Category Archives: The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #88: The Tragedy of Hamlet (2002)

13 Sunday Feb 2022

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88. Peter Brook’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, 2002.

There are too many Hamlets, and I’ve had my surfeit.

This blog’s at a trickle. There’s too much Shakespeare, and I don’t care anymore. When will someone make a glorious Troilus and Cressida?

Peter Brook—famous for bare-bones staging—is perhaps not the most auspicious director to drag me back into this mess. This made-for-TV film is set on a theatrical stage, but is not filmed before a live audience. The setting of when the story takes place seems amorphous. Despite the European references, the geographical setting is vaguely somewhere between East and West. There are few props. There is no yelling. The theory is to remove as many impediments as possible between actors and each other and audience.

In this case, the audience is separated by a screen.

The quietness of this Hamlet is its strength. The acting pulls one in. Adrian Lester manages to convey the Danish prince with some novelty without becoming irritating. Natasha Perry is an adequate Gertrude.

Jeffrey Kissoon is an ideal Claudius, and for a jaded reviewer like me, perhaps that is enough to excite me. Kissoon made a strong Julius Caesar in the 2012 BBC film, but Claudius is a more difficult part, at least if Claudius is more than a two-faced villain. Kissoon plays Claudius with a toughness that belies how little room there is between guiding the court and kingdom through good leadership and not giving in to his conscience. I am not sure I’ve even seen a smarter Claudius.

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Oh, yes, Kissoon also plays the ghost of King Hamlet as well, with an imperious urgency and toughness as well.

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The casting of this adaptation is not color-blind, but is multiracial and international in interesting ways. Polonius, Ophelia, and Laertes—plus Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—are Indian. Gertrude is very white and British.

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Hamlet and his father and uncle are black. The players are Asian. The lead player (Yoshi Oida) delivers his Priam’s daughter oration in Japanese. I am not sure that this production has anything to say about the meeting of these cultures. These choices increase racial representation and defamiliarize a too familiar play, which are not bad reasons, I think.

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The cuts to the text are aggressive. This quiet Hamlet chugs along.

Perhaps I need to continue digging into Brook.

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #87: All is True (2018)

03 Sunday Jan 2021

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87. Kenneth Branagh’s All is True, 2018.

I have a fraught relationship with Kenneth Branagh’s cinematic Shakespeare work. As an actor, he perhaps has no equal, certainly among his own generation. As a director, his indiscriminate courting of Hollywood has led to so many embarrassments. He has made more Shakespeare films than Olivier, yet as a director he hasn’t lived up to his potential. Someone would need to be so intimidated by his acting not to see the flaws in his direction. His shortcomings anger me because of how much I love him in Henry Vand in Oliver Parker’s Othello, which are compelling, perfect films.

In his latest film adaptation of Shakespeare back in 2006, As You Like It, Branagh-as-director refrained from acting, and managed to render something wonderful from this comedy. There were some Hollywood actors in the cast, but they weren’t struggling to seem natural in Shakespeare’s world. For some reason, this film wasn’t marketed well, and it didn’t get the love it deserved.

In All is True, Branagh returns to acting and directing. Penning the script is Ben Elton, who played a minor role in Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, a writer with credits for Black Adder.

All is True imagines William Shakespeare’s brief life after the Globe Theatre burned to the ground, which the film suggests led Shakespeare to retire from writing rather than rebuild his business venture to try to mount new plays. He retires to Stratford-Upon-Avon to try to put his house back in order, to cultivate his own garden.

In some ways, dear readers, this is how I feel reviewing Shakespeare films. I have perhaps experienced too much Shakespeare media. Oh, there’s a new Hamlet to watch? I’d rather watch cat videos on Youtube. The new Hamlet is amazing, you say? That will not affect my plans or desires. Let me know when there is a compelling Troilus and Cressida and then I can muster some excitement. Maybe.

But All is True is not an adaptation of a theatrical work. Imagine Shakespeare in Love, but in which Shakespeare is old rather than young, and with fewer metatextual games. In some ways, All is True could be seen as fan service for those who worship the bard. You will be rewarded if you thrill to a story that knows the details of Shakespeare’s life. You will be rewarded if you are a relative newcomer wanting more details about Shakespeare’s life. Since this was in part what my M.A. thesis was about, I am less enamored of this historical feature getting its facts right.

The core of this story imagines Shakespeare trying to put his house in order, trying to re-establish a family life, and struggling mightily at that. The running time is short, which makes a big difference. Ben Elton’s script shows real conflict between people whose hurts arise out of love and passion. This is a way to spend an hour and a half with Kenneth Branagh as Shakespeare himself.

