Giving up a military career when he is rude to the Prince of Wales, Stewart Granger is excellent as the handsome gentleman consumed with looking great and cavorting with upper class society in this elegant film.

Peter Ustinov is just marvelous as The Prince of Wales. Again and again, he shows that he was just born to play these majestic spots. Robert Morely is fabulous in the one scene that he appears in the film as the insane king.

The weak link here is Elizabeth Taylor. She seems like she is acting in 1944's "National Velvet."

The picture is a wonderful study of class values, snobbery and redemption in the end.

The real Beau Brummell was not a terribly likable guy to be made a hero for a film. A near do well who might have gone his whole life as an obscure army captain, he worms his way into the good graces of the Prince of Wales, later George IV. And he uses that position to advance himself and tweak the noses of some of the powerful. When he offended the Prince his fate was assured.

That was the real Brummell and he only survives today as an expression to signify someone with good fashion sense. He had that and little else. He didn't invent anything, he wasn't a great military leader, he never went into politics and nor was he the champion of a great cause.

It's not much to work with and poor Stewart Granger tries his best, but the part defeats him. Elizabeth Taylor in one of the last films she was given a part to look pretty and little else, she does that. Peter Ustinov comes off far the best as the Prince of Wales.

I understood the Brummell character perfectly. We've all experienced someone like that in our midst. In my former work life we had such an individual who had no discernible talent, but a great knack for kissing up to the powers that be. One of them took him along when she moved to head another agency and basically tried to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Like Brummell he overreached himself and had a big fall. When last heard of he was working in a florist's shop. Like Brummell he thought he was on the fast track to something way beyond his talents and abilities.

In that sense the film is universally identifiable. But today I can see the part being played by a Rob Lowe and not so heroically. Beau was no hero.

Stewart Granger is George "Beau" Brummel, former Captain of Dragoons, who strikes up a friendship with the future King of England, the Prince of Wales, Peter Ustinov. Under Ustinov's imprimatur, Granger makes all sorts of friends and enemies in high places, including George Gordon, Lord Byron, advises the Prince on issues of politics and character, and, most important, changes the fashion of the nation from powdered wigs, white stockings, and elaborate dress, to understated black clothing with ordinary trousers.

Granger and Elizabeth Taylor fall for each other but Taylor opts for marriage to the stolid James Donald rather than the dashing but erratic Granger who is making a living by gambling and has piled up a mountain of debts. Eventually, Granger not being willing or able to come to the mountain, the mountain comes to Granger -- at about the same time Granger's pip-pip advice to the Prince becomes too frank. Granger flees to France where he dies in poverty.

It's not what you think of when you think of a Stewart Granger movie. He was the Errol Flynn of the 1950s. His best-known films involved swashbuckling, pursuits on horseback, that sort of thing. This movie is not like that. It's duller and, in a way, more adult.

Granger here is a complex man and although the audience is invariably going to root for him -- he IS, after all, Stewart Granger -- he has quite a few flaws. It could even be argued that he is made up of nothing BUT flaws. Despite the fact that the movie does its best to paper over them, the artifice shows and the cracks are visible.

My God, what a narcissist. He's self indulgent, full of rude Wildeian quips, snooty and insolent, manipulative, and reckless with the feelings of others. The Elizabeth Taylor character was invented to assure us that Beau Brummel was heterosexual but I don't know.

I don't know that Granger himself is any more manipulative than the movie. Okay, he's an adviser to the Prince on politics. What are his politics like? The film introduces them by having Granger make a few indignant remarks about the high-flown ways of the aristocracy. Why, take the flour that those aristos put into their wigs! Enough to feed fifty million families on bread for ten million years! Very populist.

And that's the end of his interest in people blessed with less opportunity than himself. Thereafter he urges the Prince to exert his power and, at the final confrontation, not to accept any compromise with parliament regarding the bestowing of earldoms. (Ustinov had promised to make Granger an earl.) Is Granger as Brummel simply using Ustinov as the Prince to advance his own interests? Granger muses to himself -- and to Mortimer, the servant who polishes his boots with champagne -- that it may have started off that way but now Granger realizes that the Prince needs his friendship as much as he, Granger, needs the Prince's. Right-o, Beau. That kind of reasoning is known as an ego defense mechanism.

Granger is extremely handsome, dressed to the nines, and strides around with pomp and character. But Peter Ustinov is equally good in a secondary role -- a pouting, blushing, pink little porker. Ustinov convinces us that he's filled with self doubt and hesitancy, as much as Granger so skillfully plays the role of the self-confident sociopath.

We all wind up rooting for Granger, yes, but we probably won't cheer so loudly if we pay attention to the goings on. Kids may miss the action of Stewart's other films of the period. Adults may be able to get into the intrigue and the intricacies of personal motives. They may also appreciate Elizabeth Taylor at her most gaspingly stunning.