Judi Dench and Ali Fazal as Victoria and Abdul
Posted on 05/30/2019 10:30:12 AM PDT by Rummyfan
As I mentioned on the radio yesterday, May 24th 2019 marks the bicentennial of Queen Victoria. So it would seem appropriate to have a bit of cinematic Victoriana for our Saturday movie date. Her Majesty was an important and consequential figure in almost every corner of the world, and once upon a time the biopics reflected that. But she was to a degree unknown and unknowable, which offers great opportunities to the contemporary biographical sensibility. And so the most notable films of the last two decades belong to a sub-genre of their own: the Queen-Empress and the men who caught the eye of a lonely and isolated woman in the long decades of her widowhood. John Madden's Mrs Brown (1997) is about the Queen's relationship with her ghillie; Stephen Frears' Victoria & Abdul (exactly twenty years later, 2017) is about the Queen's relationship with her munshi.
If you don't know what a ghillie is, well, it's a Scots Gaelic word for a Highland chief's attendant on a fishing or hunting trip. If you don't know what a munshi is, hey, relax: Nobody in the Royal Household does either, and so they're a little taken aback to find that a Hindu waiter brought over to add a bit of imperial exotica to the Golden Jubilee in 1887 has suddenly been promoted to the hitherto unknown position of "Munshi and Indian Clerk to the Queen-Empress".
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Judi Dench and Ali Fazal as Victoria and Abdul
Dilly dilly!
Munshi same as Sancho?
Both of these named movies are pretty factual and extremely well done.
After the end of Clan rule, the Ghillie was the game warden for a landed gentleman. One of the tools of their trade was a suit of clothes they used to stalk game, especially deer. It was an assemblage of rags and bits or burlap to make the suit’s outline indistinct, and also bristled with points of attachment for fresh vegetation that could be tied to the Ghillie suit to make it blend in with the vegetation specific to that glen, moor or ben.
The Ghillie suit proved so effective and so adaptable that to this day it is a standard part of a military sniper’s kit.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.