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

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #59: Othello (1951)

23 Sunday Jul 2017

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59. Orson Welles’s Othello (1951)

Othello poster

Orson Welles’s Othello opens with some weird music by Alberto Barbers and/or Angelo Francesco Lavagnino that splits the difference between a Modernist march and Gregorian chant during the funeral march of the Moor and Desdemona, with Iago brought along, caged in captivity, like some dolorous triumph. The tragic destinies are foretold rather than having any opening credits.

The film is in black and white, which may have turned off 1951 audiences. The restored version, however, makes the scenes look crisp, and so the black and white adds an antiquarian touch rather than just making the film look moldy. While I would have adored to see more of Venice, since the Venice scenes take place at night, perhaps black and white is just as well.

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I say this with hesitant irony, since Othello is a play in part about the uses made of the color of a man’s skin. White actors who portray the Moor these days forgo the unpleasant tradition of blackface. Ideally, since there are only two black parts in Shakespeare (Othello and Aaron in Titus Andronicus), the parts could be reserved for black actors, even in these times of color-blind casting.

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While I shrink from the practice of blackface, though, I don’t find it dreadfully offensive in the case of Welles. In black and white, it looks natural enough, and doesn’t impart direct associations with minstrelsy, although again I might have preferred to see Welles tackle Iago and grant the Moor’s part to a black actor. As weird as the casting of a white man in black make-up might seem to us now, the practice was considered totally normal in Welles’s time.

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And Micheál MacLiammóir as Iago brings to mind the importance of Iago’s lack of something, some lack of charisma despite being eloquent and shrewd in the ways of Machiavellian political intrigue. I don’t mean that MacLiammóir is a poor actor, for that is certainly not the case. But physically, MacLiammóir looks rather skinny and average, bland compared to Othello and Michael Cassio. Kenneth Branagh as Iago is too handsome for us to sense that his private griefs are that compelling. Branagh makes us believe that Iago’s lies feel like truth to him, as a compulsive liar begins to have difficulty recognizing the difference. Butit’s difficult to believe he didn’t get what he wanted in the first place. MacLiammóir’s Iago is harder to root for, but easier to empathize with. It makes the tragic destructions of Othello feel less wanton and more tragic.

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The sense of Othello’s testimony before the council regarding his courtship of Desdemona comes off poignantly in Welles’s mouth. Othello declares,

Rude am I in my speech,
And little bless’d with the soft phrase of peace:
For since these arms of mine had seven years’ pith,
Till now some nine moons wasted, they have used
Their dearest action in the tented field,
And little of this great world can I speak,
More than pertains to feats of broil and battle,
And therefore little shall I grace my cause
In speaking for myself. Yet, by your gracious patience,
I will a round unvarnish’d tale deliver
Of my whole course of love; what drugs, what charms,
What conjuration and what mighty magic,
For such proceeding I am charged withal,
I won his daughter.

Othello seems to be protesting the rudeness of his speech too much since his tale does not seem especially “unvarnish’d.” However, addressing these white Europeans with whom he serves, Othello seems to understand that his audience may hear his speech as rude, and is ingratiating them against their presumed racism. (I think of Trump supporters who feel like he has made the executive office “classy” again. Institutional racism means that there is a sliding scale for judgment.) This seems all the more enhanced from Welles’s amazing instrument of a voice. (Lawrence Fishburne’s Caribbean accent as Othello made the speech seem potentially rougher in tongue to Europeans, even though Fishburne’s instrument is excellent as well.)

For textual purists, the director was perhaps too rough with the cuts. Welles has added expository voiceovers to speed the play along, allowing the story to reach its conclusion within about ninety minutes.

Sizanne Cloutier makes for a taut Desdemona. She looks uncannily like a Disney princess in such Renaissance attire, and successfully conveys both a strong, clear will and a heartbreaking innocence.

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The fortress at Cypress, abutting its geometry against the ocean, looks stark, adding to this antiquarian flair.