The night scenes are especially evocative, as the lights from candles and fireplaces still leave most indoor spaces in the dark. In that negative space, confessions take on new meanings.

All is True tells a basic story exceedingly well. Watching Branagh, Judy Dench (as Anne Shakespeare), Ian McKellan (briefly, as the Earl of Southampton), and frankly the entire cast was a joy, a sorrowful joy as Shakespeare imagines how to live quietly, in harmony with a family he didn’t know he didn’t understand.

Branagh’s voice is such a delicious instrument.

All is True is a little sad, but it is precisely the way I want to spend time with Kenneth Branagh: charming, vulnerable, unforgettable.

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #86: The Merchant of Venice (1973)

05 Sunday Jul 2020

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86. John Sichel’s The Merchant of Venice, 1973.

This isn’t the first made-for-television version of The Merchant of Venice I have reviewed, dear readers. I found it for free in its entirety on Youtube.

I gave this televised antique a chance because this was, I think, Olivier’s only recorded go at Shylock. That this was based on Jonathan Miller’s National Theatre’s theatrical production also whetted my stunted curiosity.

Merchant poster

While I wouldn’t recommend this version as someone’s first foray into Shakespeare or even this play, if you are familiar with the play, this version is a gem despite the washed out nature of this 1973 TV version.

The blocking and cinematography of this modest production are outstanding! Often with television productions, you have actors yelling in wide shots as they stand around uncomfortably. That sort of an experience is like an inoculation against Shakespeare. Not so here. Peter Roden designed the sets, and they form a close, tight setting. The occasional bridge reminds us that this is Venice, but for the most part, the feeling is intimate. John Sichel was the television director, and I don’t know if credit for the superior cinematography should go to him (the IMDB page and end credits are unhelpful, dear readers). What I can say is that the camera moves a lot to frame the actors in these intimate shots that serve the story so well without drawing attention to itself. Maybe the filmmakers had no choice, playing Tetris with bodies and the camera because there was no room, but that choice is charming.

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The setting is the 1880s, which means, blissfully, no codpieces. The costumes make the story feel much more contemporary.

As a Shakespeare junkie, I am often ambivalent about the performances of Laurence Olivier. His Hamlet is somewhat dull. His Henry V begins brilliantly—until he gets to the part that Shakespeare wrote. But his Richard III is an epiphany. And so is his Shylock. This is one of Olivier’s best performances on film, despite almost no one seeming to be aware of its existence.

What is driven home from Olivier’s Shylock is how many chances Shylock gives to Antonio to be treated like a human being. When brokering the mockery of a loan, Olivier takes off his glove to shake Antonio’s hand, but Antonio rejects that offer—and when we next see Shylock, Olivier’s glove is already back on, as if he knew that his goodwill would be summarily rejected.

Shakespeare leans heavily on poetic justice in his comedies, and some plays include apologies for suggesting disruptions of the public order. The Merchant of Venice is no different. Shylock is contractually allowed to remove a pound of flesh from Antonio after Antonio defaulted upon the loan he so contemptuously made with Shylock. The Jew is punished for his hubris, his inhumanity, and his seeming contentment with his outsider status as a Venetian. But what we see before this ending leads us to believe that Shylock, whose house is robbed of his property—a chunk of his wealth and his daughter—is justified in his rage. If he were allowed to carve out his pound of flesh, would the grotesquery of this unnerve him? Shylock’s goal is to show the Venetian order its own logical absurdity—but he fails, tricked out of justice by a willful interpretation of his bond.

Merchant of Venice 1973

This version of justice will feel poetic to anti-Semitic Christians in the audience, but not to those capable of listening to Shylock throughout the play. When Shylock hears the report of his daughter Jessica’s misconduct overseas, he then—listening to the tolling of the church bell—makes the connection that he can revenge himself upon Antonio using the bond. Antonio funded Bassanio’s courtship, and Bassanio is close friends with Lorenzo, who eloped with Jessica.

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By the end of the play, Shylock is left with nothing—not even his religion. And Olivier’s chilling performance of this erasure of humanity works every bit as well as Al Pacino’s.

And the play ends with Jessica feeling uneasy about her betrayal of her father—despite her father’s being no fun to be with. She doesn’t feel like she completely belongs with these Christians. And she hears the Kaddish.

There’s the love plot, which is done adequately enough. Joan Plowright plays Portia, who must marry whichever suitor solves the riddle of which of three boxes represents marriage with her best. (One scene has an operatic duet that can render one homicidal. Why is it there? Nothing operatic should ever sound out in fucking English!) There are a few scenes outdoors—and the magic of the cinematography dies. Joan Plowright was more interesting in drag as Balthazar the law scholar.

