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The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #38: Henry V (1944)

04 Sunday Sep 2016

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Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

38. Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944)

So last week I barely endured all the shit-mongering of Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, which seemed even worse this time than the previous times I’ve watched it. Rather than careen at Almereyda’s Cymbeline, I took pity on myself and watched something—anything—else.

What I picked was Olivier’s Henry V, which I remember not liking all that much, if compared to his Richard III.

Henry-V-film-1944-Riverfront-Theatre-Newport

Actually, I liked this movie far more than I did the last time I watched it years ago. I loved it.

Of course, my loyalties were originally to Branagh’s gritty and realistic iteration, which came out in 1989, whereas Olivier’s 1944 version seemed stilted and quaint to me at first.

Henry V 1

Odd, how Olivier seems the cultural epitome of classical Shakespeare, when he could be so cavalier in changing the text and the context of the work.

For example, the first half hour of the play is set in the open-aired “O” of The Globe, in Elizabethan London, using a huge, meticulous model of the city and a fairly good recreation of the theatrical space. The camera movement in the theater reminds one of Scorcese, and makes the space feel so intimate.

Henry V 2

The role of Henry does not seem as personal as Branagh, of course, but the perspective of the Olivier film is breathtaking, and, oddly, the laughter and reaction of the audience makes watching this portion of the film seem like watching a sitcom on television. The bridge between Elizabethan England and my own doesn’t seem that long.

Olivier makes the leap to France through a scrim and onto more cinematic sets, but once again, even though we are leaving the Elizabethan audience behind, and joining Henry on his medieval battles, the scenery is stylized to look like a combination of a fairy tale and the art of the Middle Ages. At times, the architectural perspectives look a bit like a funhouse.

Henry V 3

Despite all of this cinematic soundstage trickery, the battle scenes come off as credible.

Henry V Fight Scene

There are plenty of fine performances in this film, and no bad ones that seem to mar the whole bloody thing. And there is one actor whose presence fills this rogue’s heart with joy: Robert Newton, who here plays Pistol, the commoner and onetime associate of the king in his wilder, more youthful days.

Henry V Robert Newton

You might be familiar with him as Lukey in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out from 1947, or as Long John Silver in Walt Disney’s Treasure Island in 1950. I found about his performance in Odd Man Out from reading Harold Pinter’s Old Times. Robert Newton is funny, yet so damned compelling, too.

Olivier found legitimate ways to inject humor into Henry V. Maybe this was a result, somehow, of making the film while World War II was happening–trying to find some lightness in such a dark, serious time.

If you watch this Henry V with the right set of eyes, it’s an absolute delight.

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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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The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #14: Richard III (1955)

24 Sunday Jan 2016

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Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film 2

#14. Richard III (1955)

I’ve decided to deviate from my survey of Kenneth Branagh films lest this guide get too tedious, especially since his miserable Love’s Labour Lost is lurking for me like some malicious ghost. (The very prospect scared me away for a month.)

Instead, I pivot to that first British actor and director whose iconic relationship to Shakespeare on film is an essential part of his mythos: Laurence Olivier.

I must confess, your favorite Shakespearean rogue took a long time learning to love Olivier. When I was growing up, when dinosaurs freely roamed the earth, his name itself signified that elevated cultural sophistication that no reasonable person would want to inflict on himself. In my senior year of high school, my excellent teacher, Ms. Musgrave, showed us his grainy black and white film of Hamlet, which had terrible sound quality that diminished Olivier’s greatest strength: his voice. And Olivier was not a method actor, so that to me the whole thing seemed deeply imbued with affect. He was a traditional thespian, for whom how to speak and where to stand were paramount over sense-memories and emotional discovery. Although I have tended to exaggerate this quality.

My colleague Kevin Crawford, a peerless Shakespearean actor himself, harshly poo-pooed my poo-pooing of Olivier. What I didn’t know then was that Olivier is a more impressive director than he is an actor, and he is a better actor (and this is obvious to me now) than I gave him credit for.

Richard III is his best film.

