Brummell has his own hopeless romance, with gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor. He has her heart, but her head belongs to dull Lord Mercer, whose position is more stable than that of the sharp-tongued and lavishly spending Brummell. As long as he is on good terms with the Prince of Wales, Brummell is able to keep the debt collectors at bay. But his fortunes change for the worse, making the second half of the film less enjoyable than the first.
How others will see it. A history professor would probably grade the film as C+. Classic film fans will be more forgiving, since they are more interested in the cast and the quality of the script. Peter Ustinov and Elizabeth Taylor are very young, Stewart Granger is dashing, Robert Morley has a fun cameo as mad King George III, and the script is decidedly above average.
How I felt about it. Hollywood biographies are all more or less inaccurate. Beau Brummell gets it wrong much of the time. The importance of Brummell's friendship to the future king is undoubtedly greatly exaggerated. The most egregious whopper has King George IV in France paying his respects to Brummell when he is on his deathbed. Such a scene would be preposterous even if Brummell did not actually outlive the king by ten years.
The blatantly fictional visit of King George IV to Brummell's bedside is meant to confer importance to Brummell's life, beyond the introduction of trousers and daily bathing to the English gentry. The film implies Brummell died of tuberculous, but the less discreet wikipedia states that Brummell died "insane from strokes and syphilis."
Even the beginning of the film deliberately departs from history. Brummell is captain of the dragoons when he first meets the Prince of Wales, and is drummed out of the regiment after insulting him. In real life, his friendship with the prince caused his promotion to captain, and he quit the regiment rather than follow it to Manchester, which would have removed him from his social circles.
The characters of the perpetually glum Lord Mercer (James Donald) and his ravishing wife Lady Belham (Elizabeth Taylor) are completely fictional. Taylor's comely presence is needed for two reasons, to attract a female audience, and to prevent an inference that the friendship between the "dandy" Brummell and the rather effeminate future king was akin to that between an ambitious gigolo and a wealthy homosexual.
As for Prime Minister Pitt, he died in 1806, several years before Brummell's friendship with the Prince of Wales ended, and ten years prior to Brummell's flight from his debtors to France. The real-life Brummell was fortunate enough to inherit 20,000 pounds (a large sum in those days) from his father while still a teenager. If he spent his adult life in debt and poverty, there is no one but himself to blame.
The story has one sweeping error: time compression. Brummell became friends with the future king in 1796, and fled to France in 1816, twenty years later. Yet within the film, this entire period takes place within Elizabeth Taylor's engagement to Lord Mercer.
It's bad history. Yet, somehow, it's a pretty good movie. Credit for this goes to the unheralded Karl Tunberg, who skillfully adapts Clyde Fitch's stage play.