Shakespeare in the Cinema
Because they were both familiar and respectable, Shakespeare’s works
were attractive material for film-makers in the early days of cinema.
But most of the surviving silent films are valuable as records of
long-dead actors rather than as works of art in their own right.
Sir Frank Benson’s Richard III,
filmed in 1911, is a series of jerky tableaux,
and even the lavish production of Hamlet
shot in 1913 with Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson at a cost of £10,000 although
fitfully successful, is less a film interpretation than a stage performance with
some added episodes. Some later
silent versions had higher pretensions and more imagination, but the full
potential of the plays as cinema scripts could only be realized with the advent
of sound. At the same time, the
opportunity to use Shakespeare’s language brought its own problems.
There were simply more words in the plays than any motion picture would
need. Moreover the logic of
story-telling in an Elizabethan play was not that of a screenplay.
Two of Hollywood’s early sound Shakespeares—the 1929 Pickford-Fairbanks
Taming of the Shrew and the 1936
George Cukor film of Romeo and Juliet—were romantic spectacles designed to enhance and
exploit the appeal of their star performers.
More imaginative was Max Reinhardt’s 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an exceptional combination of the great
theatre director’s lifetime of involvement with the play, William Dieterle’s
flair and cinematic experience and some surprisingly successful casting:
Mickey Rooney plays Puck and James Cagney appears as Bottom.
In Britain Paul Czinner’s As You
Like It (1936) with Olivier as Orlando and Elisabeth Bergner as Rosalind,
was something of a false start, but Olivier’s patriotic and colorful Henry
V (1944) showed that Shakespeare could be made part of the popular wartime
cinema. Not only was Henry
V resourceful and imaginative, it was a lively picture of a familiar
kind—a grandly historical film comparable with Fire
Over England and The Private Life of
Henry VIII. Olivier’s
subsequent Hamlet (1948) and Richard
III(1955) showed similar qualities
of cinematic response to a stage play.
Joseph Mankiewicz’s workmanlike Julius Caesar (USA, 1952) combined
established Shakespearean actors (John Gielgud, James Mason) and faces familiar from
the cinema. Marlon Brando is a
compelling Mark Antony and Louis Calhern an effectively gangsterish Caesar.
More idiosyncratic were Orson Welles’s Macbeth
(1948) and Othello (1952), part of the familiar Welles saga—the desperate
pursuit of funding and resources. In The
Chimes at Midnight (1965) Welles brought to the screen a magnificent
personal performance in a project that had already been tried out in the
theatre, following Falstaff through the two parts of Henry IV and on to his broken-hearted death.
Akira Kurosawa showed Shakespearean plays through the prism of feudal
Japan in his version of Macbeth, known here as Throne
of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985),
which combines elements of King Lear
and Macbeth.
Roman Polanski’s fine Macbeth (1971) explores the themes of demonic possession and
violence familiar from his other films. In
their versions of King Lear, Peter
Brook (1970) and Grigori Kozintsev present complimentary views of the Lear
universe: the one elemental, a world for Samuel Beckett’s
victim-heroes, and other sharply focused on the social realities of Lear’s
despotic kingdom. The Russian
director’s Hamlet (1964) combines
romantic melancholy and the politics of Claudius’s Baltic Kingdom.
Shakespearean films have probably been most successful when they have
found a distinctive visual language to underpin—and often replace—the
theatrical methods of the original plays and when they have a vision of the
story and its world to communicate. Who
could forget, once they had seen them, the forest of Max Reinhardt’s Dream,
the mediterranean citadel of Welles’s Othello
and the arches and womb-like vaulted spaces of Olivier’s Hamlet? This is as much
a question of imaginative response as of respect for a famous original or
‘faithfulness’ to its every word. The
best films of Shakespeare have taken advantage of the cinema’s ability to
create a world and a way of seeing it, and to find new ways of stimulating the
audience to follow the advice given by the Chorus in Henry V: ‘On your
imaginary forces work.’