Category Archives: William Shakespeare

Capsule Reviews, Film, Male Film Directors, William Shakespeare

Tempest (1982)

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Extremely good natured. Much of the photography consists of aesthetically pleasing extreme long shots of landscapes. Susan Sarandon and Molly Ringwald are both quite attractive in it and the acting, while sometimes corny, isn’t so one-dimensional or poorly conceived as to disprove the notion of “human progress”.

What’s most interesting is the superficial similarities to Cassavetes’ own Love Streams, which was released in 1985. Both are films about coming to terms with aging, the breakdown of and longing for family, and both feature Cassavetes’ and Rowlands’ characters as their emotional and thematic core. Also more strikingly is the violent storm which forms the films’ climactic sequence, which I can’t help but think Cassavetes had at least in mind at least partially when he appended the almost biblical thunderstorm to the end of Love Streams. However, the differences between the two films are vast and very telling.

In Tempest, when the protagonist Philip becomes emotionally isolated from all other characters, an island unto himself, he literally goes and secludes himself on an island. Robert Harmon in Love Streams is depicted as being this way through his interactions with the various women that come through his house. When Harmon scolds his child, the child is emotionally distraught and Harmon tries in some kind of half-baked and unfelt way to connect to him, while when Philip does this, its forgotten and his child’s feelings are never taken into much account. Both have lots of reaction shots from animals, but even when dealing with non-human actors Cassavetes gets the upper-hand. When the storm happens at the end of Tempest, it brings together the family unit; in Love Streams it simply leaves Harmon alone waving eerily through his window in a raincoat surrounded by animals-the mood is portentous and when you see it it’s as though Cassavetes is waving from beyond the grave. No moment of such intensity exists in Tempest.

Also, Mazursky tries to get Cassavetes to pull off a Woody Allen style upper-middle class urban neurotic in some scenes, which I don’t even think I need to say fails epically.

Film, Male Film Directors, William Shakespeare

Hamlet (1948)

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That Lawrence Olivier, who was 42-years-old in 1948, wanted to explore Hamlet’s incestuous desire for his mother is obvious when you consider how he cast the 30-year-old Eileen Herlie as Queen Gertrude. You lose track of how many times they kiss each other on the mouth. At some point, probably right after Hamlet kills Polonius but seems more interested in staring at his mother’s nipples, ostentatiously visible through her sheer night gown, you just want to throw your hands up in the hair and shout. “Oh for God’s sake, why don’t you two just fuck?” But neither Herlie, nipples or no nipples, or the very young Jean Simmons, who plays Ophelia, is the object of the film’s sexual desire. That would be Olivier himself, and you really don’t have to be gay to notice, who moves with the athletic grace of an Elizabethan Nijinsky, and who stages the best choreographed dual this side of the Mark of Zorro.

Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, which was the first British film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, is justly renowned, but it can be frustrating. It’s partly a result of how difficult it was to translate the culture of the Renaissance to the mid-20th Century, and how earnestly Olivier tried. 20th Century Englishmen were not Elizabethan Englishmen. In 1948, the British monarchy, and even the British Conservative Party, seemed like relics of the past. After the war, the voters had thrown out Churchill, voted in the Labor Party, a government that implemented the National Health Service in 1948, and the United Kingdom seemed well on the way to becoming a social democracy. Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, therefore, is a very personal Hamlet. There’s no need for spies. Clement Atlee’s Great Britain was no police state. So Olivier can cut out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern altogether. He also gets rid of Fortinbras, giving most of his lines to Horatio. Above all, Castle Elsinore becomes less like a seat of the Danish crown, and more like the great estate of one isolated, perverse ruling-class family, closer to the Earnshaws than the Tudors. You go in expecting Shakespeare. When you come out, you realize you’ve seen Emily Bronte.