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One of the later sequences occurs at a sauna. Iago convinced the lovesick dupe, Rodrigo, that he may win Desdemona after all if he will only kill Michael Cassio. Welles has a mandolin playing a gypsy-like tune, and added an essential ingredient to this scene: a poodle. I am not making this up. The scene is so uncanny as to be wholly believable.

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When Iago kills Rodrigo through the floorboards of the sauna, the effect is goofy, yet psychedelically terrifying. Indeed, as the film dispatches its climax, the effect is that of a classic horror film, in which nearly everyone left alive is a monster, imprisoned in the ancient jails of their psyches.

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The gazes of the dying and the damned.

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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 #58: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2014)

16 Sunday Jul 2017

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58. Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2014)

Dream 3

Dear readers,

I have reached the point where my experience as a reviewer is becoming a liability. It is the responsibility of every production of Shakespeare’s work to both make it new while simultaneously tapping into the essence of what makes Shakespearean drama work. The more films and plays I have seen, the more difficult I am to impress. How do you make it new, yet old, after people have been making it new for so long?

Not long ago, I review Julie Tamor’s Tempest, which was mostly lackluster if compared with Prospero’s Books or especially if compared with Taymor’s own Titus. Nonetheless, I have looked forward to seeing the film of Taymor’s stage adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, since the preview for it seemed darker and stranger than her Tempest despite the generally lighter source material. I longed to know if Taymor’s tepid Tempest was anomalous. Could she make Dream both new and old?

Yes, she could. Her Midsummer Night’s Dream is too delightful.

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The constraint of the stage seemed to help immensely. How does one convey the sense of metaphysical wonder of fairies in three-dimensional space? Taymor’s solution was to work vertically to convey the sense of worlds passing through worlds.

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A clownish-looking fellow who will turn out to be our Puck goes to bed in the middle of the stage. Branches lift that bed high above the stage, and construction workers, our rude mechanicals, attach ropes and chains to the corners of the bed, and chainsaw the bed from its rustic frame. The sheet is yanked diaphanously across the entire stage, making Puck disappear before the arrival of the Duke and the nattering of our love triangle.

While there are natural and pagan elements in this Dream, Taymor uses the fun of a stage production to avoid (mostly) the predictable color green. Es Devlin’s stage design and Constance Hoffman’s costume design is mostly a gothic palette emphasizing black, white, and gray that seems to make all of the aerial work seem all the more ethereal.  The grass-covered barcalounger is a nice touch. Even Titania’s fairy attendants are dressed like ghostly Victorian orphans.

There are no movie stars in this production, just actors doing mostly perfect work.

Midsummer Night's Dream, A Theatre for a New Audience @ Polonsky Shakespeare Center

Max Casella gives let’s an old-fashioned New York Italian accent do most of his work as Bottom before his transformation. He doesn’t overdo Bottom’s overacting, which is a relief.

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One of the great scenes we expect is of course Bottom as an ass, and in this case, leaning on Taymor’s earlier theatrical instincts to involve puppetry, Bottom’s jackass puss is rendered through a prosthetic head that tapers to an alarmingly human mouth.

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Tina Benko as Titiana and David Harewood as Oberon prove quite regal and compelling.

There is the usual inter-gender wrestling performed charmingly.

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Jake Horowitz was underwhelming as Lysander, but that is a minor part, and since he kind of looks like Russell Brand but isn’t Russell Brand, we must count ourselves lucky.

Puck, who isn’t a minor part, is daringly performed by Kathryn Hunter, who makes it look easy.

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Taymor’s minimalism and eclectic style work wonders on this film of her stage version. The cinematography somehow managed to convey a cinematic sense without getting in the way of the performance. This is a superior Dream!

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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 Shakespearean Film #56: The Merry Wives of Windsor (1982)

18 Sunday Jun 2017

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56. David Jones’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1982)

My sweet readers, I broken a promise in watching a BBC Complete Shakespeare film. I well know that fine actors were unable to rescue such productions, but I was tempted by my desire to see more Falstaff, and in particular my desire to see the great Richard Griffiths play him in this Merry Wives. This made-for-TV version from 1982 is much, much better than the other Complete BBC versions I have seen. Unfortunately, that does not make it even good.

