Derek Jarman's Edward II (UK, 1991)

When he was working on the script to Ben Hur, Gore Vidal realized that Masala (Stephen Boyd) needed a more plausible motive for his actions.

The movie starts with Masala and Ben Hur reuniting in Palestine after Masala had been away for years. They have a ninety second argument about Palestine and the Roman Empire and Masala spends the next thirty years persecuting Ben Hur and everyone in his family.

Vidal figured that Masala and Ben Hur had been teen lovers. When they meet again, Masala wants to continue the relationship but Ben Hur's not interested.

Vidal told Stephen Boyd this and that's how he played the scene. They were being subtle. So subtle that Charelton Heston had no idea what was going on.

Of course, there was no reason for Derek Jarman's Edward II not to be blatant about it. Edward and Gaveston reunite while two naked men with crew cuts are going at it in bed a few feet away.

The anachronisms in Jarman's Caravaggio a few years earlier seemed weirdly natural. Edward II was in modern dress on minimal medieval sets. One was clearly wearing polyester and Edward's son wore what I think was a cotton-polyester blend. Now the fashions are 30-years-old which makes it worse not better.

It was far bloodier with a lot more torture and murder than I expected. I didn't know anything about Edward II in history but I shouldn't have been surprised. As with Caravaggio, I didn't really have any feeling about the characters except that I would never want to be around any of them, but, realistically, how appealing should they have been?

I had my own brush with period drama in modern dress nearly half a century ago. I was in the fourth grade. A girl in my class wanted to put on a play. It was only about two minutes long based on a story we read in one of those terrible primers---those books we used to practice reading. 

A princess is looking for a husband. Some noblemen come in giving her expensive gifts, but she decides to marry the one who was either a peasant or a down-and-out aristocrat who brings her some worthless crap. We were Americans. I don't know why they wanted to make royals look sensitive.

We did the play in the classroom. The set consisted of a chair. Maybe two chairs. But the director wanted the boys to wear tights and white undershirts to represent medieval finery. I thought my regular clothes were good enough and would have refused to change in any case. She drew a mustache on me. I would have gone with a pencil thin mustache like Errol Flynn, but she just drew hairs on my lip, like a teenage mustache.

It was the early seventies. Even children's clothing was somewhat Mod. I was wearing these pants that were a shade of purple---flairs that were cut in such a way that they required extra sewing---and a button-down shirt with an ornate striped pattern. It was timeless.

Years later, a friend of mine was in a Shakespeare play in high school. A (different) girl did the costumes for it. He was playing a wrestler and it may have been both functional and historically accurate, but his leather codpiece got a big laugh when they did a preview at a school assembly and he refused to wear it again.