Merchant Plowright

So the colors are washed out—like an impressionist painting, perhaps—and a few scenes drag, but even Homer nods. Anthony Nichols as Antonio plays a racist cypher remarkably well, and the acting is generally strong. This might be Laurence Olivier’s best Shakespearean performance on film. This retro find is a strong Merchant of Venice.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #85: Henry IV (2018)

15 Sunday Mar 2020

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85. Phyllidia Lloyd’s Henry IV (Part 2 of The Donmar Warehouse’s All-Female Shakespeare Trilogy), 2018

Donmar Trilogy

Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 are difficult plays to like, at least for me.

Let me remind you of the plot. Henry finds the crown heavy to wear after deposing Richard II (whose play is the only Shakespeare I loathe). There is a dispute between the king and Harry Percy (nickname Hotspur) and his family over the return of a hostages; the Percys hold out for a quid pro quo:

Why, yet he doth deny his prisoners,
But with proviso and exception,
That we at our own charge shall ransom straight
His brother-in-law, the foolish Mortimer[.]

The king senses the rebellious spirit in this family, and insists (rather like Richard II) that his subjects must obey him because he is king.

Meanwhile, the prince, Henry (nickname Hal), fucks about with Shakespeare’s outsized comic character, Falstaff, who claims to be a knight, though one doubts he could produce the proper paperwork. In medieval times before Shakespeare, morality plays dominated the theater in England, in which vices would be personified. Falstaff (A false staff?) is essentially numerous vices (arrogance, cowardice, lust, sloth, untrustworthiness, vanity, weakness) balled up into one gigantic VICE.

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If Terry Jones was right, that might apt for a medieval knight.

Hal’s youthful indiscretions are a ruse, however. His long game is to surprise everyone (the enemies of the crown, the populace, and his dad) about how good he will be when the time comes. And a civil war with the Percy family becomes that time.

King Henry IV is a bore of a character. The bickering of the Hotspur clan borders on annoying under the best of circumstances. And maybe there was a time when the hijinks of Falstaff and his incompetent crew seemed funny to me, but I doubt it. The humor is mostly on the level of a Ritz Brothers movie. My Own Private Idaho did well with some of the gags, but frankly, the few lines Kenneth Branagh pilfered for his film of Henry V make the most out of Henry IV’s material.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that The Donmar Trilogy’s version of the play is pretty good, actually.

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Like Caesar, this Henry IV takes awhile to grow really good. Harriet Walter plays Hank IV, whose whinging is less annoying than that of the honorable Brutus (from Caesar). The excellent Jade Anouka plays Hotspur, who is in the play quite a bit. While Henry IVis setting up Henry V, Henry IV also exhibits the roles of tribalism and family in English politics. There is some low, but okay humor in the Hotspur scenes. Early on, King Henry works better as an archetype in this play.

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Sophie Stanton is our Sir John Falstaff, and her performance is, thankfully, understated enough to allow for some charm. Falstaff’s band of brigands bedecked as football hooligans seems like a perfectly modern fit.

Clare Dunne (Prince Hal) in Henry IV - Photo by Helen Maybanks

The chief concern with this production is that the Irishwoman Claire Dunne plays Hal, and Dunne really chewwwwws on her vowels. It is Dunne who delivers the prisoner preamble to the play, and she announces that she wants to quit doing drugs after she is released in a few weeks. Her prisoner character (who will enact Hal) says this play is appropriate because it’s theme is change. Since the change of the prince in Henry IV is more about appearances than essences, the claim that the theme is change is preciously stupid—worthy of maybe a C- if made the thesis of a 10thgrade English essay. Maybe I am supposed to extend some leeway to the hopeful, if shallow, interpretation of a prisoner (though she is not actually a prisoner, or at least I don’t think so). This awkwardness is perhaps director Phyllidia Lloyd’s fault.

When Dunne makes her transformation into an ideal Prince Harry, though, she makes her accent less thick, more musical, which means, I think, that her carrying on as Hal was meant to be irritating. I can say from experience that the vulgarity of the Hal-Falstaff scenes are too often treated as if they are comic gold. It’s like hearing someone drone on about the genius of Jim Carrey.

The first half makes us, dear reader, root for Hotspur and the Percy family—and that is actually an interesting twist.

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The longer the play goes on, the better it gets, largely due precisely to the prison as context for the performance—the leave-taking of soldiers, for example, perhaps never to be seen by spouses and children again, is quite moving.