Laurence Olivier’s Elsinore is a great haunted castle, sparsely populated, hallucinatory, unstable, dreamlike. His Hamlet doesn’t so much feign madness as he does participate in the madness of the Danish Court. Olivier so dominates the film that there are times when you’re almost ready to believe that everything around him is simply a product of his imagination. His cruelty towards Ophelia and his mother, the murder of Polonius and the play he stages to trap his uncle into revealing his guilt, much of it comes off like a series of destructive gestures designed to shock him out of a nightmare, to help him break out of the isolation of his own mind. For Grigori Kozintsev, the assassination of Polonius is the consummate political act. While it may have been an accident, it was still a decisive gesture by Prince Hamlet against a scheming politician who had already betrayed him. It’s also the moment that Claudius decides to send him to England to have him killed. Olivier’s Polonius barely exists. Hamlet stabs him through the arras, then turns away just as quickly to pin his mother to the bed.  She’s terrified, but not because her son just killed an old friend. She’s already forgotten the corpse on her floor. What scares her is the far off look in her son’s eyes. Is he going to kill her or rape her?

In this strange, perverse land of unreality, what exactly does Claudius govern? The film opens with him drinking a toast to his marriage. It foreshadows the famous climax where he tries to murder his nephew by persuading him to drink from a poisoned chalice, but we’re a little confused about whether he’s a head or state, or simply the head of an extended family. Indeed, there are times when Olivier’s Claudius seems more like Lord Toastmaster of Elsinore than the King of Denmark. His last act before he dies is to reach for his crown. It seems that much more pathetic when we wonder whether or not that crown is even worth anything. It also makes it clear why Hamlet is so reluctant to kill his uncle and become king himself. What will he rule over? What does he want?

The reaction of Claudius to the Murder of Gonzago, is so sudden, so decisive, so tormented, and so violent that it leaves no doubt in Hamlet’s mind, or our mind, that the ghost was real. Claudius killed the elder Hamlet. After he leaves the play, Claudius goes to his private bedchamber. Hamlet follows him. Dagger in hand, he hovers over the older man as he confesses his guilt to God. Then he pulls back. The excuse seems fantastical, contrived. Hamlet doesn’t want to kill his uncle while he’s praying because that means Claudius will go to heaven. We get a hint at the real reason a few minutes later when he sheaths his dagger then goes to his mother’s bedchamber. Inflamed with incestuous lust for Gertrude, he has no trouble stabbing Claudius, really Polonius, through the arras. He wants exactly what his uncle possesses, his mother. Therein lies the problem. Hamlet is obligated to avenge his father’s death. But he fears that once he’s King of Denmark, he’ll get what he wants, dominance over his mother.  He’ll be damned to hell. Polonius’ cadaver, like a reminder of his guilty desire, lies on the floor. Who is this damned mother? Who is this damned son? Like a pair of  serial killers, they momentarily forget the bloody cadaver lying on the floor while they argue, thinking only of themselves. It’s grotesquely comic, especially when Hamlet regains his wits.

“I’ll lug the guts into the next room,” he says.

It is significant, therefore that Hamlet finally murders Claudius only after Gertrude drinks from the poison cup meant for him, and dies. Hamlet can commit murder to avenge his mother, but not his father. More importantly, he can only murder the patriarch of Elsinore after his mother is dead, after the forbidden prize he really wants is safely out of his reach. The last half hour of Olivier’s Hamlet is as much a ballet as it is a play, or a film. The dreamlike, unstable Elsinore gives way to the clang of rapiers and daggers. Hamlet descends from a narcissistic, isolated consciousness into the solid reality of the physical. We finally get to see him as more than a creepy boy man who wants to crawl back into the womb. Olivier’s Hamlet is an Olympic class fencer. Laertes, poisoned rapier or no rapier, can’t touch him. The longer the dual goes on, the more base Claudius, and his treachery, seems. Laertes is no villain. Like Hamlet, he is obligated to avenge his father, and his sister. Terence Morgan is as good an athlete as Olivier, but the scratch with which he finally manages to infect his rival is small, petty, mean spirited, the act of a coward. Hamlet, by contrast, leaps gracefully up a flight of stairs, then falls on Claudius like an eagle descending from the clouds. We realize that, had it not been for the incestuous desire he felt for his mother, Hamlet would have been a hero no less noble than Prince Hal. But that is not to be. The United Kingdom in 1948, like Hamlet’s Denmark, is a prison, at least for the aristocracy, isolated and inbred on their country estates. The empire is over. The Queen is just a figurehead. There’s no more need for heroes, or kings. Hasn’t the world had enough of these decadent gentlemen and ladies? Hamlet’s level headed friend, the commoner Horatio, therefore, not King Fortinbras of Norway, gets the last word.

“Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally: and, for his passage,
The soldiers’ music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies: such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.”

