Load of rubbish!!

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

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 saw this whole series when I was about 10 yrs old on Masterpiece Theatre back in the 1970's and I remember it made a huge impression on me concerning Tudor history. It motivated me to read more on the time period and English history. There are six episodes, each devoted to the stories of his wives. But not only the stories of his wives backgrounds and who they were in history, it also gives the history of what was going on during Henry the VIII's reign---The Reformation of the Church of England and the break from Roman Catholism. The act of Succession. and the relations and intrigues between foreign countries lined up against each other like a chess board.The acting is superb! The costumes are rich and magnificent. Keith Mitchell looks so much like Henry the VIII, you think he's been resurrected. The settings or back drop may have been the only thing that the production company did not spend a lot of money on--lots of wood paneling and open hallways. But the Tudor homes and palaces were althoug opulent in construction--they did not have a lot of furniture or knick knacks of the homes of today. Young people should be compelled to watch this series. It is a kingly delight and not to be missed by future generations.

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.

Wow, i'm a huge Henry VIII/Tudor era fan and, well, this was .... interesting. The only one I watched was the Catherine of Aragon one. And wow...just wow. I've seen bad acting before, but this reached new heights. When the actress who played Catherine was umm.. crying? she wails and screams and i have to admit i rewinded many times... many, many times .... funny, funny stuff. The only person who even showed any slight sliver of talent was the actress playing Anne Boleyn (i might be prejudiced though, i do have a slight obsession with Anne Boleyn, she was a really facinating woman, read up on her, it's worth it!) Also, i have read a lot about the Tudor time period and i think that the characters weren't very acurately displayed, they were all very stereotypical. Only see this movie if you are prepared to see a very important time period, and the important lives of those involved turned into a laughing stock.