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The melee between Harry and Hotspur is also gripping (like a brawl in the yard).

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The king’s deathbed scene is likewise compelling (which is difficult to render in a way that doesn’t seem hysterically melodramatic); I suspect the tawdry crown sculpted out of flattened aluminum cans adds the right amount of pathos.

Henry IV

This Henry IV makes a lot of the parts of the play that often seem of less interest more interesting, including Prince Henry’s extraordinary first moments of nobility. For that, I am grateful.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #84: Julius Caesar (2018)

01 Sunday Mar 2020

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84. Phyllidia Lloyd’s Julius Caesar (Part 1 of The Donmar Warehouse’s All-Female Shakespeare Trilogy), 2018

DT Caesar 6

Last time I discussed Phyllidia Lloyd’s Tempest, and I am glad I watched these out of sequence. This all-woman cast of Caesar isn’t a bad Caesar—but I do think that Caesar is not an especially strong play. Brutus is such a wet blanket, even when portrayed by Harriet Walter. There are no compelling villains or heroes in this play, with the possible exception of Marc Antony (played wonderfully by Jade Anouka), but apart from one soliloquy and of course Caesar’s funeral oration, Marc Antony doesn’t have much to do.

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In my last post, I discussed the oddness of the setting of Lloyd’s Tempest—the play is set in a prison, but in a reality that bleeds in and out of that incarcerated reality. Caesar is more securely set as a prison production. The disruptions of the prison setting can be jarring, in ways that are mostly good for the play. For Shakespeare fiends who’ve seen too many productions, The Donmar Trilogy refreshes the plays that would be deleterious for newcomers.

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The prison setting works well for the politics of Caesar, this closed-system of power dynamics. Truth be told, the production is merely all right until Caesar is killed around the middle of the play. The political rationale for the assassination does not diminish its brutality, each senator approaching the dictator for a stab or two to drive the body upward. And as prisoners might, they made Caesar drink bleach. (Noble Brutus doesn’t seem to notice.)

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The second half is much better, since it has the Marc Antony bits, plus Brutus must confront the reality of what he has wrought in the only scenes in which the character becomes sublime. The haunting by Caesar is especially memorable. The battle scenes are rendered as a something like a heavy metal video, conceptualizing Rome’s civil war in a facile way that moves the story along and doesn’t draw attention to the limitations of the stage, or the gym where this was performed.

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Of course, Shakespeare was faced with how to end a play about the limits of ethos and power, and old as I am I wasn’t at the original production. The Donmar Trilogy ending, though, finds a delightful, painful way to undermine the ascension of Caesar’s heir, Augustus.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #83: The Tempest (2019)

26 Sunday Jan 2020

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83. Phyllidia Lloyd’s The Tempest (Part 3 of The Donmar Warehouse’s All-Female Shakespeare Trilogy), 2019

I have a fondness for prison theater. When Beckett directed a trilogy of his plays at San Quentin in 1985, he found actors who embodied his existential tragicomedies with an ease few professional actors could muster. Those productions were much more successful on an artistic level than the Broadway production of Godot I saw about a decade ago, in which Studio 54 was filled with an audience fawning over every breath Nathan Lane took. It wasn’t Nathan Lane’s fault as an actor, but rather his fault as a beloved Broadway icon’s fault. He could have been performing a passion play and the audience would have deemed it cute.

I have written about the documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars, in which prisoners with serious crimes in their pasts wrestle with similar themes in The Tempest. With any good documentary about a production, though, there is some disappointment that watching the performance itself isn’t an option.

I love theater. 

I don’t know if I have expounded my theory about watching theater and film in this blog, dear readers, but here it is in case I haven’t. 

Too much is made of the difficulty of Shakespeare, especially in high school and college classrooms in which the bard is perversely read rather than witnessed, or if witnessed, usually with a film so dusty and antiquated that students are conditioned to loathe the experience all the more. (Olivier’s Hamlet or any of the BBC’s Complete Shakespeare is a suicidal point of entry.) 

Any good performance of a play makes that text come alive the way it was intended to. Imagine a cult of people who sit around only reading a screenplay of The Matrix rather than watching the movie. Such a thing can be done; doing so more than once a year will transform one into a hipster. When I have shown undergraduates Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, after 10 minutes they are watching it as if it were any other good movie. When I attended a matinee of Romeo and Juliet at Orlando Shakespeare Theater surrounded by mostly high school students, they understood the play perfectly.

What to make, though, of a film of a theatrical performances of Shakespeare half-set in prison?

The Donmar Warehouse’s All-Female Shakespeare Trilogy comprises three films of theatrical productions in a warehouse space, something akin to a black box gym. These shows were performed in 2016, and released on film later.

