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The Drunken Odyssey

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The Drunken Odyssey

Tag Archives: Franco Zeffirelli

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #39: The Taming of the Shrew (1967)

18 Sunday Sep 2016

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

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Elizabeth Taylor, Franco Zeffirelli, Richard Burton, The Taming of the Shrew

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film 239. Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew (1967)

All right, readers, let’s get to it. The Taming of the Shrew is one of those infernal puzzles Shakespeare has bequeathed to us.

We don’t use the word shrew these days to describe women, so if you want to imagine a current translation, the play might be called The Taming of the Raging Bitch. It’s the most amazing romantic comedy ever. I mean that sincerely.

shrew-poster

In this film, Elizabeth Taylor plays the raging—um—shrew.

The chief plot is that Katherina is the oldest daughter of Signior Baptista. She cannot help railing violently against her younger sister who has acquired two suitors, and railing against her hapless father as well.

shrew-13

Signior Baptista is adamant, bless him, that Bianca will not be wed before her older sister is married, since that would disgrace Katherina. And why is Katherina a shrew? Perhaps she resents being little more to her family than an impediment to her sister’s happiness. Perhaps Katherina views the prospect of getting married herself just to make her sister happy as utterly dehumanizing. Perhaps she regards the very role of being a woman—a wife, mother, daughter, gaze object for men, an accessory to her dowry—inherently belittling.

Soliloquies are for tragedies, not comedies.

Katherine is too often lashing out to reveal her own emotions so directly.

shrew-6What is interesting about this film’s casting is that Katherina is played by Elizabeth Taylor who is stunning, even when she is snarling, whereas Natasha Pyne’s Bianca is a blandly beautiful blonde.

shrew-12

The implication is that Katherina’s temper makes the men of The Taming of the Shrew unable to see her physical beauty. Her rage defines her as other than female to them.

What makes this film perfect is that the male lead, Katherina’s suitor, is a bold alcoholic named Petruchio, played by Richard Burton. Can I get a Hell, yes?

shrew-1
In the first half of the film, this performance is giddy, silly slapstick, and Petruchio’s courtship of Katherina comes off like the deranged efforts of a cartoony character, like Pepe LePew who seems oblivious to the horror he is causing.

shrew-11

Katherina is unaccustomed to a man courting her like she is actually desirable, and is equally unaccustomed to a man who will accept and match her aggressions. The way the courtship plays out so physically in this medieval Italian set is both quaint, earthy, and delightful, like collapsing onto piles of cotton.

And yet the drama of this comedy modulates, as these two people, lawfully married, learn to acknowledge accept one another as human beings, even as the psychological terms of their marriage are being negotiated. Tenderness creeps in at moments, despite the fraught nature of their relationship.

Petruchio may be a drunkard capable of violence and gross egotism, but he is also unwilling to advance upon her sexually without her consent.

For all of Shrew’s  outrageousness of plot and gender politics, those conflicts are the point. The ironies of the play, that Katherina accepts and simultaneously ironically transforms her new role as wife, need to be there in the acting, for the ironies on the page are subtle, so much so that many people today find the play too patriarchal for current audiences.

What’s interesting about this Zeffirelli film is that the subplots don’t seem to drag or do much more than credibly make us feel the chief plot more intensely. Gremio, an eldery suitor of Bianca’s, and Hortensio, an ineffectually foppish suitor to Bianca as well, come off as comic villains.

shrew-16

Lucentio’s courtship of Bianca, done under the guise of being her tutor, seems to happen in the background, visible without slowing down the primary plot, and Michael York (who played Tybalt in Zeffirelli’s Rome and Juliet) makes Lucentio seem suitably romantic and somehow not creepy.

shrew-9The costumes and the sets are charming, making the middle ages seem colorful and fun, somehow even making codpieces look good. But if you look closely, there are also less happy details, too, that point out the stakes at play in this dangerous comedy.

shrew-10You might quite easily try to dismiss the sketchy politics of this comedy, born of a more restrictive, thoroughly patriarchal time, but if you watch with an open mind, you’ll see that the world of The Taming of the Shrew is still recognizable today, and that we still must strive to treat each other with dignity, even if that requires approaching the world with a profound degree of irony, to know the difference between who we are, and who we are told we are.

_______

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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 #4: Hamlet (1990)

06 Sunday Sep 2015

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

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Franco Zeffirelli, Hamlet, Mel Gibson

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film 3

#4: Hamlet (1990)

Franco Zeffirelli is a creature of opera, and was friends with Maria Callas. He directed the version of La Traviata I attended at the Met. Yet when he directs films of Shakespeare, he avoids the bombast and hyperbole of the operatic mode altogether.

Hamlet poster 1990

His Hamlet is earthy.

The problem with Hamlet, as Laurence Olivier simplistically put it in his own epigraph to a film version of the play, is that “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” The prince of Denmark is charged by his father’s ghost to enact vengeance in Act 1. Emerson Venable tried to reconcile the four act delay of this revenge in his short book from 1912, The Hamlet Problem and its Solution—which is a more complex way of saying that Hamlet’s mind was a powerful engine of philosophy and conscience. He delays killing Claudius because he worries his own motives are too impure—his “prophetic soul” wanted to kill his uncle before he knew the new king was guilty.

Zeffirelli gives his Hamlet a medieval setting, and focuses on Hamlet’s worries of mortality, that the mind will become food for worms, then dust. The opening shot is of the prince pouring earth over his father’s sepulcher.

Olivier’s Hamlet isn’t bad, but isn’t necessarily good, either. I hate to say it, but the 1948 film isn’t dramatic enough. Olivier is skinny, and Hamlet comes off as a feckless aesthete.

Zeffirelli’s solution was to cast Mel Gibson, of Bird on a Wire fame.

Hamlet Gibson

Before the sanctimoniousness of Braveheart, before the snuff film of The Passion of the Christ, before his anti-Semitic run-ins with the police and consequent disgrace, Mel Gibson was a talented actor, an athletic one capable of menace. (Except for the ending, Lethal Weapon was actually a good film, before all those sequels.) When Hamlet is told the news of Claudius’s betrayal, he watches the king from above the castle and strikes the roof with his sword, sparks flying. His mind is undoing him, but his body threatens to undo him as well.

Hamlet

Ian Holm is a lucid Polonius, comic and shrewd.

Polonius

Helena Bonham Carter is sublime as Ophelia.

Hamlet Ophelia

The part of Ophelia is really the litmus test of any production of Hamlet—she suffers directly what Hamlet thinks he is suffering. She cannot be the perfect daughter and lover, and is destroyed by what the royal court of Denmark carelessly asks of her. Her mad scene is unforgettable.

Glen Close shines as Gertrude, a difficult part to make likable.

HAMLET, Glenn Close, 1990

Alan Bates as Claudius, the venerable Paul Scofield as the ghost, and Nathaniel Parker as Laertes all do revelatory work as well.

Hamlet is a moody play. As my friend Numsiri once had to point out to me, it’s a bummer. But Mel Gibson squeezes out as much mook humor as can be discovered in the part.

Hamlet Gibson 2

The scenes from the play are not only truncated—the Polish plot is withdrawn entirely—but boldly re-arranged as well. This Hamlet moves with a good momentum, and drives its story home masterfully. It is also the Hamlet that turned me solidly into the Shakespeare junkie that I am. It is my Hamlet.

_______

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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.

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