I love this movie so much

People are voting emotionally.

Absolutely the worst movie.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I highly enjoyed this series. I watched it when it first aired in 1971. I later bought it on VHS. I'd now like to get it on DVD. I have watched this series countless times and never grow tired of it. Keith Michel is excellent as Henry VIII and having read the book by Allison Weir, Keith seems to portray Henry fairly accurately. I thought all of the actors/actresses did quite well. The woman who played Catherine Howard seemed to overact just a bit, but she still did a fine job. The series makes you feel as though you're right there in that time period. It almost makes me wish I could have been there, except for the fact that life for the royals wasn't as glamorous or even safe. You could feel the tension and fear in all of Henry's wives as they risked their very lives to be the wife of a tyrannical king. Henry didn't start out that way, but soon after his father had died, Henry had great aspirations about being the new king. He wanted to make England powerful and prosperous again. That meant fighting wars and slaughtering enemies. It was only a while later, after Catherine had failed to produce a living son, that Henry realized how important a legitimate living male heir would be to him and he was willing to risk others to get what he wanted.

I was only 13 when this series aired on TV back in 1971. Others have mentioned seeing it on PBS, but I clearly remembering it first airing in the U.S. on network TV - I'm fairly sure it was CBS - back in the summer of 1971. Isn't it amazing that in 30 years we went from great historical drama being summer TV fare to schlock like Survivor and Fear Factor? At any rate, this series stars actors and actresses that Americans have probably never seen before since this was entirely a British production. It consists of six episodes - one for each wife - each running 90 minutes in length. My favorite episodes were those about the second and fifth wives - Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, respectively. Dorothy Tutin plays the long pursued and then quickly rejected Anne Boleyn, mother of the future Elizabeth I. She is executed on trumped up charges merely because she had failed to produce a male heir and Henry could never come up with an excuse for another divorce just a few years after he had come up with a philosophical and religious reason for one to Catherine of Aragon. He would have completely lost face and one with Henry's pride could not have that. How ironic that it was Anne's daughter Elizabeth - not Henry's son Edward - that was the strong and able monarch and heir Henry had hoped to produce, and the one to clean up the mess he made of England's treasury when she assumed the throne. Katherine Howard, Henry's fifth wife, is the other wife that is executed, although the charges of adultery against her are true. Mitchell does an outstanding job of playing the heartbroken king when he learns of Howard's treachery. The thing is, Katherine Howard's treachery is not so much that as it is the expected outcome of a young healthy 17 year-old girl married to an old man 30 years her senior who can no longer be a real husband to her. She was truly a tragic figure, but typical of that era - a young girl treated as a commodity by her family and placed in an arranged marriage. It is odd that with all of the intelligent and beautiful wives that Henry had, the one that had his heart until the day he died was the shy and plain Jane Seymour, his third wife, mother of his only son, and the only one of his six wives to die a natural death while still his wife. Through all six episodes Keith Mitchell plays Henry the VIII spectacularly as he gradually ages from a lean eighteen year old that is full of life into a bloated self-indulgent old man who still has the passions he had a teen, but with a body that does not cooperate. Turns out kings like commoners cannot escape from the ravages of old age. If you enjoy this series, you might want to consider watching "Elizabeth R", starring Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth I. Both of these series are excellent, but that is the one that people have remembered over the years, plus it won an Emmy for Best Drama.