Merry Wives 1

The usual problems with these productions abound. First, the haste of the productions and the closeness of the sets made two-shot scenes difficult. I suppose seeing people’s faces in Shakespeare could be construed as overrated. Second, these Renaissance sets of Merry Wives look fake, like those of the second season of Black Adder if someone forgot to make it funny. Oh, yes, Merry Wives is supposed to be a comedy. And third, something about the pacing of the production seems like maple syrup in zero gravity.

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Let us talk of Master Ford, as portrayed by Ben Kingsley in the same year as Gandhi and one year before playing a steel-nerved cuckold in a film adaptation of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. Kingsley has interpreted his part as melodrama—a man, like Othello, who did not know jealousy until it completely overwhelmed his character. His soliloquies are delivered directly to the camera, and his performance is magnetic.

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Judy Davis plays Mistress Ford, and though she is not often on camera, she plays the part with an effervescence that somehow seems both Elizabethan and modern.

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Nigel Terry, who some may know as Arthur from Excalibur, makes the most out of hyperactive Pistol, making him seem intelligent and infinitely mischievous.

I suppose I owe you a summary of the plot. Two wives of Windsor are being wooed by the fat rascal, Sir John Falstaff, whose knighthood is of dubious origin. The wives decide to punish him for his impudence, for his assault on their marriages and honor, hence their merriment.

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Richard Griffiths apparently decided that the comedy of this comedy didn’t commence until halfway through the movie, when this illicit wooing begins. I suppose the idea was to establish Sir John’s nobility more than his charisma at the outset.

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The thing tends to drag. Time wears, as it were. The running time is just under three hours. On the whole, this Merry Wives does draw out the tensions of Shakespearean comedy, for the difference between comedy and tragedy is sometimes only how the story ends: marriage, or a pile of corpses?

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The legend is that Merry Wives was Shakespeare’s response to Queen Elizabeth’s demand that he write a play about Falstaff in love. There is a lot of love in this odd play, even if Falstaff isn’t one of the true lovers. I am not sure if someone not already familiar with the play could easily follow this version. It isn’t quite good, but overall it isn’t bad, either.

The tricky finale actually works.

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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 #55: Falstaff: Chimes at Midnight (1965)

04 Sunday Jun 2017

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55. Orson Welles’s Falstaff: Chimes at Midnight [Henry IV Parts 1 & 2] (1965)

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One restraint of most Shakespeare film productions happens to be, alas and fuck, the budget. Often, actors, including the best actors, will willingly work for scale in service of the bard, but the cost of film and catering and the crew and their equipage will or cannot do so. Quality often suffers.

Such seems to have been the case with Chimes at Midnight, which features a tour de force performance by Orson Welles as Falstaff.

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Welles was very, very, very fat. That is not a criticism, merely an observation. He looks like an optical illusion, a caricature of a caricature that is Sir John Falstaff. And yet in appearing like such a cartoon, Welles somehow makes the part quite real, and shows us what Shakespeare’s own original audience would have loved about this rascal who contains so many vices, a bursting character from a medieval morality play.

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Contrasting the enormity of Welles’s girth is the slender running time of Chimes at Midnight, which squeezes both parts of Henry IV down to under 2 hours of running time. If you don’t already know these plays, abandon all hope of following the manic, complicated plot. If you have experienced these plays, though, then lean in and enjoy this manic take on its complicated, truncated plot. Ralph Richardson served as a narrator, to offer context and some sense of segues.

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Henry IV is played by John Gielgud, who makes England’s sovereign and his moral disappointment in his son, prince Hal, seem majestic rather than bitchy or sheepishly human.

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Keith Baxter and his dimpled chin play Hal, and he seems truly mischievous, a quick, fun foil for Welles’s Falstaff.

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Norman Rodway, as Henry Percy, AKA “Hotspur,” switches between manic comedy and tragedy in his threat against the throne. He seems to have gotten the memo to act and speak as fast as he can, and manages to make both seem palatable enough.