Film, Male Film Directors, William Shakespeare

Hamlet (1964)

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Since the suppression, or even the regulation of language is tyranny, madness is a kind of freedom. A madman can say anything he wants. He can slip the bonds of court etiquette, political correctness, or suburban, middle-class restrictions against “talking about politics or religion,” and speak his mind while other people cower in fear or clam up like good Germans. Whether or not anybody listens to him is another question. To feign madness can be the act of a revolutionary. A man in full possession of his wits pretending to be out of his mind, whether he’s a poet or a fool, needs to have a better sense of what’s considered appropriate and what’s considered to be transgression than someone who never pretends to be anything but sane. King Lear’s fool spoke truth to power. Jesus was half crazy with rage when he kicked the money changers out of the temple. Can you imagine Arthur Rimbaud or William Burroughs saying as much as they did by writing a PHD thesis in sociology or a realistic novel?

When Hamlet returns to Elsinore after the murder of his father, he knows he’s walking into a potentially fatal trap. He’s next in line for the throne. His uncle Claudius, fortunately, doesn’t have any children, but that doesn’t mean a man who’s widely seen as a usurper wouldn’t consider his nephew, the rightful heir to the crown, a threat, and have him killed. There are spies everybody. Neither his lover Ophelia, the daughter of a fatuous court counselor, or even his own mother, especially his own mother, is trustworthy. A man like Claudius who murders his way to a throne certainly wouldn’t be above murder to consolidate his place on that throne. Even before he sees the ghost of his father, Hamlet has his suspicions. He’s faced with a choice. He can organize a coup, kill Claudius, and seize power, or he can end up locked up in, or, more likely, locked up in and strangled in one of Elsinor’s dungeons.

An Elizabethan Englishman would have understood that perfectly. A modern Englishman, or American, can be a bit more naive. Like Kay Corleone in The Godfather, he often labors under the illusion that “Presidents and Senators don’t have people killed.” Cinematic versions of Hamlet, therefore, such as the brilliant 1948 version by Lawrence Olivier, often dispense with politics altogether. They concentrate on family politics, forgetting that in Medieval Denmark, just like in The Godfather, politics are family politics. Sometimes, like Kenneth Branagh’s dull, messy 1996 film, they just get lost in Shakespeare’s cascade of words, unable to find a dramatic center among all the famous poetic tropes. Actors just wind up saying the words for the sake of saying the words, and the only thing that winds up being expressed is that some people are ACTING Shakespeare.

A Russian in 1964 wouldn’t have had that problem. He knew about purge trials, doctors plots, and secret police lurking around every corner in the Kremlin. Sergei Eisenstein’s brilliant Ivan the Terrible Part II — and Eisenstein was court poet to Stalin exactly the way Shakespeare was court poet to Elizabeth I — dramatized in shadow and light what Hamlet dramatized in words. So when I read on Dennis Grunes’ blog that there was a Russian version of Hamlet, the screenplay adapted by Boris Pasternak, that is fully the equal of, and perhaps even greater than Olivier’s 1948 film, I got a copy as soon as I could find one. My heart started to pound as soon as I heard the opening music, written by Shostakovitch — the man who wrote the Eighth Symphony that played in the streets of Leningrad during the long siege by the Nazis — but I was still a bit sceptical. The essence of William Shakespeare is language, more specifically, the English language. What’s more, as good as Pasternak’s translation probably is, I don’t speak Russian. So I’d have to read English subtitles of a Russian translation of a play from Elizabethan English. How much of Hamlet would actually be left?

Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet, which stars the Polish actor Innokenty Smoktunovsky as Hamlet, Mikhail Nazvanov as Claudius, Elza Radzina as Gertrude, Vladimir Erenberg, and Anastasiya Vertinskaya as Ophelia is a triumph that deserves to be better known in the United States. Had Kozintev’s just filmed a straight dramatization of Pasternak’s translation, he might have gotten lost in Shakespeare’s words just like Kenneth Branagh did. But he does more. Kozintev’s Hamlet is not just a translation of Shakespeare’s play into Russian. It’s a translation of Shakespeare’s play into light, shadow, music, geometry, into the language of cinema. At times it almost feels like Eisenstein’s poetic reconstruction of Stalinist terror wedded to Andrei Tarkovsky’s long, lingering camera work from Andrei Rubelev. Above all it’s a distinctly Russian take on Hamlet by people closer in spirit to Elizabethan England than anybody in the modern United Kingdom, Slavs rescuing an Anglo Saxon masterpiece from the Anglo Saxons, “cultural appropriation” in the best sense of the word.

