Norma Shearer's turn as Marie Antoinette, the tragic 18th-century queen of France, will always stand out as one of the lushest of MGM's 1930s lush budget productions, and for that reason alone is always worth a look--and a very enjoyable look it is. Forget that the costume designs are more than a bit over the top, even for the Versailles of Marie Antoinette's day. Forget Shearer's uneven acting, which as in all her films veers from the truly affecting to the annoyingly melodramatic (e.g., her stagey, even hokey body language in the night meeting with Tyrone Power in the garden just after she becomes queen, when he makes her understand they must not see each other again). Just enjoy the experience of what Hollywood figured they could pass off as history in the 1930s and expect a worldwide audience to accept as history.<br /><br />The film fails as history for two major reasons. First, it is based on a groundbreaking biography of the queen by Stefan Zweig, an Austrian novelist who was a close friend of Freud and was deeply influenced by psychoanalytic thought. Zweig's book created and popularized the view of Marie Antoinette's sex life that remained current for decades--that Louis XVI was unable to consummate his marriage with her for more than 7 years, and had to have minor surgery before he could seal the deal. Zweig's predictable view was that sexual frustration explained Marie Antoinette's notorious frivolity and spendthrift ways. We know today that Zweig fabricated his tale only by suppressing valuable evidence that would have weakened his theory, and giving undeserved prominence to other material that let him paint the kind of picture he wanted to create. Recent historians (and Zweig was not an historian) looked at the evidence Zweig omitted and proved conclusively that Louis XVI was not impotent and never had the surgery Zweig claimed was necessary. Louis was a lousy lover, true, and it did take some years before he got down to serious boudoir athletics, but Zweig's thesis has been thoroughly wrecked.<br /><br />In the 1930s when Zweig's book was new and influential, MGM could base a movie on it but couldn't openly portray the sexual issues at the heart of Zweig's account. Screenwriters had to dance around Louis' bedroom limitations and had to find a way to imply that the queen and Count Axel Fersen (Tyrone Power) were not lovers as Zweig implied they were. Thus the film's version, that the noble Fersen gently but firmly told the enamoured queen that they could no longer see each other. In fact, Fersen was at Versailles on and off throughout Louis XVI's reign; it was rumored that he fathered the queen's second son, born in 1785 exactly 9 months after one of Fersen's visits. But Louis accepted the child as his, so he must have been visiting the queen's bedroom at the right time. There's no proof Fersen ever paid the queen that kind of visit.<br /><br />The second major flaw in the film's historicity is that Shearer would not play Marie Antoinette as a featherbrained, shop-til-you-drop type, which would be nearer the truth than the noble character Shearer gives us. It's unlikely that Marie's sex life was as active as some writers want us to believe, but she could spend up a storm when she put her mind to it. Shearer preferred to act a queen seriously devoted to the welfare of France and the French people, a writer of Louis' speeches and a woman who labored relentlessly to improve her subjects'lot. The resulting queen bears no resemblance to the real deal. Attractive, charming, stylish, generous to a fault, yes; a skilled and dedicated politician, no.<br /><br />The film's hold on history is thus slender. In 1938 Hollywood could not acknowledge that the real dupe in the Affair of the Necklace was a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church; here the fool appears as the duke de Rohan, a relative of the cardinal. Mozart's famous "Don Giovanni" minuet is played at the ball during which Marie Antoinette insults Louis XV's mistress, Mme du Barry. In the film's chronology the ball immediately precedes Louis XV's illness and death in 1774; Mozart wrote "Don Giovanni" in 1787. The film compresses the ball and Louis XV's death into 24 hours, but Louis XV's last illness lasted 2 weeks. Marie Antoinette never openly insulted du Barry as shown here, nor was there ever a formal decision to annul Marie's marriage. The royal family's return to Paris after their foiled escape attempt is here followed immediately by Mme de Lamballe's murder. The attempted escape was in June 1791; Lamballe, who was not with the royal party during the attempt, was killed in the September Massacres of 1792.<br /><br />So enjoy this splendid piece of film purely as spectacle--a testament to Hollywood's world view in a bleak decade. Entertainment it truly is, and not at all bad. As history, it's bunk.