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The great battle between Henry IV and Hotspur’s forces os both impressive and awfully awkward. I suspect the sound of rattling armor was created by shaking a pillowcase of silverware. (Perhaps that is authentically how battle sounded in the Middle Ages. If that is so, one should avoid accuracy.) There is a great confusion of fog, mud, and clanging, interspersed with Orson Welles hysterically trotting about in truly enormous armor. The editing is extra-manic, and I suspect the film was often sped up like kung fu action sequences.

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It occurs to me, dear readers, that perhaps I’ve been premature to claim the low budget of this movie was its downfall. Perhaps the downfall was its modest reception, and its therefore being out of print a long while. The version I got ahold of was less crisp than I expect the Criterion Collection print is. As The Hollow Crown demonstrates, the inn setting of much of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 are drab enough if treated with historical accuracy, so the black and white is less a burden than it might have been. Perhaps the sound is better in the Criterion edition (I doubt it). The energetically frumpy medievalish score by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino has to grate no matter how crisp it sounds.

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But the chief musical instrument of Falstaff is the voice of Orson Welles. The voice and the man were larger than life, and experiencing it embodying Falstaff helps one believe that an absurd amount of indulgence might be his due. We can imagine a king, a prince, a beautiful young prostitute (played by Jeanne Moreau) could grant him something like grace. On the field of victory, or in the Boar’s Head Inn, Falstaff is a beacon of vivaciousness and intelligence. In the throne room, however, such grace reveals itself to be an almost infinite length of rope by which he will hang himself.

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The subtitle of the film (or the title, depending on where it was released) might make the theme of this film seem unpleasantly sentimental. The “chimes at midnight” speech takes place between Falstaff and Master Shallow, a justice of the peace in the countryside with whom Falstaff is resting after a battle. This scene takes place before he learns that his carousing friend Prince Hal will be coronated as Henry V. Master Shallow is a dreadful bore, and his desire to reminisce about the greatness of being awake at midnight is sad. That Falstaff indulges him makes us sorry for Falstaff. Alan Webb’s Shallow speaks in an elderly quavering falsetto that is unendurable. This brief film shoves that dialogue into the beginning of our story to make the theme clear.

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Except it isn’t, unless we are to see the theme as the weariness of having to deal with dullards. At least the screenplay skips repeating the speech later.

As brief as this film of two plays is, it ends by squeezing in the beginning of Henry V as well, to reach the closure of Sir John’s story, his death, and mourning of the Boar’s Head crowd. If the film were a half-hour longer, perhaps The Merry Wives of Windsor could also have been crammed in.

Like I said, if you know these Falstaff plays, then this film is well worth the effort, but do grab the Criterion edition. So says your humble rogue.

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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 #54: The Taming of the Shrew (1929)

21 Sunday May 2017

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54. Sam Taylor’s The Taming of the Shrew (1929)

Taming of the Shrew Poster

Thirty-eight years before Hollywood power-couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton captivated audiences as Katherine and Petruchio, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford did something similar.

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Apparently, this is the first Shakespeare film with sound, and the performances of Fairbanks and Pickford are not especially good. When their acting gets more physical than vocal, the performances improve a hundredfold.

The slapstick of the play comes off wonderfully, with plenty of people falling down a staircase that is the chief hero of this film.

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I suppose I find myself slightly shocked that the violent tendencies of Katherine could be more cartoony than in the later Zefirelli version, but Pickford is arresting as this female dervish. That she actually wields a whip makes this a kinkier version of Shrew than one should expect from 1929, and when Petruchio woos her, they both have whips. (Behind the scenes, Fairbanks and Pickford’s marriage was on the rocks.)

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Hugo Riesenfeld’s music is delightfully bouncy, insanely melodramatic. It is good along with that staircase.

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At times, Fairbanks is good in a hammy, egotistically clownish way. Pickford’s voice is why her career would not last long into the sound era of film.

Shakespeare’s text was altered and truncated, so much so that the running time is about 65 minutes. It’s like a fun fever dream.

