The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with his battell
fought at Agincourt in France by Will Shakespeare
The
film no longer belongs to Olivier but to Renoir (Le Carrosse d’or) and Russell
(The Devils) and Kurosawa (Ran) and Bergman (The Magic Flute),
in that order.
The rest is Shakespeare.
Hamlet
The potent poison has a Freudian dimension that
lines up Laertes and Claudius at the last, against
Hamlet, but it quite o’ercrows his spirit.
Nevertheless, the camera shows his progress to the heights with the very
symbols of the film (cannons, rounded portals and windows) justly aligned for
the first time.
This manner of construction will of course leave
out the critics, who do not understand the term and generally misuse it to mean
suggestive and naughty.
There is always the concern to make a film, the
organizational principle works from first to last informing the pictures.
Peter Brook borrowed from the ghost for King
Lear. The dizzying ascent up the circular stone stairs is reversed in Crichton’s
The Lavender Hill Mob and repeated in Fellini’s La dolce vita.
Richard III
Those who fought with Harry upon Saint
Crispin’s day are honored in the film, gentles one and all.
The memory of Adolf Hitler was very green and
vivid, the dreamlike torpor punctuated with thrusts and shocks, borne along by
concatenations in the editing (the bloody axe, a maidservant’s wet
cloth), the conscious originality of the direction not without precedents
(Lubitsch for the monologue addressed to the camera passing one window after
another with a view inside), the list of plays made evident (Julius Caesar, Macbeth), the medievalisms and
romanticisms, with Garrick and Cibber, render the film a sumptuous telling.
And at the very end, the Crown of England too is
grateful.
The Prince and the Showgirl
Rattigan’s
screenplay on the ordering of the kingdom bears directly on Zeffirelli’s
Tea with Mussolini, indirectly from Cukor’s Born Yesterday.
“Anti-Carpathian
activities” mean collusion with the Germans in 1911, the Regent puts them
down, the King that is to be conspires.
The American (out
of Stroheim’s The Merry Widow) sees things amiss but puts them
right.
Olivier as
Charlie McCarthy with a foreign accent has lost his Bergen, Monroe very plush
from Milwaukee is an understudy like the kinglet, she doesn’t appreciate
the hierarchies but that doesn’t matter.
The director
plays a joke on himself here and there, the miniature London of Henry V,
Hamlet’s cortege bearing the passed-out showgirl to the Regent’s
bedroom, whence she emerges next morning with the royal crest on her bum.
The Three Sisters
How one gets from
King Lear to Cries and Whispers, they have nothing in their heads but vanity,
two of them, the other an old refrain about an oak tree and a golden chain,
their mother is dead and their father, the general, back to Moscow they would
go.
Co-directed
with John Sichel.
“‘A town like Perm’, which is now called Molotov...” Masha remarks, on Irinushka’s
name day, “we won’t be remembered, just
forgotten.”
Colonel Vershinin, “let us say that there are a hundred
thousand people in this town, a backward and uncouth place, of course, and that
there are only three people like yourselves. It is obvious that you cannot
conquer the dark mass that surrounds you in your own lifetime,
gradually you’ll have to surrender and get lost in the crowd. Life will
stifle you, but...”
Kuligin, “a trifling, silly little book,” he
says of his own history, “written because of nothing better to do.”
Masha, “what a damned unbearable life.”
Andriuska and the local girl, “he went to his
doom.”
Chekhov’s
idea of a comedy, blisteringly realized by the National Theatre. An impression of the stage production not very far
from the Olivier/Burge Chichester Uncle
Vanya, in color, which seems to have struck Bergman most forcibly. The
camera moves within a set almost real, very large and yet fragmentary, with
exteriors of the Russian woods on a sound stage. Homeric laughter, in a way, Lensky may die in a great poem, but Tusenbach...
The youngest
takes a job in the telegraph office, the eldest grows older teaching school, Masha... married Kuligin.
Natasha’s
French rebuke of Masha drives poor Tusenbach to seek redress in a decanter of brandy from the
cameraman so as not to break into laughing.
The
little bourgeoise and the carnival people, she that
is mistress to the chairman of the local council, she of the bustle and
clattering shoes.
A thing to be
rebuked by Tom Milne (Time Out),
“a catalogue of pregnant pauses from which all Chekhovian intent has long
since ebbed away.”
For
Molly Haskell (Village Voice),
“a feminist vision”.
TV Guide,
“though flawed, an important rendition”.
Hal Erickson (Rovi), “melancholy classic”.
Bell-ringers and
firemen open the second half, quite surrealistically filmed, an echo of Wild Strawberries as much as anything
else (and Welles’ The Hearts of Age).
“In 1812, Moscow was burning, God almighty, the French were taken by
surprise!”
The great house is
mortgaged to pay a silly debt.
Halliwell’s Film Guide, “lacks cinematic vigour.”
Walton score,
Unsworth cinematography.
The
brigade to Siberia. Moscow, the saddest dream imaginable. Not Siberia at all,
Poland. “Home Olga.”
Natasha, “so
tomorrow I’ll be all alone here. First thing I’ll do is have that
row of fir trees cut down.”