This is a fictionalized biography of England's interesting, overrated and matrimonially challenged monarch of the early sixteenth century. The Renaissance--secularism, self-assertion, democratic elections and the relegation of otherworldism--had been introduced as a set of ideas negative to church-worldly theocracy in 1470 by Edward IV. Henry VIII's era's nobles then followed a fashion set by him; female costume was thin, confining, geometric and dull. Henry's male costume was broad, fur-bearing, opulent and increasingly Italianate. His life and times became a struggle between Medieval statism and individualist Renaissance priorities. The series is titled for the "six wives" he married; but an equal amount of time is spent on Henry's stormy reign. The six wives are "Catherine of Aragon" (Annette Crosbie; "Anne Boleyn" (Dorothy Tutin); "Jane Seymour" (Anne Stallybrass); "Anne of Cleves" (Elvi Hale); "Catherine Howard" (Angela Pleasance, aka Angela Scoular); and "Catherine Parr" (Rosalie Crutchley). The assessment of a nine-hour-long series of such complexity as English history, examples of acting, directing, staging, writing, political theory and psychology is a difficult assignment. It is on the grounds of separate evaluations of these aspects that I say one must approach the series. Henry begins as a conformist but Renaissance-loving youth of unusual promise; by the end of the series he has become a bloated and totalitarian monster. He has wasted the kingdom's exchequer in continental wars and on Medieval-style pageants and tournaments; and his neglect of justice and bequeathing of his kingdom to Bloody Mary Tudor, a Catholic, nearly undoes his life's great achievement, the removal of Catholic influence and monastic structures from England, for good or ill. The presentation of events, personalities, ideas and history here I regard as above-average in sum; at times, one feels one is watching realpolitik coming to life before one's eyes. The physical production is above average though seldom either sumptuous or grand; the richest part of the series is its costumes. The directors bring good performances out of many actors; blocking of action, gestures and scenic elements are always quite high-level, I find. Psychologically, the difficulty in such a six-episode coherently-arranged ninety-minute-each mini-series is to try to make the motivations and reactions appeal to late twentieth-century viewers. The writers of the episodes had varying material to work with, and for the most part handled both historicity as well as psychology with requisite skill, I suggest. The dialogue about political as well as personal consequences in most cases remains interesting, and rather well-handled, by my standards. 1. Catherine of Aragon. This is a rather well-written story which telescopes years of time, from the early marriage of Henry, then a prince, to his brother's affianced wife after his death to the ending of their quarrel after early happiness when Henry divorces himself from her and Catholicism. Annette Crosbie is miscast as a Spanish noblewoman but acts rather creditably throughout the episode. 2. Anne Bolyen. Less time is covered in this episode than in the first, and some backtracking is necessary since the same events are covered from Anne Bolyen's point of view the second time. I find the dialogue and story-line and acting to be the best in this Nick McCarty script of all the series' entries. Dorothy Tutin and Wolfe Morris are excellent in this episode even though she is a bit too old for the part. The highlight is the trial scenes that end with Anne's unjust murder. 3. Jane Seymour. I consider this the weakest of the scripts, although Anne Stallybrass is an effectively tragic figure; Bernard Hepton as Cranmer comes to the fore in this episode as a most effective presence. 4. Anne of Cleves. This charming and very-well-reasoned episode presents Elvi Hale as a delightful and occasionally merry prospective bride for an aging Henry; she became a world-class presence due to this intelligently written part. 5. Catherine Howard. Anglela Pleasence is quite good in this part though neither quite beautiful nor highly-charismatic; she deserved more work off this interesting effort. The script is a strong one, especially in dialogue; and the viewer is given the sense from the beginning that this is a monarch of whom men dare not run afoul. A moving and complex piece of television writing and well-acted, the episode shows that even the mighty Howard family is not impervious to Henry's danger. 6. Catherine Parr. Another episode that telescopes time. Enorrmous by now and dangerous, Henry has become the shadow of what he was; one fears for Rosalie Crutchley, the kindly woman who brightens his last years, for a climate where truth cannot be uttered is no England for honest men, male or female. One must begin any evaluation of the series with with Keith Michell as Henry Tudor. His performance is extraordinarily good, much better than anyone else's in the part has been of which I have knowledge. By playing Henry straight, Michell gave him time to become deviant--in reasoning, willful blindness, denial, cruelty and injustice--by slow degrees. Among the many other actors involved, Sheila Burrell, Christopher Hancock, Patrick Troughton and Zienia Merton among others deserve mention. A landmark when it was produced, the series has only grown in stature since it was first presented.

This is the best of the 6 episodes about Henry's wives, probably because she was the most vital of his Queens, and the only one to be crowned in her own right. Dorothy Tutin is outstanding as the charasmatic woman who captured the heart of the King - she is a vivid contrast with Katherine of Aragon, solid and boring, and Jane Seymour timid and sly - I would recommend this film to anyone interested in the Tudor era and Anne in particular.