like the play itself?
I thought that the characters of Eleanor and Henry are simply brilliant, and the dialoge is extraordinary. But the princes were not so great though, especially Richard and John. They were treasonous, yes, but they were not that stupid.
John for example looks like he has an intelligence disorder of some sorts.
I know that Goldman later thought that he had been wrong John and wrote a novel about him, Myself as Witness, where the king was a more rounded character, but it's virtually impossible to get a copy now. Has anyone read it?
Fun fact about the 1963 movie: I wanted to show it to my mother (we saw the the newer version first), and i found a couple of different russian translations, and one of them was from the Soviet era. It was good but then i saw the scene where Philip tells Henry about how Richard made moves on him and the whole gay part. Well, the translation was totally different. In it, Philip told Henry that he and Richard actually plotted to kill him! So the whole dialogue was changed. And Eleanor's line about the role of sex in history had been changed into the role of chance in history which made no sense.
So you can say that the whole sex stuff was totally inappropriate in communist heaven
