Charles Laughton (The Private Life Of Henry VIII)

Here's some fun Oscar trivia (provided your definition of fun is incredibly flexible) — for which movie did Charles Laughton win his only Oscar?

If you said Mutiny on the Bounty, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Witness for the Prosecution, or even his lone directorial effort, the classic film noir The Night of the Hunter, those are all good guesses.

They're also wrong.

No, the answer is The Private Life of Henry VIII, a 1933 dark comedy about divorce, beheadings, marriage, affairs, affairs of state — the sort of history lesson that might make knowledge cool again.

Ostensibly the true story of England's King Henry VIII, this is the sort of movie they promoted with the tagline "He gave his wives a pain in the neck and did his necking with an axe."

What this film knows about history wouldn't fill out the back flap of Henry's biography, but what it knows about people would fill volumes.

If I had to boil the plot down to a central throughline, it would be the efforts of Henry's fifth wife (Binnie Barnes) to become his third wife then his fourth wife. She's determined to put a ring on it no matter what the cost, and after watching Henry execute wife two, bury wife three and divorce wife four, finally gets the randy old goat ginned up enough to lose his head ... and loses her own in the process.

That Henry works as well as it does is largely thanks to Laughton's interpretation of the title character — no surprise there; he was a terrific actor.

As Laughton plays him, Henry is vain, buffoonish, dangerous, impetuous, larger than life, loving life, and ultimately, despite his tendency to separate his wives from their heads, sympathetic — an unwitting victim of women too clever for him by half.

In fact, most of what you think you know of Henry VIII as a personality comes not from the history books but from Laughton.

You can't take your eyes off him.

Look, I wouldn't watch this in lieu of studying for the A.P. history exam — there's no mention of the Pope, the Reformation, Sir Thomas More or any of the other things people write essays about. Instead it's all bedroom shenanigans and giant turkey legs. But who doesn't like bedroom shenanigans and giant turkey legs?

The film was a big hit in 1933 and made international stars of not only Charles Laughton, but also Merle Oberon, Elsa Lanchester and Robert Donat. And it made producer-director Alexander Korda synonymous with British sophistication.

Now I don't want to oversell Henry VIII. It's an early sound picture and suffers from the same problems that plague many movies of that era: it's static and stagy, and lacks a score (some producers thought audiences would get confused if they didn't understand "where" the music was coming from, which is why there are so many nightclubs, radios and kazoo bands in late 20s, early 30s pictures).

That said, any movie that can turn vice into a virtue and get laughs from chopping people's heads off is okay in my book.

If it shows up on TCM again, and you have 97 minutes to spare, give it a look — I think you'll get a kick out of it.