Donmar Tempest 5

The framing device used for all three films is a prison context. Guards somberly march in the prisoners who will be the actors. Then, one prisoner-actor performs a testimonial about her crime, and her hope or lack thereof for her future. Then, the play begins. Much of the discourse about these productions indicates that they are set in a prison, but the prison is more of a meta-setting. It’s not Prospero in prison—instead, it is Hannah, played by veteran actor Harriet Walter. At times in the play, the prison frame intrudes into the action with a jolt, such as the guards demanding the shipwrecked nobles of The Tempest to strip down out of their suits. That wouldn’t happen in a prison production of Twelfth Night. The reality of the play shifts in this production.

Donmar Tempest 3

Ariel causing a tempest.

There are some upsides to this prison-as-meta-setting—and I apologize for how fucking academic all this sounds, but please believe me, I am using this jargon specifically, to save us some agony here:

  1. The all-female cast doesn’t need any more explanation. If you’ve read much of this column, dear readers, then you know I like nontraditional casting, but dislike distracting color- and gender-blind casting. Give me half a reason to believe in your non-traditional casting, and I will. The Donmar Trilogy made me forget that this is an all female cast instantly. This provided an unpretentious opportunity for women to play leads in Shakespeare. 
  2. The plain costumes, lots of grey sweats, make these productions seem urgently primal, both modern and ancient.
  3. The basic special effects and props require the emotional buy-in from the audience—one can sense from these films how theater is a fun collaboration between performers and audience.
  4. The strange dislocations of the setting are actually a welcome distraction for an audience overfamiliar with Shakespeare’s work. I imagine The Donmar Trilogy would be a bumfuzzling introduction to these plays (“What the hell is happening?”), but to Shakespeare junkies, the weirdness makes these classics feel new. 

Okay, I am over 700 words deep and haven’t even mentioned The Tempest yet.

Donmar Tempest 4

Harriet Walter kicks ass as Propsero. When Helen Mirren played the role in Julie Taymor’s film, I couldn’t see what she was trying to do; she seemed medically sedated. Harriet Walter makes the dialogue seem both natural and appropriate, and can convey so much magic through her gaze and the sound of her voice. She wears a gray tank top, and there is so much perfection in her muscles and wrinkles. She is a woman who has gained power through her age, it seems.

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Jade Anouka is a wonderful Ariel—her singing voice is beautiful, and jumps around singing styles so well. One of the island’s spellbound sequences was presented as a carnivale outpouring of excitement.

As I learned from Lisa Wolpe’s one woman show in which she portrayed Romeo, any great actor can play any part. The Donmar Trilogy reinforces this idea, as the actual gender of the actors seems like an afterthought (even when the guards call the actors ladies). 

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Race is an afterthought. These characters emerge so forcefully from these actors that it seems almost like the most perfect way to experience the story. Love is love. Betrayal is betrayal. Family is family.

The play moves along quickly, which is a relief, since The Tempest doesn’t have great villains. Prospero really is never not in control of everything. The strength of the ending is the teetering emotions of Prospero, who forgives his usurping brother, which does not require the repentance of that brother.

The prison setting ends the play with a surprise: Prospero may leave the island to return to Milan, but Hannah (the actor-character Harriet Walter portrays) will never be paroled, and as the other actors are released and say their goodbyes with a voiced-over babel, Hannah will remain, sitting resignedly in bed, with only a book for company.

The irony of this production is that so much energy and discipline went into making the play unique, yet the result is a perfectly transparent story, much like the first time I watched The Tempest, which is a gift I am grateful for.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #82: Hamlet (1964)

19 Sunday Jan 2020

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82. Grigori Mikhaylovich Kozintsev and Iosef Shapiro’s Hamlet

I am not sure why I enjoyed this Russian Hamlet so much. Jaded churl that I’ve become. I have had a surfeit of Hamlet (this is my eighth for this blog), and I don’t see that Kozintsev and Shapiro’s’s gorgeous, yet understated presentation is breathtakingly original.

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I have no right to judge the Boris Patsernak translation, as the subtitles are those of the bard (“Nyet, m’lord”).

The acting isn’t bad. Mikhail Nazvanovas Claudius seems interesting, and Anastasiya Vertinskaya as Ophelia is arresting.

Hamlet Kozintsev 5

Innokenty Smoktunovsky is completely adequate as Hamlet—it should be telling that he’s not the first actor I want to discuss in this film. His legs are really skinny, which look pigeon-like in his tights.

