Why aren't there any movies starring Gladstone?

Why hasn’t William Gladstone, a towering figure in British politics who was prime minister four times in the 19^th Century, been the central character of any film biopics? Why has he been the starring role in only one even remotely significant play, Hugh Ross Williamson's short-lived 1937 show Mr. Gladstone, which never made it out of London? Why has his arch-rival in British politics, Benjamin Disraeli, been the subject of so many plays and films when by contrast he was only prime minister twice and usually ranks lower in the lists of the best prime ministers in Britain’s history? 

The fact is, filmmakers have been so dazzled by Disraeli's positive attributes that both prime ministers have failed to get the interesting, complicated, balanced treatment they deserve. “All actors want to play Disraeli, except fat ones,” American filmmaker Nunnally Johnson was quoted as saying in the London Review of Books in 2013, almost 40 years after the last Disraeli biopic. “It’s such a showy part—half Satan, half Don Juan, man of so many talents, he could write novels, flatter a queen, dig the Suez Canal. Present her with India. You can’t beat that, it’s better than Wyatt Erp.” That may be why the Internet Movie Database counts so many portrayals of Disraeli: seven biopics about Disraeli and 14 portrayals in films that aren’t primarily about him.

There are actually more portrayals of Gladstone recorded on IMDB, but he’s never been the subject of a theatrical film release. Gladstone shows up in 20 movies, almost always as a scowling prude, and often a villain. But the only screen treatments of Gladstone that make him the central figure are one hour episodes on BBC television series: In 1983 an episode of “Number 10,” a British television series in which each episode covers a different prime minister, focused on Gladstone. Then in 1960 a television series of filmed plays called the “ITV Play of the Week” featured a one-hour drama entitled “Old Man in a Hurry” by (here he comes again) Hugh Ross Williamson, the author of the 1937 play Mr. Gladstone.

By contrast, there were films named Disraeli in 1916, 1921, 1929 and 1978. It is true that three of the Disraeli films starred George Arliss and were based on a long-running Broadway play for which he originated the role. But there was also one called The Prime Minister in 1941 and one called Invincible Mr. Disraeli in 1963. The remaining biopic was the hour episode on Disraeli in TV’s “Number 10” (the title of which alludes to the prime minister’s house at No. 10 Downing Street in London). A case can be made that it might be time for an intelligent dramatic treatment of Disraeli too, one that doesn’t treat the conservative prime minister as an unmitigated hero. After all, 1978 was a long time ago, and the films are all heavily flawed.

But for now let’s focus on the strange treatment of Gladstone by the entertainment industry: There is much to dislike in the Liberal prime minister, but the main reason he is most often portrayed in an uncomplicatedly negative light is that the films he is in usually feature Disraeli as a hero. One can only speculate why Gladstone has gone comparatively underrepresented in movies, but let us start with his personality. For all the reasons that Disraeli is beloved by actors, Gladstone is the opposite. He was not a Don Juan, though he did have a habit of going into the streets to “reform” prostitutes. (That was the subject of his episode in “Number 10.”) He could not write novels, though he did publish seven books of Homeric criticism. (“Gladstone read Homer for fun,” Winston Churchill quipped, “and it served him right.”) And, famously, where “Dizzy” did in fact flatter Queen Victoria, Gladstone merely infuriated her. The reasons why are keys to understanding Hollywood’s aversion. The Queen felt he treated her as though he were giving speeches to her. She may also have felt he had an irritating Messianic complex, seemingly believing that God had appointed him to fight the causes he fought. Where his supporters called him G.O.M. for the “Grand Old Man,” his rivals called him “God’s Only Mistake.” And where Disraeli was possessed of a proto-Wildean wit, Gladstone was famously humorless. This explains why Gladstone is a stick in the mud in supporting role after supporting role.

We think of Hollywood as liberal, but Gladstone’s reputation as “the People’s William” has not won him more favor. The strange thing is that this is not because he was a very conservative Liberal. Actually, the best untold story about Gladstone is his transformation from being what historian Thomas Babington Macauley called “the rising hope of those stern, unbending Tories” when he started in politics in the 1830s to being perhaps the primary representative of what liberalism meant in the second half of the 19^th Century. None of the films or plays about Gladstone tell this story in any depth. The closest I’ve seen from a dramatic treatment of Gladstone is in the 1978 Disraeli miniseries, which suggests that Gladstone’s switch from the Tory party to the new Liberal party in 1859 was made because the leaders of the Liberal party at the time were old, giving him a much shorter path to the premiership than a Tory party led by the young Disraeli. This is probably largely true, but it doesn’t tell the full fascinating story. 