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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 #53: The Tempest (2010)

14 Sunday May 2017

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53. Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010)

In 1999, Julie Taymor gave life to Titus Andronicus, an obscure, early, and quite bloody play by Shakespeare. It was great.

In 2002, she gave us a visionary biopic of Frida Kahlo. It was good.

In 2007, she made Across the Universe, a musical cobbled together from Beatles tunes that … what was I talking about? I fell asleep for a moment.

In 2010, she returned to Shakespeare to attempt The Tempest, a famous, late, and quite fantastical play by Shakespeare. It was—well, what was it?

The-Tempest-movie-poster

My critique of this film is colored by the fact that the cast and production of Taymor’s Titus was so exquisite, and by the fact that Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books set an equally high standard for any film of The Tempest. There isn’t much wrong with Taymor’s Tempest, but there isn’t much right with it, either.

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What should have been momentous is that Taymor changes the gender of Prospero, making her a Prospera, played by Helen Mirren, which again should have been momentous on Mirren’s strength as an actor. But Mirren’s turn is stoical to the point of emoting almost nothing until the climax of the film.

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Russell Brand, as the clown Trinculo, is precisely as annoying as Russell Brand tends to be. Alfred Molina plays Stephano, the butler of the king of Milan who has drunken aims to become a king himself. Watching Molina act with Brand shows off Brand’s affectations and weaknesses as an actor all the more.

Chris Cooper also struggles to make Shakespeare’s words fit into his mouth, leading him to offer an uncertain performance despite his generally strong qualities as an actor.

THE TEMPEST

Alan Cumming was one of the highlights in Titus. His Saturninus was a mixture of Hitler, Marilyn Manson, and Pee Wee Herman. He can work no wonders with the part of Sebastian, the treacherously jealous brother of King Alonso. What casting director let Russell Brand, and not Cumming, play Trinculo? Watching him interact with Chris Cooper reveals how tentative Cooper’s performance was.

David Straitharn, as King Alonso of Naples, acts well enough to serve as some sort of redemption for his atrocious performance in Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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Ben Wishaw, who portrayed Richard II in The Hollow Crown, makes a fascinating Ariel here, although the special effects are often unpersuasive.

Tom Conti is wonderful as the elderly Gonzalo, eager to restore peace to Milan.

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The love story between Ferdinand and Miranda seems dulled by the performance of Reeve Carney, who seems like he was hired mostly on the strength of his cheekbones and the quality of his whisper.

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Felicity Jones, who filmgoers may recognize as Jyn Erso from Rogue One, is lively as Miranda, managing to imbue her with an ebullient innocence that is not treacly.

THE TEMPEST

The problem is that any good performance in this film seems counterweighted either by bad ones or stoic ones.

One of Taymor’s strengths is a surrealistic streak, and the visually dissociative moments in this film are good, but few and far between.

The end of this film isn’t cathartic, but is only as memorable as the last breath you take before falling asleep.

On the whole, Taymor and her actors tended to be too light-handed in their choices. So says your humble rogue.

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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 #52: Tempest (1982)

23 Sunday Apr 2017

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52. Paul Mazursky’s [The] Tempest (1982)

Let’s start with a necessary observation: Paul Mazursky’s Tempest has very little of Shakespeare’s play in it. There is none of Shakespeare’s words. This film is about a Manhattanite architect’s midlife crisis, with some loose associations with Shakespeare’s themes and (vaguely) characters. There’s no magician, although the architect might be insane. The Shakespearean allusion is almost a weird distraction, for the first hour and forty-five minutes, after which the connections to The Tempest swell into the film, pulling at all of these surging plots that have been seemed so unlike the Shakespeare story.

As I have said before in my treatment of Japanese and Indian films, non-English adaptations of Shakespeare tend to be breathtaking, but I am really suspicious of English film adaptations that avoid Shakespeare’s language.

I was prepared to loathe this film, but I didn’t.

