I'm only a little familiar with the life and work of the great Romantic poet Lord Byron who may today still be best known for his description as being "Mad, bad and dangerous to know". Certainly this post-Gainsborough production repeats the phrase often enough, including partly in the title of course. Quite what the celbrated poet and adventurer would have made of his life being condensed into a mere 83 minutes I'm not sure and while he knew a thing or two about unusual verse structure, I rather think, like me, he'd have been nonplussed if not downright confused at the way this movie attempts to encapsulate his tumultuous life.
We join the movie at the end of his relatively short life, fighting with the Greeks against Turkish oppression, having lately done something similar in Italy with the revolutionary resistance there, the Carbonari. Struck down however by illness, we find him on his death bed where he slips into a strange dream where he's put on celestial trial to decide whether he was a good or bad man, in the former guise a great poet and freedom fighter, in the latter a libertine spendthrift who picks up and drops usually titled wealthy young ladies at will, whether they be married or not. Now, I'm a dream sequence fan myself, but this one certainly isn't in the Powell and Pressburger class.
The simple answer to the big question is of course that he was both. Unfortunately the director here misses the point in pompously and disingenuously throwing the matter back in the viewer's lap in a rather silly and misjudged final scene.
Dennis Price is given the task of bringing the notorious Bard to life but fails to project the man's sexual magnetism which seduced so many beautiful women. There is however an interesting selection of contemporary actresses including Mai Zetterling and Joan Greenwood who get to play his conquests although some of these performances are somewhat uneven too.
On the plus side I did get to hear some fine lines of poetry which will probably prompt me to read some of the man's work but on the whole it seemed to me that this pedestrian and portentous movie did its subject a disservice in dulling if not dumbing down the exciting life led by this undoubtedly charismatic man.
