I have in mind a day from twenty-eight summers ago. I was living in a trailer on the edge of a small town called Fallon, Nevada. I was there because the U.S. Navy saw fit to send me to the Naval Air Station to the east of the town.
One weekend afternoon I was watching a video of Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Shakespeare's Henry V with a friend. He was 20 and I was 32. We watched Olivier's clever and colorful (filmed in Technicolor) film, which was deliberately meant to arouse English patriotism just before the Normandy Invasion, all the way to the scene in which Olivier delivers his "St. Crispin's Day" speech.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
Henry is giving words of encouragement to his weary soldiers on the eve of the decisive battle of Agincourt. By now, it's a familiar speech, and Olivier delivers it honorably, in keeping with the style of acting that his film memoralizes. But his delivery seems unbearably declamatory today. Olivier was a master technician, and the next time you look at the scene, pay special attention to his hands. Olivier's Henry is a stalwart warrior, completely lacking anything so modernistic (and natural) as self-doubt or irresolution.
But far from being impressed by the scene, my friend told me about one that he had seen that put Olivier in the shade. I doubted there could be such a performance, but my friend told me of Kenneth Branagh's film of Henry V, and how, on hearing Branagh speak so convincingly the same lines that Olivier had spoken forty-five years before, I would be inspired to join him at Agincourt myself.
I stopped the Olivier video, and together my friend and I drove to a video store in town to look for Branagh's film. We found it and rented it and brought it back to my trailer to watch. When it was over, I had to admit to my friend that, while I regarded - and still regard - Olivier's film to be one of the finest examples of Shakespeare on film, Branagh's film was far more effective, and quite thrilling to watch - something I, honestly, never expected of a film adaptation of Shakespeare.
I have seen them all over the years: Olivier's Hamlet, Richard III and Othello, Orson Welles's Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff (aka Chimes at Midnight), Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando as Marc Antony, The Merchant of Venice with Al Pacino, and even Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Hamlet (with Mel Gibson). And I have also seen the Shakespeare films that Branagh directed since Henry V, including his four hour Hamlet.
The most striking difference between Olivier's and Branagh's films is the treatment of the play's so-called comic characters - Falstaff, Bardolph, Nym, Mistress Quickly, and especially Pistol. Branagh has his actors (Robbie Coltrane, Richard Briers, Geoffrey Hutchings, Judi Dench, Robert Stephens) play their roles "straight," or as close to straight as possible.
What is most important about Olivier's film is that it was made at a time of national peril. Winston Churchill personally authorized the expense of the production in wartime ($2 million - an enormous sum for a movie in 1944), convinced that it would boost sagging morale in England as the war entered its fifth year.
The place at which both films fail, though for different reasons, is the Big Battle, Agincourt, itself. Olivier shot his battle in neutral Ireland, with hundreds of locals recruited as extras. The tracking cameras and cutting show how much Olivier learned from battle scenes in other films - particularly from Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938). But this is precisely where Olivier succumbs to a common temptation among filmmakers. Writing about Tony Richardson's excellent The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Stanley Kauffmann commented that
"large-scale battle scenes are doomed to remoteness. Whether it's Borodino in War and Peace or Balaklava here, they always seem to reduce to the same shots in differing uniforms: the Alexander Nevsky shot, in which the camera rolls along looking down a line of advancing riders; the cannon exploding in our faces; the quick glimpses of men with lances through their guts; the riderless horses; the ground-level shots of the dead. The big film battle has become a ritual, rather than an experience, often confusing and usually too long. (Having gone to all that expense, they're not going to use only a couple of minutes' footage out of it.) About all that ever really works is the long, wide horizon shot, which conveys only size, not heat."(1)
Kenneth Branagh wanted his Agincourt to look more like real combat (with which most of us are blissfully unacquainted): blood and mud and pain. Instead of the cast of hundreds afforded Olivier, Branagh used perhaps dozens, sticking mostly to close-in shots. Alas, he shifts unnecessarily in and out of slow motion, which ruins the realism. His battle lasts ten minutes, but it could've been as effective in less time.
In France, the "comic" characters Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph are nothing but cowardly thieves. Bardolph is hanged, while Pistol and Nym live up to their job titles as "cutpurses" in the very midst of the battle, stealing everything they can from freshly slain French. Finding Nym has been killed, Pistol speaks his last line in bitter despair, "To England will I steal, and there I'll steal."
In Olivier's film, Robert Newton played a quite traditionally conceived Pistol, about as over-the-top as Newton could reach. But we are supposed to laugh at him. Robert Stephens, in stark contrast, plays Pistol in Branagh's film as a near-tragic bungler. It is a fascinating performance to watch.
That leaves us the two Henrys. Olivier is resolute and noble throughout his film, whereas Branagh is, in his soliloquies, far less sure of himself and much more of a mensch. There is certainly room for either interpretation in Shakespeare's role. Olivier's Henry served its purpose in 1944 as an English zealot, but Branagh's Henry is the more real. And to his credit, Branagh stuck more closely to the play. In the small role of Katharine, Branagh's former wife, Emma Thompson, an invaluable actress and scriptwriter, adds her brilliant presence to her scenes.
Including a scene from Henry IV, Part II in which Hal promises Falstaff that he will abandon him once he is crowned king, Falstaff (Robbie Coltrane) delivers his great line, "We have heard the chimes at midnight. Jesus, the days that we have seen!" But he delivers it to Prince Hal, when it is actually part of a conversation between Falstaff and Justice Shallow:
SHALLOW
Ha, cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that that
this knight and I have seen!—Ha, Sir John, said
I well?
FALSTAFF
We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master
Shallow.
SHALLOW
That we have, that we have, that we have. In
faith, Sir John, we have. Our watchword was 'Hem,
boys.' Come, let's to dinner, come, let's to dinner.
Jesus, the days that we have seen! Come, come.
(Henry IV, Part II, Act 3 Scene 2)
In 1600, when there was no public lighting and the only things that prowled the night were werewolves and men up to no good, it was impressive to be out of doors to hear the chimes at midnight. But my Navy friend and I, having scoured the high Nevada desert of its scant attractions, had heard the midnight chimes and seen the dawn with sleepless eyes and knew the camraderie of fellow sufferers so far from home but even farther from our destinations. He is in St. Petersburg, Russia just now, and I am in the Philippines. Jesus, the days that we have yet to see!
(1) Stanley Kauffmann, Figures of Light: Film Criticism and Comment, Harper Collins, 1971.
No comments:
Post a Comment