u.k. drama
1944
color 127 min.
Director: Laurence Olivier
CLV: $69.95 - available
2 discs, catalog # CC1410L
Laurence Olivier's HENRY V today seems like nothing more than a
miracle in answer to the Chorus' call for "a muse of fire that would
ascend the brightest heaven of invention." It's a dazzling adaptation
of a Shakespeare play, made (in Technicolor, no less) in the midst of
World War II. That it was also a financial success, appealing to the
mass audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, was an extraordinary as
it was unexpected, and a trio of Oscar nominations (Best Picture, Best
Actor, Best Original Score), along with a special Academy Award to
producer/director/star Olivier, only affirmed its charmed
existance.
It is easy fifty years later, to underestimate the magnitude of
Olivier's achievement. Filmmakers with much greater records of success
than Olivier's--Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle with A MIDSUMMER
NIGHT'S DREAM, George Cukor with ROMEO AND JULIET, and Paul Czinner
with AS YOU LIKE IT Z(with young Olivier as Orlando)--brought
Shakespeare to the screen during the 1930's, supported by some of the
most popular stars of the era. Their reward: millions of dollars in
red ink and reams of negative reviews. The accepted wisdom was that if
Shakespeare couldn't be sold by James Cagney (A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS
DREAM), or Leslie Howard, Norma Shearer, and John Barrymore (ROMEO AND
JULIET), Shakespeare was box-office poison.
Interest in producing a full-length screen version of Henry V dated
from the '30s--from television, not a film studio. Beginning in 1937,
the BBC had broadcast scenes from Shakespeare's plays on its fledgling
television channel. Its director Dallas Bower had proposed a televised
HENRY V. The BBC's television unit shut down with the coming of war,
and Bower became an executive at the Ministry of Information, where he
tried without success to enlist support for a HENRY V film.
In the spring of 1942, Bower produced a radio show in which Laurence
Olivier read two of Henry's speeches. He found Olivier willing to
consider starring in a film of the play. Soon after, producer Filippo
Del Giudice bought Bower's HENRY screenplay; after hearing a radio
broadcast of Olivier in the role, he was convinced that Olivier should
star in a filmed version. Olivier was enthusiastic about adapting
Shakespeare to the screen, although his first choice was RICHARD
III. Del Giudice convinced him that HENRY's patriotic story was more
suited to the times than RICHARD, with its tale of perfidy amoung the
members of England's ruling families.
Olivier still had unhappy memories of Czinner's AS YOU LIKE IT, and
insisted on full creative control over the film. Del Giudice obliged
him (he'd previously given the same consideration to Noel Coward on IN WHICH WE
SERVE. Olivier didn't intend to direct the film; he wanted this
responsibility to go to a more seasoned hand. But he was turned down
successively by William Wyler, Carol Reed, and Terence Young, before
agreeing to direct himself. As his assistant and technical advisor, he
chose Reginald Beck, the editor of THE DEMI-PARADISE, in which Olivier
was starring.
He then enlisted critic and scholar Alan Dent to cowrite the
screenplay. They succeeded in retaining the essence of the play while
trimming it by over 1500 lines, or nearly half its length. Some of
this material was cut for the sake of brevity, while other
sections--depicting the political machinations behind Henry's invasion
of France, and the king's bloodthirsty nature--were removed for
propaganda reasons, thus rendering Henry benign and patriotic, unlike
either Shakespearian or historical versions. For his score, Olivier
chose another veteran of the failed AS YOU LIKE IT, William Walton,
one of the most respected composers of his generation.
The film won over critics and audiences alike by succeeding where
every other screen adaptation had failed: It made Shakerpeare's
language and settings work for the film, not against it. Far from
denying the work's theatrical origins, Olivier and Dent seized on
these factors, and the film opens as a reenactment of the play in the
year 1600 at the Globe Theater.
This setting gave Olivier an opportunity to overthrough the
suffocating stateliness with which Shakespeare had been treated in
earlier movies. For audiences expecting a slow, reverential film,
HENRY V's opening scenes were a revelation, reminding them how
boisterous audiences in the playwright's time were. It also emphasized
that, for all of their powers, Shakespeare's words were vital
components of a living, breathing theater, cast in flesh, not
stone.
Olivier's treatment solved the problem of what to do with the part of
the Chorus from the play. As portrayed by Laslie Banks, the Chorus
became a character who is part of the play-within-the-film. As the
movie progresses, the theatrical setting gives way to cinema's
illusions of time and space (a similar approach proved successful
thirty years later when Ingmar Bergman filmed Mozart's THE MAGIC FLUTE. This proved so
compelling that Kenneth Branagh, in his revisionist adaptation of
HENRY V, fourty-five years later, has to acknowledge Olivier and
Dent's solution: He uses his own onscreen Chorus, which moves across a
soundstage and directs us into action.
Olivier's film unfolds in layers. It carries us first into the
realistic 1600's setting, charming and delighting with its depiction
(including the deliberate, true-to-Shakespeare's-spirit anachronism of
the figure with contemporary eyeglasses on stage) of a performance of
the play. It then allows this setting to dissolve. First the onscreen
audience and the backstage areas disappear, then the physical
boundries of the stage vanish from the camera's sight. Finally the
movie opens to the broadest-possible cinematic canvas, depicting the
combat in France. One must try and imagine what audiences in 1944
felt, expecting something dull and stately, then watching the movie
transform before their eyes, surprising them with every shot.
But HENRY also excels at its heart, with Olivier's portrayal of the
title role. His joyful bravado may seem dated to modern audiences; we
supposedly know better, looking down from the perch of hindsight, than
to glorify war and combat, and Branagh's dark, irony-laced approach
seems more suited to these end-of-the-century sensibilities. Olivier's
Henry, however, was a creation of 1944, not 1989. With several million
soldiers fighting in Europe, it wasn't possible to depict Henry's
darker, more cynical motivations.
Moreover, as Branagh's supporters fail to note, the scholar's
perception of HENRY V differs from the public's. It is one of
Shakespeare's most popular histories, and it has long been treated as
a feverently patriotic work; its ironies give way to the blood and
thunder of Henry's speeches.
Olivier's HENRY V is Shakespeare clothed in as fine a cinematic garb
as any movie ever made up to that time. It was the first great
Shakespearean film, and set a standard of excellence against which
others have had to compete. It proves that Shakespeare can work on
screen and at the box office.
"Small time," the Chorus tells us in a final speach,
"but in that
time most greatly lived this star of England. Fortune made his sword,
and for his sake, in your fair minds, let this acceptance take."
--BRUCE EDER
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