The first thing you realize is that Kozintsev’s Hamlet is not an intimate, domestic, psychological Hamlet like Olivier’s. We aren’t introduced to the title character at his uncle’s and mother’s official wedding announcement, but riding into Elsinore along a beach. Northern Estonia fills in for Denmark. After Hamlet rides into the family fortress, a forbidding drawbridge over a deep mote is raised. We are now behind the Iron Curtain, cut off from the rest of the world. Suddenly it makes perfect sense when, later in the play, he asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern why they’ve come to “prison.” Denmark is a prison. Canons are fired. Black flags, for the elder Hamlet, are draped over the ramparts. A herald, not King Claudius himself, announces the marriage. During Claudius’s early meetings with the Danish court genuine political business gets taken care of. They’re not just an excuse for Hamlet’s brooding. What’s more, we know we are at a royal court. Protocol counts. Ritual counts. Hierarchy counts. This is the seat of the Danish crown, not an upper-middle-class living room.

During Hamlet’s initial monologues, therefore, we are aware, not only of Hamlet’s isolation, but of the consequences of Hamlet’s isolation. “O God, God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!” he thinks as he walks through a room full of haughty, scheming courtiers. They are thinking about power, money, self-preservation. He’s dwelling on his alienation. He has to get himself together quickly, or he’s doomed. What’s more, the Danish court seems like an oppressive place, for the Danish people, not just for Hamlet. This is a stylized, ritualistic set of Mandarins, not a boisterous democratic assembly. This is not Henry V’s Churchillian host amassed on the beaches of Normandy ready to do battle with the forces of evil. This is the twisted, repressed, secretive, secretively violently world of a tyrant. We are aware of, we dread the forces that lurk beneath the surface as much as Hamlet does. Something is waiting to spring out of the shadows, to consume the rotten state of Denmark.

In most productions of Hamlet, the elder Hamlet’s ghost is simply a messenger, the spirit that, “more in sorrow than in anger,” informs his son that he was murdered. Even in Olivier’s film, the ghost, while menacing, acts mainly as a Greek chorus. Not so in the play, where Horatio is justly concerned that the ghost could lure his friend to a precipice and so terrify him that he goes mad and jumps to his death. Try not to jump out of your skin when you see Kozintsev’s ghost for the first time. The music blares out. Hamlet, Horatio and their companions jump back in terror, the camera turns, and we see it, an enormous figure out of a nightmare, towering above Elsinore’s battlements, not only a messenger, but the return of the repressed soul of Denmark, the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

Dennis Grunes, in his otherwise positive review of Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film, expresses some disappointment that Olivier didn’t leave some ambiguity open about whether or not Claudius really murdered the elder Hamlet. Perhaps, he suggests, the ghost is merely a figment of Hamlet’s imagination, a demon who plays on his hatred of his uncle and his incestuous feelings for his mother to lure him to his destruction. In Kozintsev’s Hamlet, it really doesn’t matter. We are, once again, in the world of politics, not domestic politics. Claudius, whether he murdered the elder Hamlet or not, is still a usurper. He’s not the man to defend his kingdom from an invasion by Norway. His court is decrepit, old, ritualized, rotten. Denmark needs young Hamlet to organize a coup, remove Claudius, and release the repressed energy made so manifest in his father’s terrifying specter. Indeed, Kozintsev is so confident that in his reading of Shakespeare’s play that, after the players stage The Murder of Gonzago, and Claudius retreats to his study, the usurper confesses to the murder on camera, but Hamlet is nowhere to be seen. The famous “now I’ll do it pat, now he is praying” scene has been eliminated altogether. Innokenty Smoktunovsky’s Hamlet is a man of action, not a brooding melancholic. He goes right to his mother’s bedroom, brushing obsequious courtiers aside as he walks, and stabs Polonius, who he mistakenly believes to be Claudius, behind the heavy curtains.

