Shakespeare on Film: The Good, the Bad & the Mediocre

[IMG:L]Kevin Kline's current stint as King Lear at the Public Theater reminds me of how embarrassing it would be for this fine actor's uncharacteristically inadequate performance to be condemned to film. It doesn't help Kline that James Lapine miscast the production, directed it poorly and made certain additions of his own to improve what may be the greatest play ever written. This King Lear and its protagonist cry out for oblivion, but how good is Shakespeare on film even when everything works?

The most celebrated example of filmed Shakespeare is the Laurence Olivier Henry V, followed by his Richard III. Less acclaimed is his Hamlet, from which we may conclude that the lesser plays make out better on film than the greater ones.

Olivier has written, "In Henry V more than in any other play, Shakespeare moans about the confines of his Globe Theatre . . . all those short battle scenes, in a lot of his plays, are frustrated cinema." Russian film director Grigori Kozintsev, who made both a Hamlet and a King Lear, made a different point: "The advantage of the cinema over the theatre is not that you can even have horses, but that you can stare closer into men's eyes." One deduces that cinema's strength is partly in the battle scenes, but even more so in the close-ups. Yet from the more expensive seats in the theater you can see eyes well enough; so maybe cinema's greatest gift is to the less affluent.

But let's not forget the acting. As is fairly well known, stage acting and screen acting require different techniques. Putting it in the simplest terms, the latter has to be more understated because of film's greater proximity to the actor and the medium's greater realism. The stage necessitates stronger projection in diction and demeanor, so as to engage the far reaches of the auditorium. The closeness of the camera, however, allows—indeed demands—greater intimacy and naturalness. The heroic on stage tends to be the hammy on screen.

But Shakespeare's language has an intensity, his characters have a vivacity, almost automatically eliciting a certain histrionic grandeur that proves a liability on screen. And yet when Paul Scofield deliberately underplayed Lear in Peter Brook's film, the result was unpleasingly flat; the writing demanded something the camera prohibited. Or is it that a stage actor's underacting is not the same as the spontaneous casualness of the movie star? And when the text and story are modernized in a movie, as in a recent Hamlet with Ethan Hawke, a loss is invariably incurred.

Orson Welles distinguished himself both as a film and stage director, but his Shakespeare films, such as Macbeth and Chimes at Midnight (the two parts of Henry IV), suffered both from poor post-synching and underfinancing that would cause numerous interruptions in the shooting. In the theater, these problems do not arise.

In the movies, Shakespeare has often fallen into the wrong directorial hands. In Baz Luhrmann's wretchedly updated, rock-music-scored Romeo + Juliet, even the + in the title was inferior to Shakespeare's "and."

[IMG:R]The problems with filmed Shakespeare are well illustrated by the three Othellos. In 1951, Welles's version fell victim to (in Leslie Halliwell's phrase) sporadic and poverty-stricken filmmaking. The 1965 Olivier version was a photographed stage production directed by Stuart Burge, and consequently uncinematic. The 1995 version, adapted and directed by the mediocre Oliver Parker, retained only a third of Shakespeare's lines and had Laurence Fishburne and French actress Irene Jacob in the leads. They made Kenneth Branagh's Iago seem very well-spoken indeed.

Shakespeare's comedies are filmed less frequently, probably because quick repartee in Shakespearean English is beyond most audiences. Max Reinhardt's 1935 Midsummer Night's Dream made it largely on spectacular visuals and Mickey Rooney's Puck. The 1936 As You Like It featured the immature Olivier and German-accented Elisabeth Bergner in a very mannered production directed by Paul Czinner that neither J. M. Barrie as co-scenarist nor William Walton as composer could quite save.

Kenneth Branagh, clearly in competition with Olivier, has directed and starred in both a Henry V and a Hamlet technically more advanced but having inegalities in the casting, starting with the protagonist. More recently, Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing and Love's Labour's Lost had some authority despite uneven casting, but did not capture a sufficient audience.

When I asked Ingmar Bergman about his projected movie version of Peer Gynt, he said the money could not be raised. At my expression of regret over the loss of what might have been the definitive version, he disagreed: A play's definitive version had to be on the stage. Perhaps the best thing to be said about Shakespeare on film is that it may encourage some undereducated moviegoers to seek out Shakespeare in a theater.