R3 poster

The setting for this film is tradition, some version of historically accurate with a hint of storybook whimsy added, like the giant crown in the eaves of the castle that looms over the proceedings of the court.

Richard III is a hunchbacked, malformed man who is second in succession to the throne when his oldest brother becomes king after a period of civil war. As a soldier, as a leader of arms, he had purpose, but in peacetime he has nothing but his own loneliness and worthlessness to look forward to. So he begins to plot his bloody way to the top.

R3.9

Richard is a bad character, like a two-dimensional vice character that Shakespeare might have plucked out of a morality play and given psychological depth to. And Olivier, in a striking soliloquy that is filmed in a single take, looks us in the eye and confides his great frustration, his sense of honor, and his plans to us, the audience.

R3.1

That he trusts us with this information makes us feel gratified, and perhaps a bit implicated, as he warns us of what he will do to his family. Olivier’s portrayal is nuanced, letting us understand how much he might feel conflicted by this vast impulse that has taken him.

One of his schemes is to woo and marry the Lady Anne (Claire Bloom), whose father and husband both died by his hands in the civil war preceding the play.

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He begins this suit over the coffin of her husband, Edward. Shakespeare’s psychology is fascinating. Richard is wooing a beautiful noblewoman, which he perhaps has the nerve to attempt since the odds of succeeding are so low that failure should be considered less important than the audacity of the attempt.

Considering the context, Lady Anne is not receptive. But Richard is unrelenting in asserting his love for her, and makes himself vulnerable to her vengeance if that means making her happy. He forces her to choose to love or murder him.

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Is it the agency he grants her, her own grieving weariness, or perhaps an inkling that for his vulnerability, for his devotion, for himself, that makes her relent, and accept his proposal?

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In a romantic comedy, this would be the happy ending.

But Olivier’s Richard III also shows us the joys to be found in wickedness, and he will boast of his victory over love to us.

But the real relationship of Richard III is between Richard and his willing conspirator, the Duke of Buckingham, played to perfection by Ralph Richardson.

R3 Ralph Richardson

Olivier and Richardson are so reactive to one another’s performances that our joy in their Machiavellian schemes turns into great fun, until Richard decides to start bumping off children.

There are so many great performances in the film, including John Gielgud as Clarence, the nice, middle brother whose innocence runs the risk of being sentimentally intolerable. If Richard’s eldest brother, King Edward IV, is a bit corrupt, or at least flaky, Clarence’s assassination gives us reason to pause in our admiration of Richard.

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Claire Bloom as Lady Anne is astoundingly good, in one of the most difficult parts of all of Shakespeare. If we don’t believe that she has truly, psychologically capitulated to Richard, then the rest of the story doesn’t matter.

Olivier gives Richard a surprising amount of heart, and the vulnerability he has shown Lady Anne we will also see from time to time, when he isn’t scheming, even when he has committed to being a villain. Olivier’s Richard can know fear.

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It is a shame that I forsook Olivier for so long. His acting was amazing, but he was generous as an actor, and surrounded himself with equally talented people. And for all my expectations that he was somehow atavistic in supporting a historical sense of Shakespeare, Olivier possessed an artist’s eye in interpreting Richard III, and also in his Henry V. In R3, he rearranged scenes, changed lines, made much visual use of Mistress Shore (the extramarital consort of Edward IV). Perhaps Olivier is not the place to start for fans of Shakespeare on film, but among all the Shakespeare films I’ve seen, this version of R3 has grown on me the most, and is the most rewarding one to put in the Blu-ray player once more, and hit play.

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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.

Shakespearing #28.1: Four Observations About Othello

15 Sunday Feb 2015

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Shakespearing #28.1 by John King

Four Observations About Othello

28 Othello1. In Shakespeare is Hard, But So is Life, the Irish theater critic Fintan O’Toole says,

If you look at the character of Othello in isolation, and in particular if you look at him through the notion of the “tragic flaw’, then he is not, for all his facility with words, very bright. He can talk up a storm, but he’s not much for thinking. His tragic flaw is jealousy and he carries it around like a crutch, just waiting for someone to kick it from under him. He is manipulated by Iago, a man he didn’t enough trust enough in the first place to make him his lieutenant, without ever attempting to ascertain facts for himself. Suspecting his wife, he fails to confront her with her supposed infidelity, or to question her alleged lover, or to ask any of the other people who could tell him what’s going on. He is driven demented by a handkerchief. (69)

Now O’Toole is setting up a discussion of the chaotic Elizabethan context of the social construction of social status and political power, but if we look at Michael Cassio as being the hero of the play, then his tragic flaw is that he cannot hold his liquor. Sad, really.