That Kozintev is uninterested in the theme of incest is obvious by the actress he cast as Ophelia. Anastasiya Vertinskaya is a remarkably beautiful woman, not a sexed up tart like Kate Winslet in Branagh’s awful film. Branagh actually seems to take Polonius’ view, that Hamlet is just using Ophelia for sex. In Kozintev’s film, Ophelia is not a social inferior Hamlet is toying with as a sexual plaything. She looks more like a queen than Gertrude does. Kozintev’s Polonius isn’t as much of an obvious fool as he’s often played in English language versions of the play. He’s an obvious schemer. It’s clear that his “concern” over Hamlet’s attentions to his daughter is more a trumped up bit of drama he can use to get into King Claudius’ favor. He’s made his choice. He doesn’t see Hamlet as ever ascending the thrown — Or why wouldn’t he want his daughter to marry the next king? — but, rather, ending up strangled in one of Elsinore’s dungeons. Hamlet’s murder of Polonius, therefore, makes perfect sense. It’s not just a semi-comical cockup. It’s the beginning of the coup that Hamlet has to organize if he wants to live. Unfortunately, it also destroys Ophelia, and any chance of an alliance with Laertes, a sympathetic, and forceful character Hamlet might have otherwise gotten on his side. Indeed, we can finally see what’s at stake when Claudius suborns the grief stricken young man to murder his nephew. Whether or not he murdered the elder Hamlet, Claudius is an evil, Machiavellian politician fully prepared to use his late counselor’s son to save his own skin.

If Konzintsev’s Hamlet has a weakness, at least compared to Olivier’s Hamlet, it’s the way he stages the fifth act. Perhaps it’s more of the logical outcome of the way he stages the first four acts than a weakness, but, in any case, Kozintsev’s Hamlet lacks the thrilling climax of Olivier’s. For the explosive, athletic Laurence Olivier, Act Five of Hamlet is the revolution, the moment when the man feigning madness throws off the cloak of his mental distress in order to overthrow the rotten monarchy in the state of Denmark. Olivier loudly  forces himself onto Ophelia’s funeral procession. He’s an Olympic class fencer who choreographs one of the most thrilling duals in cinema. He’s undone, not through his own tragic flaw, which he’s now resolved, but through Claudius’ treachery. Before he dies, he leaps off a flight of stairs on top of his uncle, stabbing him repeatedly, a man who’s now decisively answered the question “to be or not to be” with “to be.” He wants to live but he’s dead. Innokenty Smoktunovsky’s Hamlet never quite makes it out of his brooding shell. He confronts Laertes at Ophelia’s grave, but never one ups his grief. I don’t even remember, for example, if Kontzinev even left the famous “should I eat a crocodile” monologue in the film. The final duel lacks the explosive grace of the 1948 film. Hamlet doesn’t so much overthrow Claudius as stand witness to the collapse of the Danish monarchy on the eve of a hostile takeover by Fortinbras and Norway. Claudius is sent to hell, but manages to drag the Danish crown down with him. Hamlet walks outside and looks at the sea. The camera lingers, Tarkovsky style. The landscape seems to overpower the dying king of Denmark. Has order been restored? We don’t know. A blight, Claudius, has been removed from Castle Elsinsore. Whether or not Fortinbras will prove any better is left to our imagination. But we suspect that he won’t.

Film, Male Film Directors, William Shakespeare

Henry V (1944) Henry V (1989) El Cid (1961)

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“But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?”

When Laurence Olivier decided to film Henry V, he understood that he was defying the conventional wisdom that Shakespeare didn’t translate well to the movies. With a multi-million dollar budget and a cast of hundreds, you could reenact the Battle of Agincourt, but that by no means guaranteed that you’d capture the excitement of the famous English military victory any better than the Lord Chamberlain’s men did in 1600 with a cast of dozens. William Shakespeare knew that what limited his ability to stage the history of Henry V also freed his imagination. The more he was required to to make up for the Globe Theater’s lack of realism, the more he would  have the opportunity to display his poetic genius. Laurence Olivier understood Shakespeare intuitively. He decided not to film Henry V as a Hollywood epic. Rather, he would use the tools film gave him to translate the language of the Elizabethan theater into the language of cinema.