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But he avoids Orsinoesque levels of angst. The whole cast seems to have a stoic approach, and I must confess I am unfamiliar with Russian film of this period to see a clear cultural rule in the performances. 1964 was eleven years after the death of Stalin.

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I suppose I feel about this Hamlet something like what I felt about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. It was competent enough, and felt both superior-looking and familiar. Few complaints. Pass the Grey Goose.

Hamlet Kozintsev 7

The lived-in sensibility of this Denmark encompasses the additions Kozintsev, Shapiro, and Pasternak have added. The extras react in surprising ways to the action, which lets the political aspect of the story to feel immediate. Claudius’sopening monologue is repeated like gossip in the court, as if by an anxious chorus. Later, the courtiers try to keep up when Claudius applauds “The Murder of Gonzago.” They falter instantly when the king cannot maintain the charade.

Hamlet Kozintsev 10

An insensate Ophelia is dressed in mourning clothes by servants. Laertes is shown fetching his ancestral sword before confronting the royal family for his father’s murder. The visual language of cinema enhances the story, letting the plot emerge rather than racing to squeeze a tragedy into two hours. (The running time is 2 hours and 20 minutes, but doesn’t feel that long.)

This is what I think people mean when they say setting is a character. A well-established setting can make the fiction seem more real–the setting of a story is as important as characters. (This does not mean that might heart and brain are interchangeable; the setting-is-character theory seems really lazy to me.)

Hamlet Kozintsev 9

The crisp cinematography by Jonas Gritsius shows off the ancient castle with regal, Renaissance pomp, and the lives lived within such beautiful cages, too. The depth of field and painterly composition of shots makes the viewer, or this rogue at least, become absorbed. This is the best-looking Hamlet I have seen, a world above the gauzy haze of Olivier’s 1948 version.

Kozintsev Hamlet 1

One of the highlights of this Hamlet is its cinematic ghost, with a gothic cape perpetually unfurling behind it in slow motion. It’s difficult to convey a Renaissance sense of dread over hauntings, but this film’s apparition makes an impact.

Kozintsev Hamlet 4

Dmitri Shostakovich’s music splits the difference between modern orchestration and classical brutalist music, but also conveys court music with a light touch. This is a soundtrack I would gladly own. At times, music and action sans dialogue carry this film. If you don’t love Shostakovich, stop reading this blog right now. Or give him a listen while you read.

Solomon Virsaladze’s costumes are outstanding. The Renaissance wardrobe looks authentic without looking ridiculous.

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Gertrude appears at the start of the play in mourning clothes, including black chiffon gloves that look too dainty and sexy for mourning (or maybe just Byronic in taste). Gertrude’s vanity is especially apparent in this version. When Hamlet looks what’s he’s killed behind the arras, there were royal dresses adoring headless mannequins.

Okay, I officially like this Hamlet more than The Rise of Skywalker, but less the than the nearly perfect Zeffirelli version. If this 1964 Hamlet ever comes out in blu ray format, or whatever high-resolution format comes next, I recommend picking this one up.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

 

 

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #81: The Merchant of Venice (1972)

10 Sunday Nov 2019

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81. Cedric Messina’s The Merchant of Venice

So Maggie Smith portrayed Portia in a 1972 BBC production ofThe Merchant of Venice, and since this wasn’t part of the BBC’s dreadful complete Shakespeare project (which looks as if Roger Corman directed it), I thought it safe to venture my eyes and ears on it.

Merchant of Venice Maggie Smith

This Merchant was better than the complete Shakespeare series, which, alas and fuck, doesn’t make it good. Maggie Smith is an amazing actor, but—

It was nice to see Charles Gray—who you may recognize as Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever, or as the narrator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Rocky Horror Picture Show Charles Gray

He plays Antonio, the fleshly collateral for a loan to Shylock, played quite well by Frank Finlay.

The Venetian set looked especially artificial without seeming stylized, and all of the actors between Gray and Finlay look especially untalented between them. To perform Shakespeare’s words, one must be able to think in those words, and these miscreants could not.

Why did I watch this thing made for the BBC’s Play of the Month series? Right: Maggie Smith. Maggie Smith is such a badass—except in this. She seems a little bored, and the lump portraying the suitor she is supposed to feel passion about would have made acting difficult.

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The cameras rove in this production, and such movement becomes a little distracting, though I suppose the restless cinematography was meant to compensate for a lack of dynamic visuals from the actors and sets. Maybe the cameraman had restless leg syndrome.

Apparently Charles Gray portrayed Antonio earlier in a television production starring Orson Welles. Why isn’t that available?

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Maggie Smith and Frank Finlay.

