The handsome, youthful versions of England's King Henry VIII in the new film The Other Boleyn Girl and the hit Showtime series The Tudors have been treated as fresh mintings of the monarch who in popular lore often has often become the bloated image of self-indulgence. For Golden Age movie fans, the iconic visual of the much-married king may still be the lovable monster given rotund form and splendid appetites by Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933).

But Baby Boomers are used to seeing Henry VIII as a limber, virile figure. In the 1966 Academy Award-winning movie of Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, Robert Shaw was every inch the tarnished yet glittering hero Bolt described: "Not the Holbein Henry, but a much younger man, clean-shaven, bright-eyed, graceful and athletic. The Golden Hope of the New Learning throughout Europe." The most engaging scene in that movie was Shaw's proud, macho Henry tromping through the riverside mud outside his Chancellor's, Sir Thomas More's, estate, displaying both his "dancer's leg" and his Latin to More's daughter Margaret, and expressing his admiration for the serenity of More's country life before declaring that he'll brook "no opposition" to his divorce of Queen Catherine and his marriage to Anne Boleyn.

Eric Bana, in The Other Boleyn Girl, and Jonathan Rhys-Meyer, in The Tudors, may present themselves as dreamy-eyed, metrosexual heartthrobs, but neither seems capable of a similar deft-yet-forceful political gavotte. Bana is even weaker than Richard Burton was in Anne of the Thousand Days, letting Anne practice erotic blackmail until he divorces Catherine. And Rhys-Meyer in The Tudors (at least in the early episodes I've caught on DVD) is too preening in an actorly way to be persuasive as a leader, and too capricious even as written -- at one point he threatens a "universal peace treaty" by challenging the French king to a wrestling match and behaving like a worse loser than Bill Belichick.

Watch The Other Boleyn Girl and the first two episodes of The Tudors' first season back to back, and you wonder whether these historical fictions have been popular with women because they reverse old sexual prejudices. These Henrys are at the mercy of their hormones. Unlike Shaw's, they don't seem capable of channeling their surges of testosterone into tactics and strategy that would change England forever (and in progressive directions, to boot).