Henry V opens with a panoramic view of London in 1600. There it is, old London Bridge, old St. Paul’s, the full skyline of the medieval English capitol. Surely this would have been a powerful image for any British theatergoer in 1944. Olivier’s inspired approach to filming a close, almost literal translation of Henry V from the Elizabethan stage to the movie theaters of 1944 was to film, along with Henry V itself, a recreation of how Henry V would have been staged in 1600. Felix Aylmer and Robert Helpmann, therefore,  not only play the Archbishops of Canterbury and Ely. They play actors playing the archbishops of Canterbury and Ely.  Laurence Oliver not only plays Prince Hal. He plays an actor playing Prince Hal. As the two archbishops manipulate the King into invading France — a war that will head off any possibility that the crown will try to confiscate church property — we realize that we are watching the opening of Henry V along with a 16th century audience. They laugh. They cheer. They make the actor playing the actor playing the Archbishop of Ely so nervous that he drops a handful of documents on the floor. He has to pick them up to read his lines. He drops them again.

By this method, Olivier can stop and start the play at his convenience. He can slow down and break up the famously convoluted reading of the Law Salique, dish it out in bites small enough for a modern audience to swallow. By the time Henry is ready to cross the English channel to invade France, we understand both the legal justification for the invasion and how contrived this legal justification probably was. It doesn’t matter. These funny little churchman aren’t manipulating King Henry. He’s already decided on his course of action. What’s more, we no more question Henry’s decision to invade France than we question the coming invasion of Normandy. Henry is the man to restore a just order to western Europe, a Churchill in Elizabethan clothing. Olivier’s reading of Henry V is both nationalist and true to its original intent. William Shakespeare knew war was terrible. He was also a patriotic Englishman.  War is hell. Go team Britannia.

If Laurence Olivier’s decision to stage a play within a film solved the problem of how to translate the language of theater into the language of film, he’s now faced with the challenge of how to make full use of the tools cinema provides him. How would William Shakespeare himself stage Henry V if he had cameras and hundreds of extras, if he could control the lighting, stop and start the film as he successfully builds new stage after new stage, if he could leave the “cockpit” and film on location in the “vasty fields of France?” An abrupt introduction of “nature,” a rainstorm, into the play within the film signals the beginning of the transformation from the theater to the movies, from the play within the film to the highly stylized, yet still more cinematic than Elizabethan recreation of the Battle of Agincourt. We hear a thunderclap. A boy with a placard that says “The Boar’s Tavern” indicates a possible change in venue, but the “groundlings,” the common people in the cheap seats, stay on. It’s their moment, the introduction of “Pistol,” who was a great favorite of the working class in Elizabethan England,  Nym, and Bardolph. We here about Sir John Falstaff’s illness, and remember how Prince Hal rejected Falstaff and all his old friends when he became king. The groundings laugh at Pistol’s every word, every gesture. The actors get soaking wet but continue. Whether or not the “gentlemen” in the audience have gone to the Boar’s Tavern is never made clear, but we don’t see any sign of them. This is the London mob having fun.

When Nym, Bardolph and Pistol decide to follow King Henry to France, we remember that the English army at Agincourt, like the British and American army that would hit the beaches at Normandy depended on the working-class, those English long bowman who would defeat French chivalry, those British and American factory workers and shopkeepers who would drive Hitler’s master race back across the Rhine. The transition to France now quickly proceeds, first to the French court, then to the siege of Harfleur.

“Thus with imagined wing our swift scene flies
In motion of no less celerity
Than that of thought. Suppose that you have seen
The well-appointed king at Hampton pier
Embark his royalty; and his brave fleet
With silken streamers the young Phoebus fanning:
Play with your fancies, and in them behold
Upon the hempen tackle ship-boys climbing;
Hear the shrill whistle which doth order give
To sounds confused; behold the threaden sails,
Borne with the invisible and creeping wind,
Draw the huge bottoms through the furrow’d sea,
Breasting the lofty surge: O, do but think
You stand upon the ravage and behold
A city on the inconstant billows dancing;
For so appears this fleet majestical,
Holding due course to Harfleur.”

