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Tag Archives: Richard Burton

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.

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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.

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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 #34: Hamlet (1964)

31 Sunday Jul 2016

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

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Broadway, Hume Cronyn, John Gielgud, Richard Burton

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

34. Bill Colleran and John Gielgud’s Hamlet (1964)

As I mentioned last week, The Globe’s film of its stage show of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a vibrant romp in Renaissance style.

The film of Richard Burton’s performance as Hamlet on Broadway is, on the other hand, an exercise in drab modernity.

Hamlet 1The film was directed by Bill Colleran, but the stage play Colleran was filming was directed by John Gielgud, who apparently directed by whim.

Famously, this version uses a sparse stage, and the actors wore street clothes, to give the story an air of being a rehearsal. What meta-theatrical context is there, then, for this Hamlet, by these towering talents of Burton and Gielgud? There doesn’t seem to be any.

The aesthetic messages of these choices seems just to say that this is not fucking Camelot.

Burton had performed in Camelot on Broadway in its legendary, original run. The musical was beloved by John F. Kennedy, and after he was assassinated in 1963, it would be used to craft the narrative of his brief, youthful, tragic, optimistic presidency.

Bill Colleran filmed this Hamlet in black and white, which makes the thing look even drabber than the stage version.

This was 1964, the same year that Burton starred in Beckett and The Night of the Iguana. Maybe he should have taken a break.

I mean, I can imagine vulgarians smacking their lips at the chance to see Richard Burton do Hamlet, but Richard Burton is a bit spastic and very stentorian here, almost like he is doing his impression of Richard Burton overacting in Hamlet. He likes to SCREAM in his WELSH ACCENT.

HE LIKES TO SCREAM IN HIS WELSH ACCENT!

I adore Burton, which makes it strange to watch around him in this iteration of Hamlet.

Hume Cronyn plays Polonius well. He seems like a fond father of both his children, and his finicalness and officiousness comes off as more noble than foolish.

Hamlet 6Linda Marsh is a fine Ophelia, finding a compelling balance between asserting her view of the world and her obedience to the patriarchs who impose a different view of the world upon her. It is the irreconcilable gulf between these two sides of herself that will destroy Ophelia, which is why a Hamlet can survive a mediocre Hamlet, but not a mediocre Ophelia, whose mad scene will not allow for mediocrity.

Hamlet 7Marsh preens herself, gazes at the round paddle of a fan as if it were a mirror, proves her feminine equilibrium during Ophelia’s mad scene, her voice quivering, her eyes flitting without purpose, still trying to be the perfect young woman.

And then she scuttles off, leaving us with Claudius and Gertrude. Hmmmm.

Eileen Herlie’s Gertrude comes off as a cipher, and Alfred Drake’s Claudius about the same. They are more drab furniture. I’ve seen better acting out of the puppets on Mr. Rodgers’ Neighborhood.

John Collum is a likeable Laertes, for what it’s worth.

Had Burton squatted center stage clutching Yorick’s skull for three hours without uttering a word, the effect would have somehow been better.

Hamlet 8I can see it now: Andy Warhol’s 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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