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Mazurksy was responsible for a lot of mainstream dramas that were funny, and manages to find a surprising middle ground between Woody Allen’s wallowing in neuroses as if they are inevitable and clownish, and Alan Alda’s pointedly smart, funny, earthy earnestness, say, in The Four Seasons. In this Tempest, Leon Capitanos’s and Paul Mazursky’s dialogue is evocative, revelatory of character, and believably oblique and strange and intuitive. Here is Phillip, his wife Antonia, and his daughter Miranda stuck in traffic in New York on New Year’s Eve:

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PHILLIP

I should have stayed home and watched Guy Lombardo on television. 

ANTONIA

Guy Lombardo’s dead.

PHILLIP

Really?

ANTONIA

Yeah.

PHILLIP

How sad.

ANTONIA

Yeah.

MIRANDA

Who’s Guy Lombardo?

Or here’s Phillip talking to his love interest, Aretha.

ARETHA

That’s how I’m working my way back. Getting singing jobs.

PHILLIP

Back to New York?

ARETHA

Unless I fall in love with you, which is a distinct possibility.

PHILLIP

That would be a mistake. I am right in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

ARETHA

Who’d she run off with?

PHILLIP

Oh, she didn’t exactly run.

ARETHA

You’re in a lot of pain, huh?

PHILLIP

So are you.

In some ways, this non-Shakespearean Tempest moves more directly than the source material towards the emotions of its main characters.

So the architect decides to quit his job working for a gangster who is building a casino, with whom his wife, frustrated with his mid-life antics, will have an affair. He exiles himself to Greece with his daughter, and eventually they, Aretha, and her dog Nino, will retire to an isolated Greek island populated only by the wild man, Kalibanos, who is perhaps rather overfamiliar with his goats.

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The acting seems so surprising and real in this film. Kalibanos is played by the exquisite Raoul Julia.

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Phillip (our Prospero) is played by John Cassavetes. Gena Rowlands plays Atonia (our Antonio).

Molly Ringwald Tempest

Molly Ringwald, in her first film performance, plays Miranda, in an electric performance.

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Susan Sarandon plays Aretha, who is perhaps our Ariel. When she sings, you can hear hints of Janet from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The ensemble cast is exquisite: their performances clearly feed off one another.

Should you track down and watch this film, there are a few surprises I feel compelled not to spoil for you. Let me just say that some of what happens in the last act makes up for how pat and neat the final conclusion turns out to be. In a Shakespeare film this messed up, some shocks are in order.

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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 #51: Prospero’s Books [The Tempest] (1991)

16 Sunday Apr 2017

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51. Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books [The Tempest] (1991)

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Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books is the most visionary adaptation of Shakespeare that I have ever seen, and that declaration is made with all due consideration to Julie Taymor’s amazing film of Titus Andronicus. Prospero’s Books may be the most underrated film of all time. And yet your rogue has taken more than a year to get to this gem in this blog, in part because of the demands that the film makes upon the viewer. The Tempest is such a strange play—any straightforward adaptation must fail because of how sublime Shakespeare’s conception was in his final outing as a solo playwright.

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Peter Greenaway understands that the storm in this play is a metaphor for the psyche of a wise old man approaching the end of his life. This Prospero’s story may be happening entirely in his own mind. Either that, or this is a metaphysical projection of one man’s mind onto the temporal world. Greenaway has meticulously committed to this aesthetic, and if I try to think of another director who comes close to making the psychological most of the fantastic, for the strange revelation of character, I would have to come up with the example of Jean Cocteau.

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After Prospero has enacted the tempest, the credits sequence features a grand processional through this mage’s palace. There are a pair of naked women dancing mechanically, spastically, like they are demonically possessed. Michael Nyman’s lush, chromatic score is stirring, punctuated with the clanging one might associate with a factory, a blacksmith’s, or industrial music. There is such abundant imagery here, such abundant sonic provocations, with Prospero at the surrealistic heart of it all.

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Peter Greenaway has framed the scenes with his own imaginative explanations of the pages of the magical tomes that Prospero has owned (and written) over time. I presume that this extra-textual aspect of the adaptation is the reason why the film has a different name than the play, although this also indicates that Greenaway saw the themes of the play in a different way than The Tempest might ordinarily indicate.