Harfleur, like Normandy, falls. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” Henry declaims, leading the charge. “Or close the wall up with our English dead.” Nym, Bardolph and Pistol are now in France, having participated in the successful attack. The Globe Theater is gone. We know we’re not really in France. The scene is stylized, ritualistic, dramatic, not realistic, but it’s no longer a film of a play, but, rather, a cinematic dramatization of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Every Englishman (and woman) in 1944 would have known what happened next. The English army is cornered by vastly superior French numbers. The French crown has paid an enormous sum of money to recruit and outfit a army, which now  outnumbers the English anywhere from 4:3 to 6:1. By all rights the English should have lost. Henry should have gone back to England in disgrace with most of his soldiers lying dead in the “vasty fields of France.” Agincourt was a decisive English victory against the odds, as unlikely as it would have been had the British not gotten on their ships at Dunkirk, but turned and smashed Hitler and the Wehrmacht once and for all.

Compared to pageantry and unapologetic patriotism of Olivier’s film, Kenneth Branagh’s revisionist, post-Vietnam reading of Henry V is intelligent, competently acted, thought provoking, and humanistic, but, ultimately, dull and uninspired. Laurence Olivier’s St. Crispians Day speech makes me want to jump once more into the breach right along with Nym, Bardolph, and Pistol.  Branagh’s makes me wonder what exactly such a ringing call to battle is doing in a film that,if a misreading of Shakespeare’s play for a good cause  is still a pretty blatant misreading. The film’s most powerful scene, Henry ordering his old friend Bardolph hanged for looting,  is so well done that it short circuits the victory at Agincourt. Is Henry a hero or just a ruthless dictator? In Olivier’s play, Henry is a shimmering democratic warrior angel, an athletic Churchill in the prime of his youth. In Branagh’s film, he’s an opportunistic social climber who hangs an old friend on the way to marry his French Princess — a magnificent young Emma Thompson speaking perfect French and bad English.

But as laudable as Branagh’s liberal, anti-war vision is, he undercuts it with the way he stages the Battle of Agincourt. The battle, which is filmed largely in close ups, might be more realistic than Olivier’s. The mud, gore, and brutal hand to hand combat is probably what the Hundred Years War did look like to the common soldier, but neither Shakespeare nor Branagh has the consistent anti-war, anti-authoritarian vision of, say, a Leo Tolstoy. For Shakespeare, it’s intentional. He wrote a play to glorify Henry V and the Tudors. Branagh, on the other hand, rudely pushes a post-Vietnam sensibility into the play’s patriotic Elizabethan myth making. What’s more, shortly after we see Henry order Bardolph’s hanging, we then get to see the horror of war visualized as the brutality of the common soldier. That might work as an anti-war message. War reduces us to beasts. But it also detracts from message Branagh had sent when he dwelt on Bardolph’s brutal execution. Is this a straight staging of Henry V or a deconstruction of the legend of Prince Hal? It’s both, obviously, and it’s not bad as far as cinema goes, but it’s not Shakespeare either. It’s a realistic war movie weighted down by Shakespeare’s language.

Anthony Mann’s El Cid is something quite different. If Olivier overcomes the limitations of the cinema of his day by his oblique, stylized approach to the Battle of Agincourt, and if Kenneth Branagh gives us a realistic, big budget Henry V that’s neither true to the source material nor grand enough to be genuinely realistic — Agincourt was, after all, the biggest, bloodiest battle of the Middle Ages — then Anthony Mann, up until then best known for low-budget westerns, makes a bold dramatic choice and stays with it with so much crazy determination that it works. El Cid is the biggest, loudest, grandest, most patriotic, most romantic historical epic ever made. Mann has thousands of extras, not hundreds. He films on location at four of the biggest, most imposing castles in all of Spain. What’s more, having worked in the American southwest, he knows how to make good use of the Spanish landscape, the deep blue, sun drenched Mediterranean, the forbidding light, space, and beauty of the Iberian peninsula. Charleton Heston may be wooden, but he’s larger than life wooden. Sophia Loren may not be a great actress, but she is able to convey the broad, operatic quality of her character Doña Ximena. Genevieve Page, as Princess Donna Urraca of Zamora, has more regal, female authority in one glance than you can find in all nine hours of Peter Jackson’s execrable Lord of the Rings saga. The over the top drama, the incestuous love of Donna Urraca for her brother Alphonso, Alphonso’s betrayal of their other brother Sancho, Cid’s blatantly oedipal dual with Doña Ximena’s father Count Gormaz, the Muslims, both good, Cid’s friend Al-Mu’tamin the Emir of Zaragosa, or comically, B-movie evil, the Osama Bin Laden like Ben Yusef, Doña Ximena’s attempt to revenge herself on the man she loves for having killed her father, everything right up to the climatic battle on the beaches in front of Valencia, where Cid leads his troops into battle even after he’s dead, serves up the kind of blood and thunder, the romantic melodrama an Elizabethan poet like William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe surely would have appreciated better than any of us.