Maggie Smith was fun in the last act, in which she disguises herself as a law scholar and insinuated herself into the trial in which the legal status of Shylock’s bond would be determined. Michael Radford’s Merchant of Venice is the gold standard for that play—or the lead standard, if you will—but Lynn Collins’s fake beard was really unconvincing in what is in almost all respects a masterpiece.

Still, if you get the chance to watch this 1972 made-for-television adaptation of Merchant, you definitely shouldn’t anyway.

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Read the play out loud with friends, perhaps.

Go ride your unicycle.

Have a martini.

Write me a letter.

Do what you will.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #80: Filming ‘Othello’

03 Sunday Nov 2019

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80. Orson Welles’s  Filming ‘Othello’

I’ve neglected this blog for nearly a year, dear readers.

I had suffered a surfeit of Shakespeare, something I didn’t think was possible. Fucking Hamlet again, I would think. Why? I mean, why?

So far, I have reviewed seven films of Hamlet. Some of them are great, but I may not even be able to watch another great one, especially since I won’t know it’s good until I watch it, and I am waxing wroth for too long for every bad one. Even a decent new one grates on the nerves.

Filming Othello Title

What drew me back was this documentary of sorts about Orson Welles’s 1951 film of Othello. This isn’t a behind-the-scenes sort of film, since, as Welles points out, the film of Othello often lacked the materials to film Othello, so there were no cameras and film left over to film the filming. Instead, this document involves Welles sort of apologizing for making the film and daring to speak about Othello and Shakespeare at all, and eventually getting excited about showing us a movieola, which is kind of an excuse to show us clips for the film. For its small faults, Othello is a masterpiece of editing.

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Welles tells wonderful stories about this legendary film shoot, including the roving production and filming in a bathhouse when they could not yet afford costumes. Welles does offer insights into the play, and into his filming of the play.

This conversation with Welles is spelled by a dinner conversation he shares with two of the other actors from the 1951 film, Micheal MacLiammoir (Iago) and Hilton Edwards (Brabantio) and by a question and answer session Welles submitted to with Boston University students.

I recognize the great difficulty of anyone trying to share commentary about Shakespeare for a mass audience, since there is the obvious question of, “Who is this for?” I imagine that is why Welles was apologizing at the start of this film for the very existence of this documentary,, and why documentaries such as Looking for Richard and Discovering Hamlet tend to be so idiotically, droolingly numb despite the intelligence of the artists working on them.

Filming Othello

Filming ‘Othello’ is the best among these, in part because of the conversations Welles is having with his peers, with students, with us, and with himself. I do think if he was speaking with a single interviewer—just the right interviewer—it would have been better still, but the cobbled-together nature of the documentary is some ways befits the film it is a commentary upon.

Filming Othello

What is so charming is that Welles is so earnest, despite his suspicion that he is both not as smart as Shakespeare, and that he is smarter than entertainment is allowed to be. Three years later he would be doing voice-work for Magnum P.I.

The conversations are intrinsically delightful, but also deepen my feelings for that troubled, crazy little film of Shakespeare’s tragedy. There was so much pressure on it, yet so much turned out right about it, too. At the end, Welles makes this confession: “With all my heart, I wish that I—I wasn’t looking back on Othello, but looking forward to it. That Othello would be a hell of a film.”

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #79: 10 Things I Hate About You [The Taming of the Shrew] (1999)

23 Sunday Dec 2018

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79. Gil Younger’s 10 Things I Hate About You [The Taming of the Shrew] (1999)

Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s only story fixated on teenagers in love, but Karen McCullah and Kristen Smith adapted The Taming of the Shrew to do so.

07 Taming of the Shrew

Shrew is one of Shakespeare’s most outrageous plays. (It’s the comedy equivalent of Tis Andronicus, if you ask me.) That comedy dramatizes the institutional stresses of matrimony in Shakespeare’s time. Women were, from a legal view, property. They required a dowry—a pile of money, property, or other valuables—to protect their socioeconomic security as well as that of their husband at the time of marriage. Occasionally, this would result in a happy marriage, but security, not happiness, was the goal of this business transaction.

If a rare woman rebelled against this order (in which she was a commodity), she was a bitch, or a shrew. If such a bitch had a younger sister, by rights, the younger sister should not marry unless her elder sister did first, so a spinster could bring discord and shame upon her family.

An alcoholic bachelor of some means could bolster his security by marrying that shrew, if he were just drunk and brave enough. Shakespeare had a daring sense of humor.

This is not polite humor, or drama, for that matter.