Shakes is Hard2. Othello is about race, or more particularly, it is like a litmus test about race. We out ourselves in how we react to the race and racism of the play.

O’Toole remarks on how icky 19th century scholarship was about the interracial couple at the core of the play (76-77). O’Toole is so keen to show how progressive he is that he misreads A.C. Bradley entirely.

Shakespearean TragedyIn a lengthy endnote in his Shakespearean Tragedy, Bradley chronicles the ridiculous debate over whether or not Shakespeare actually intended Othello to be a black man because, you know, Othello would have kissed Desdemona, which means that our beloved bard has perhaps accidentally almost wanted people to consider interracial love. This dimwitted denial among otherwise intelligent people so enervated Bradley that he writes wearily in the first person plural, in this endnote, “We do not like the real Shakespeare” (416). Bradley’s dry sarcasm was lost on O’Toole.

I once got to hear James Earl Jones discuss his career, and on the subject of Shakespeare, he said that he preferred the part of Michael Cassio to Othello.

When portraying Othello for the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival, Kevin Crawford forewent any pigmented make up at all so as to avoid the stench of blackface, and considering the emotional and political climate post-9/11, made Othello a converted Muslim.

White actors are still drawn to this perplexing role in Shakespearean tragedy, but have stopped using blackface since at least the 1990s. There are so many black actors that the grotesquerie of blackface is easily avoided, and while this has long been true, we are now at least two generations into being fully aware that this is true.

If many audience of previous ages have found the color of Othello’s skin disgusting to contemplate, when that skin color is the bizarre co-optation of blackface, I must confess that the spectacle does make me queasy, as in Olivier’s turn as the Moor.

othello

3. From Olivier’s perspective, the convention of using make up to render him black was an established stage convention, and the connection to Step and Fetchit perhaps seemed especially remote to him.

I have, over the years, shrugged off my aversion to Olivier and his seemingly old-fashioned acting. In his own ways, he was bold, and funny, and worthy of some indulgence (not that the blackface thing in Othello is tolerable). Olivier was a term used throughout my childhood to indicate an absurdly perfect actor, when in fact he was a human actor devoted to Shakespeare. The Shakespeare thing is why, for so many people, he wasn’t quite real.

OlivierFor Olivier, the challenge of Othello was finding an appropriate voice for the Moor. In his autobiography, he writes,

I decided to have a bash at that voice. I have always felt nervous about roaring and screaming at home, but feel no self-consciousness if I can get out into the hills. I remember once screaming King Lear at a group of cows that had formed a ring of curiosity around me. “God,” I thought, ‘I hope the audience is as patient as they are.’

4. In 2009, I got to see Philip Seymour Hoffman portray Iago in Peter Sellars’ production  of Othello in the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at NYU. Very little of that experience stands out to me, although I may have been a little drunk and certainly gastrointestinally encumbered by too much Arturo’s pizza.

Othello and Desdemona’s bed was plexiglas and filled with television images, a tableau that looked stupid rather than expressionistic or meaningfully postmodern, since sleeping on plexiglas seems like a non-starter no matter what such weird behavior is supposed to mean.

But what I do remember is the strangeness of Iago himself–the play seemed to be about Iago’s attempts at having human relationships with his wife, with Othello, with Desdemona, and his transgressive ways of breaking some unspoken barrier between human loneliness and the emptiness of convention to the secret authentic core of other people’s lives. Hoffman’s Iago seemed, in his soliloquy, to be having a hard time having a relationship to himself, an outsider, even when he is all alone.

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1flipJohn King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.