So, if not the ideational evolution of Gladstone, what story does the one full-length dramatic treatment of Gladstone tell? Williamson’s play Mr. Gladstone quite deliberately tells the same story about Gladstone that all the other plays of the 1930s told about the G.O.M.: The 1880s Gladstone, embroiled in the controversy over Irish “home rule,” or freedom in government from Britain. In fact, Williamson wrote in an “author’s note” in the script that his play was specifically written for an audience that had already seen the other plays, an audience which of course no longer exists today. “This play was written in 1937 for the Gate Theatre Studio,” Williamson wrote:

“That is to say, it was written for a particular audience, which might be presumed to have seen Elsie Schauffler’s Parnell and Laurence Housman’s Victoria Regina. Both these plays, in my opinion, were extremely partisan statements on political matters still recent enough to be controversial. Parnell presented what can only be described as a gross caricature of Gladstone himself, besides completely falsifying the Home Rule issue as it affected the two men. Mr. Housman seems to me to over-sentimentalize a Queen who appears to have been one of the more unattractive characters, as she was certainly one of the most unconstitutional monarchs, who have occupied the English throne. It was my criticism of these dramatized versions of history which led to the writing of Mr. Gladstone, as an attempt to present to the audience which first saw them in England the real issues of the time, conveyed as nearly as possible in the actual words of the characters.”

And yet when the play was reviewed, it was criticized for being as one-sided in Gladstone’s favor as Williamson felt the other plays had been against him. As The New York Times reported on Friday, October 1, 1937, “The dramatist’s portrait of Gladstone is careful and reasonable … Nevertheless, it fails, in the opinion of critics, to do him justice. For the Times of London the fault lies in the oversimplification of the ‘Grand Old Man’s’ character, an omission of those complexities—his arrogance and humility, his tactical adroitness and passionate faith—from which arose the special character of his genius.”

As one might guess from Williamson’s words above, Queen Elizabeth is not portrayed favorably in Mr. Gladstone. The stage directions describe her as “undeniably ‘difficult,’’ having “surrendered her independence of judgment to the dazzling attentions of ‘DIZZY’ … in process of becoming that obstinate conservative old lady whose continual nagging almost broke even Mr. Gladstone’s spirit.” And lest that make it sound like Disraeli escapes scorn, he is described in the stage directions by a quote from Lytton Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians: “After a lifetime of relentless determination, infinite perseverance and superhuman egotism, he found himself at last, old, hideous, battered, widowed, solitary, diseased, but Prime Minister of England.” To Williamson’s credit this is a more interesting take on Disraeli than any of the films or plays titled after him offer. But the conception of drama in the 1930s thus seemed to be that if the story was told from the perspective of the Queen or Disraeli, one couldn’t also tell the story from the perspective of Gladstone. One or the other had to be a villain. This was also the tendency of historians, observed Robert Blake in an essay in 1998: “Too often biographers of these two extraordinary men have felt it their duty to see their hero’s enemy through their hero’s eyes, and to denigrate or at least sneer at the opponent almost as if the battle was still raging when they wrote,” Blake wrote. “This is absurd over a century after Gladstone’s death, and after all he outlived Disraeli by 17 years.”

Room remains, therefore, for a balanced portrait of both Disraeli and Gladstone on both stage and screen. That may not be the priority of Hollywood and Broadway, which for very good reason have been trying (if haltingly) to rectify the huge gaps in representation of peoples who, to put it simplistically, are not heterosexual white males. But leaving Gladstone out of our library of film history entirely leaves a gap in our historical education about the whole of the second half of the 19th Century. (A similar gap exists in United States history, where TV’s “The Gilded Age” is one of the few screen tellings of a half-century of presidents.) 

I can imagine a fun new portrait of Gladstone, one that finds humor in his humorlessness while locating interest in the conflict between the Gladstone who called himself an “out and out inequalitarian” and the Gladstone who said anyone had a moral entitlement to the vote. One that finds him haunted by the Greek Gods of Homer as much as by a rigid Christian conscience that drove him to note in his diary each time he whipped himself for lustful feelings. One in which Gladstone changes parties in part because he was humiliated by his experience in Odysseus’ homeland as the stooge of Disraeli. But also one in which he embraces new opportunities to speak to the masses in the mid-19^th century, ending up partially changed by his efforts to speak to people who didn’t have the kind of aristocratic background he had overvalued. One that is honest about his deplorable racism, evidenced in his early support of slavery and the Confederacy in America. And one that is honest in depicting his attempt to recant both positions. One with a Gladstone who believed himself driven by principle even as he went from one party to the next, but who was also a lauded tactician. One in which the Liberal leader failed to pass a law expanding the vote to the working class by such tactics, only to see Disraeli pass an even stronger reform because the Grand Old Man's supposed brilliance in tactics failed him. 

None of those aspects of Gladstone’s story have been told yet on stage or screen.