Because the playwright worked towards a paradoxical reconciliation of these values (a woman could be her own person and yield herself as property to a patriarchal order), some dumb modern viewers become uneasy at the conclusion, as if Shakespeare were confirming that the patriarchy he has been skewering for two hours is mostlyokay, once characters have the wisdom to understand that love is required for the system to work.

Similarly, the conclusion of The Merchant of Venice has viewers wondering if Shakespeare was anti-Semitic since Shylock never does get his vengeance for losing his daughter and property (again reinforcing a woman’s identity as a commodity), and because Shylock is punished for being so inhumanly Jewish (according to the gentiles in the play).

The way comedy worked in Shakespeare time was to pretend that all was mended at the end.

Comedy ends in marriage. Tragedy ends in a pile of corpses.

By ending in such a reassuring way, Shakespeare could complicate the world in fairly tragic ways in the middle of the play. Through clowning, Shakespeare could sneak in a lot of truth about the odd ways we live our lives, even though he had to pretend like he was only kidding.

Which brings me to this question: as a young American actress, how did Julia Stiles come to star in three Shakespeare adaptations? She was in Tim Blake Nelson’s excellent O, and in Michael Almereyda’s diarrheal Hamlet.

10 Things I Hate About You is a loose adaptation that doesn’t use Shakespeare’s language and seldom nods to the wording of the original play, though pedestrian meta-references to Shakespeare abound.

10 Things I Hate About You Poster.jpg

The high school setting for this adaptation is a strength. Today, the parental limits for a daughter’s sovereignty makes more cultural sense than Renaissance norms for marriage. Instead of marriage, the boundaries here are for adolescent dating.

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The title sequence and title make clear that this is supposed to be a teen rom-com. While the predictability of the Shakespearean comedy is often blissfully undercut, the predictability of the teen rom-com genre is, alas and fuck, sometimes grating. Occasionally, 10 Things I Hate About You seems to try too hard to be cool and outré. But the wild romantic scheming of the original is there in this adaptation, along with the surprises that this scheming brings to the schemers.

The cast takes the movie pretty far.

Allison Janney plays Ms. Perky, a dean who can instantly see all of the conniving neuroses of adolescence from a billion miles away, and dispatches their problems as quickly as possible in order to steal more time while on the job to write a lurid romance novel.

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Perky suggests the fate of the spinster, whose love life is imaginary despite being pretty and smart. (This character seems to disappear halfway through the movie. I guess Janney could only get one day off from The West Wing.) This could be Kat’s fate, which doesn’t seem terrible, actually.

10 Things I Hate About You Larry Miller

Comedian Larry Miller plays the concerned dad to two daughters. Miller’s posh monotone deadpan always makes him seem a bit sinister, which makes the hand-wringing of the father character of Shrew much easier to handle. (The character is pathetic at best in the original play.)

Our Petruchio, the drunken shrew-wooer, is played by Heath Ledger, who plays the part with a verve that will remind one as his turn as the Joker later in his career. Instead of a drunk, though, McCullah and Smith make his character a chaotic juvenile delinquent with a reputation that makes him beyond the respectable pale. He is dreamy, yet wrenches out of this part some real sophistication of emotion.

10 Things I Hate About You

Both Stiles and Ledger have exquisitely downturned mouths, which became distracting once I noticed it. Do you notice it?

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays—who cares?

Julia Styles plays Kat, the shrewish lefty alternative feminist whose contempt for the entire high school system makes her critical of everything, which was more or less me in high school, or college—actually I’m still that way. Stiles does not generally play Kat’s anger with a broad sense of comedy, allowing the situations and dialogue to do the comedic heavy lifting.

What ultimately makes me not quite love this movie is its disappointing conventionality. It’s zany comedy tends to feel forced when Heath Ledger is not there to deliver it, and as the story proceeds, the moral component of the film makes the attitude of Kat more about her own personal experience, her own disappointing psychological and sexual journey, than about her entirely appropriate critique of the world she is living in. Her motivation ultimately becomes a bit paint-by-numbers, and the various plots of the family cohere in ways that border on the sentimental.

One of the few graces of the end of the movie is that the love stories don’t have sentimental closure. The younger sister will give Joseph Gordon-Levitt a chance, and Heath Ledger’s Patrick Verona makes a grand gesture that provisionally returns him to Kat’s good graces, even though college makes their future uncertain.

I can’t help but think that if Allison Janney and Larry Miller each had one more scene that the movie could have deepened its edge more.

10 Things I Hate About You is a virtual time capsule for the late 1990s for its style and music, with just a hint of the Renaissance about it. Mostly, though, it’s a teen rom-com that compares poorly with Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.