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Prospero lives not so much on an island, but in the mansion of his book, and this mansion is like a disordered Eden, teeming with nakedness and social transgressions and mischief, but not sex or violence. It is a dream-state that fully suggests the sublimity of The Tempest, exceeding the grasp of anything like human understanding.

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The film is a little like watching a weather documentary while suffering a fever dream. Greenaway has set the cultural world of this Tempest as that of Italy (the plot involves Milanese politics) with ruffs the size of Ferris wheels fringing men’s heads. This culture is confronted by the Edenic innocence and non-erotic nudity of the island.

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The staggering strength of this film is one reason why it might take me this long to reveal that Prospero is played by John Gielgud, who would have been about 86 at the time of filming. This is his best performance of Shakespeare on film. Gielgud was a traditional Shakespearean actor of his time, whose emphasis was on his voice as an instrument, and whose chief decisions as an actor would have been about where to stand, and (obviously) understanding one’s lines. He generally made such a process work, but in this film, his advanced age shows that he never stopped getting better.

Prospero's Books 2

If this is your first Tempest, you may feel quite lost. The cinematography, special effects, and complex editing can be quite puzzling. But the work is joyously masterful, and the fantastical elements of this play have never been better envisioned. If you watch this as your not-first Tempest, I challenge you not to love it.

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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 #50: Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episode 1009 [Hamlet] (1999)

09 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in Film, Postmodernism, Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

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Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

50. Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episode 1009 [Franz Peter Wirth’s Hamlet] (1999)

I am going to pause amidst my round of tempesting to honor an old episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, in honor of this show’s return.

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode devoted to Franz Peter Wirth’s 1960 German television version of Hamlet is rather dreamlike. The sparse set filmed in black and white is reminiscent of the Olivier version, but feels more like some sort of generic old film reel of Hamlet. That the film is dubbed into English makes it seem otherworldly, like a 1960s kung fu flick (Attack of the Flying Bodkins, perhaps).

Some of the acting and voice-overs seem adequate if not good, which makes the generic nature of this Hamlet seem almost pleasant. (The voice-over for Claudius was performed by Ricardo Montalbán.) The problem is that the title part is played by a young Maximillian Schell. If the name sounds familiar, then think of Dr. Hans Reinhart from The Black Hole.

In Hamlet, Schell looks like an especially manic and greasy incarnation of Klaus Kinski, and my guess is that he was performing the voice-over himself, and the vowels sound like he is chewing on them.

I will confess, though, I really enjoyed Gertrude’s wig in a totally non-ironic way.

Obviously, this Hamlet could not be truly good to serve MST3K’s purposes. The premise of the program is that a janitor of The Gizmonic Institute has been installed in a satellite in outer space and is forced to undergo scientific experiments involving him watching B movies—mostly horror and science fiction. This experimentation has been made tolerable with robot companions, with whom the janitor jokes about said putrid movies in order to make the experience entertaining. On Mystery Science Theater, one watches the janitor and robots watch the movies.

As I have stated in my essay, “Mystery Science Theater 3000, Media Consciousness, and the Postmodern Allegory of the Captive Audience,” published a decade ago in The Journal of Film and Video, I prefer the episodes with Joel (the first janitor to undergo the experiment) to those featuring Mike (the second janitor). As MST3K episodes go, this Hamlet isn’t bad, and if Joel were the experiment subject of this one, there is no reason to expect that the media-conscious criticism would have necessarily been more acute.

One can see this meta-Hamlet as being in a continuum with Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead and Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis’s Strange Brew. Since this is a deeply truncated version of the play to fit the time constraints of MST3K, one disappointment is that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (the two idiots, forced to be observers, rather like the janitor and robots) barely appear. As Claudius is addressing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Crow asks (as if the voice of Claudius) “which one of you is Squiggy again?”

Some of the jokes are high-minded, and others are delightfully low, kind of like Shakespeare himself. With such a generic Hamlet airing on The Satellite of Love, Shakespeare’s play is rendered doughy and the opposite of sacred, which is, on the whole, a consummation devoutly to be wished.

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.