The legendary Hungarian producer and director Alexander Korda was at Denham Studios in the early 1930s, filming The Private Life of Henry VIII. The film would later be Oscar-nominated for Best Film and would win for Charles Laughton's bellowing, Kodiak bear of a performance. Speaking of his star, Korda described Laughton's style of acting as "an act of childbirth... what he needed was not so much a director as a midwife."

A little less than a decade later, Korda would begin work on his exquisite That Hamilton Woman with two other performers of less girth but of similar magisterial prowess: the married actors Vivien Leigh and Sir Laurence Olivier. Long rumored to be Winston Churchill's favorite film, Korda's film was set under the fog of the Napoleonic Wars in England and Naples; a thinly veiled proxy for Hitler's stronghold in the spring of 1941.

Nervous to meet the uncle of her beloved Charles, youthful and peppy Emma (Leigh) falls saturnine when she realizes that her trip to meet Sir William Hamilton (the great Alan Mowbray) was to be a proposition for her to marry him, in exchange for paying of Charles' numerous debts. Arriving with paintings and sculptures from England, Emma soon finds that she is no different to Sir William than the art he collects; for the well being of her mother and herself, she agrees to marry Hamilton and becomes more of an empress than a wife.

Currying favor with the Queen of Naples, it is Emma who is able to find the troops and permissible documents that allow Lord Horatio Nelson (Olivier) to begin his assault on Napoleon. As the title intimates, much of Korda's film has to do with how Emma is perceived by others when she begins a very public affair with Nelson; an affair neither her husband nor his wife seem to be too upset about.

The war is, in itself, a mirror of the social conflicts that arise from their affair, but this is not a film that uses war simply as a background for a world of manners, and it is not a film that views war simply as a psychological smart bomb. Rarely has a more thoroughly harrowing and emotional portrait of life at home during wartime been rendered on the screen. For Nelson and Emma, war is a large part of their life and their romance, not something they leave behind when they embrace; whenever he is on the battlefield, she seems to be assuring him that he will have the requisite forces with him. On their second rendezvous, Emma finds her Nelson with a disfigured eye and missing hand, saying, "They told us of your victories but not of the price you paid!"

Spousal competition may not have been involved but, at any rate, Olivier's rigid-yet-smoldering officer is no match for Leigh, whose very presence seems to make the film's heartbeat quicken. Overwhelming in her delivery, Leigh may be the continuation of Ibsen's rebellious doll but she's also the empty shell that a life of fighting can turn you into; the film is bookended by her as an old, penniless vagabond. It's an outstanding performance, the logical other side of the coin to her wartime prostitute in Waterloo Bridge.

Criterion's release of the film includes audio commentary from historian Ian Christie and an interview with Korda's nephew.