Anna Boleyn was produced at the Tempelhof studios of UFA where Windsor Castle, Hampton Court, the Tower of London, and Westminster Abbey were built. As in Madame Dubarry, his earlier excursion into history, Lubitsch again tried to humanize history without straying too far from the truth. In fact, Theodore Huff, the British film writer, who has compiled the index of Lubitsch's films for the British Film Institute, states that Anna Boleyn “as a whole was more historically accurate than the 1933 Laughton version (Henry VIII) which pictured Henry as a likeable and amusing fellow, pursuing bobbed-haired girls through the ‘moderne' settings.” In Lubitsch's film, he is a brutal monarch, a gourmand and a ruthless pursuer of the ladies of the court. Under the title Deception, it was Lubitsch's second film to be shown in this country.
Enno Patalas writes, “The presentation of consumption is always liberating and entertaining with Lubitsch.... (T)ake the way in which Henry VIII loves women in Anna Boleyn. Emil Jannings as Henry VIII, the ladykiller, is the massive embodiment of sensuousness which devours its object whole and demands constant change. Henry gets rid of Katharine and takes Anna Boleyn, then takes Jane Seymour and executes Anna. By strictly following the pleasure principle, he destroys age-old traditions (breaking with the Pope and ignoring the law)....” (in Richard Roud's “Cinema: A Critical Dictionary”).