The very best scene by far in this relentless, driving, noisy, colorful, out-sized, overly long, over the top medieval epic follows the inspired method Laurence Olivier invented for Henry V. As good as the climatic battle scenes are — and they’re better than anything in the infantile Lord of the Rings — the most exciting battle scene is a fake, or more accurately, a staged battle scene, a tournament staged by the film’s characters within the film. We are in front of Castle Bellmonte in Southern Spain, here standing in for the ancient Spanish city of Callahora. Callahora is disputed territory, claimed by both the King of Aragon and the King of Castile. Cid, who’s under arrest for treason — he defied a royal decree by sparing Al-Mu’tamin’s life — has taken up the gauntlet as Ferdinand, the King of Castile’s champion. Since Cid had killed Count Gormaz under suspicious circumstances, the King of Aragon thinks it’s an opportune moment to lay claim. He’s certain his champion, Don Martin, who’s killed 27 other men in single combat, can beat anything Ferdinand can send against him. Ferdinand, with good reason, is skeptical himself. Cid is a young man. Don Martin is a legendary knight.

What follows is as realistic a staging of a medieval trial by combat as you’re likely to see, yet a realistic staging that uses the full panoply of cinematic technique available in 1961. Olivier’s staging of the Battle of Agincourt, Sergei Eisenstein’s staging of the Battle of Lake Peipus are among the best battle scenes ever filmed, but they are limited by their size and scope. Olivier couldn’t put the 30,000 men he would have needed on stage. Nevsky couldn’t show the real carnage of the battle on the ice. Anthony Mann solves the problem by staging not a battle — although he would stage a battle at the end of the movie — but a tournament, a dual, a fight to the death by the champions of Aragon and Castile for the City of Callahora. In place of Olivier’s and Shakespeare’s groundlings, in place of the London mob, we get a battle of of facial expressions between Doña Ximena and Donna Urraca. Donna Urraca wins. I think Genevieve Page is a much better, much more subtle actress, but I suppose your mileage may vary. We see the dual between Cid and Don Martin — we know that Cid’s going to win because we’re only an hour into a three hour movie — not through our eyes, but through the eyes of the Castilian court. Donna Urraca’s beautiful face registers every blow and every counter blow. Doña Ximena is melodramatically conflicted. She loves Cid but wants him dead. She was charged by her father just before he died to avenge his death, and she wants to avenge his death, but she also knows that the only reason he had been so determined to provoke Cid was a creepy, incestuous passion, and a reluctance to admit he was growing old. After Cid stabs Don Martin through the heart, the camera draws back. Cid walks across the field to bow to greet King Ferdinand as the now Prince of Callahora. We see not only the scale of their field of battle, but the scale of Castle Bellemonte, and the stark landscape surrounding it. Olivier’s Henry V seems positively intimate and domestic compared to this. But Mann could not have done it without the approach to history Olivier invented back in 1944.

Sadly, people who film historical romance have not followed up on Laurence Olivier or Anthony Mann. They’ve taken one of two approaches. There’s the approach Kenneth Branagh used in the 1989 version of Henry V, a liberal, revisionist, anti-war deconstruction of the myth of chivalry. The best, and probably the most extreme example of this type of cinema would be Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac. The second and far worse would be the one Peter Jackson took in his Lord of the Rings trilogy, romance devoid of romance, chivalry without chivalry, a medieval epic that uses special effects in place of drama, infantile racism in place of political intrigue. If Olivier’s Prince Hal is a man of destiny who triumphs, and Charleton Heston’s El Cid one who fails, then Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn is one who bores. Replace the bawdy, irreverent Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym with the insipid Frodo and Sam, and Shakespeare’s groundlings become G-rated moppets. Aragorn’s speech in front of the gates of Mordor is a wooden imitation of Olivier’s St. Crispian’s Day speech. Three major set pieces and an army of the dead against what must seem like 100,000 computer generated orcs doesn’t equal one Battle of Agincourt. Laurence Olivier we have need of thee today.