"Disraeli" only remains noteworthy for being an early-talkie biopic that nabbed George Arliss a Best Actor Oscar and two other nominations for Best Picture and Screenplay--the first film to mark the trend of Academy voters' inexplicable Anglophilia and love affair with drab biographical pictures. To be fair, it must be a challenge to make an exciting movie out of the UK Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli buying the Suez Canal. Pretending colonialism is invigorating, however, as Disraeli employs foreign policy to play matchmaker for a young courtly couple, is not a successful way to go about it. The Russian spy business here is inane, too. The surviving reissue print of the film looks flat and dull. Amazingly, this was a very popular film in its day and was also a remake of a 1921 silent version with Arliss and the Broadway versions also starring him.
The acting is horrendous, with them being forced by the primitive synchronized-sound technology to shout their lousy lines. Sure, Arliss is better than the others, but he, too, resorts to some throwing of clenched fists in the air to theatrically project emotions, and his character is a pompous fuddy-duddy who is rightfully criticized by his contemporaries for his imperialist designs (although, obviously not for the anti-Semitic attacks). I actually prefer Arliss in his other performance nominated for Best Actor in the same season, for "The Green Goddess" (1930). That film, too, is Anglophilic and colonialist rubbish, but Arliss plays on the other side, as a monarch of a fictional Eastern kingdom, and his wry humor serves to almost seemingly mock the movie itself, which, as with "Disraeli," is deserving of it.
The acting is horrendous, with them being forced by the primitive synchronized-sound technology to shout their lousy lines. Sure, Arliss is better than the others, but he, too, resorts to some throwing of clenched fists in the air to theatrically project emotions, and his character is a pompous fuddy-duddy who is rightfully criticized by his contemporaries for his imperialist designs (although, obviously not for the anti-Semitic attacks). I actually prefer Arliss in his other performance nominated for Best Actor in the same season, for "The Green Goddess" (1930). That film, too, is Anglophilic and colonialist rubbish, but Arliss plays on the other side, as a monarch of a fictional Eastern kingdom, and his wry humor serves to almost seemingly mock the movie itself, which, as with "Disraeli," is deserving of it.