Search Results

This chapter describes the Shakespearean filmmaking during the period 1930–90. The notable auteur figures include Akira Kurosawa, Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles, and the types of film mentions for critical attention extend to classical productions, film noirs and picturesque fantasies. It provides some comments in relation to numbers, idiosyncratic styles, ideological differences and the use of the film noirs genre for various adaptations of Hamlet. Olivier's Henry V was the first Technicolor Shakespeare. The actor-director's duality is illustrated as he endeavours to balance the theatrical and the filmic, cinematic novelty and reverence, indulging in excited reinventions that simultaneously honour textual specifics. Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well is a Hamlet-infused adaptation. In all of Welles' films, skewed angles and pronounced camera mobility allow for unconventional frame compositions and create a general effect of spatial fragmentation or disjunction suggestive of psychological complexities. Prospero's Books is more affirming in its Shakespearean attitudes.

The 20th century ushered in a reform of Shakespearean staging that emphasized minimal scenery, rapid movement, and everything that the 19th-century stage was not. William Poel was an early reformer, as was Harley Granville-Barker. The new Hamlets included Sarah Bernhard, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Robert Burton, Nicol Williamson, and many others. Interpretation, responding to cataclysmic events that included the Russian Revolution, two World Wars, feminism, and street protest, moved toward a revisionist of the play as disillusioned, bitter, fatalistic, and violent.

Laurence Olivier's film of William Shakespeare's Henry V opens with the repeated introduction of a stage boy holding up placards that show the title and locations of the play. The film's invention of this boy is consistent with the archaeological thrust of its opening sequence, which stages Henry V in the same manner it might have been represented in a reconstructed theatre of 1600. The stage boy and his placards evoke a semiotics of performance based on presuppositions which are later and more readerly than those of Elizabethan playhouses. In addition, they inadvertently reveal Olivier's recreation of the Globe theatre as itself an act of historical translation. This chapter examines the temporal translations, elisions, and supplementations that show how Olivier's Henry V mediates in complex ways between different historical moments. It also argues that the film implies a politics of nostalgia for a pseudo-historical utopia.

This chapter chronicles the stormy history of Carrie, Wyler's film version of Theodore Dreiser's classic novel Sister Carrie. Also discussed is an early script version written by playwright Clifford Odets (for another production that had been abandoned) — it was utilized but mostly discarded by screenwriters Ruth and Augustus Goetz. Also detailed are Wyler's wooing of Laurence Olivier to play Hurstwood and his contentious relationship with David O. Selznick, husband of co-star Jennifer Jones. The film was compromised by HUAC's influence on Hollywood — its release was delayed (because it was perceived as un-American) and the film was re-edited by the studio while Wyler was in Italy filming Roman Holiday.

This chapter considers the screen history of the play, examining the major film versions (directed by Paul Czinner, 1936, Christine Edzard, 1992, and Kenneth Branagh, 2006) and the BBC-Time Life Television Shakespeare production of 1978. None of these has been particularly well-received by critics and audiences, and the chapter discusses their uneasy use of film and television realism to render the pastoral fantasy world of the play. The discussion of the BBC production draws upon the corporation’s audience research data to investigate what actual spectators made of it in the context of the late 1970s television viewing experience.

The fight against the theatrical influence had been one of art filmmakers' oldest campaigns in their drive to achieve artistic independence. The “genuine film artist” considered theatricality in the cinema to be the antithesis of cinema's own aesthetic qualities. There were, however, two main reasons why theater could not be entirely eliminated from the cinema, and why postwar modernism had to face theatricality again. One obvious reason for the return of theatricality was the appearance of synchronic sound. Sound dialogues did not revolutionize narrative composition but instead modified the dramatic structure sufficiently so that rethinking the relationship between theater and modern cinema became necessary. Theatrical adaptations abounded in the 1940s and 1950s. Some very classical adaptations were created, such as the Shakespeare series played and directed by Laurence Olivier: Henri V (1946), Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1955). But the series of classical adaptations was only the beginning of a real aesthetic convergence between theater, cinema, and literature taking place during the 1950s.

The chapter begins with an analysis of “The Inherited Wish,” his introduction to William F. Nolan’s Ray Bradbury Companion. The phrase was originally Sir Lawrence Olivier’s way of explaining his inherent love of his acting life, and Bradbury adapted it to explain his own inherent love of his writer’s life. The chapter continues to track Bradbury’s abiding resistance to the intellectual establishment’s occasional attacks on science fiction’s rise into the literary mainstream. Bradbury’s compelling mystical vision attracted Marcel Marceau with a collaboration proposal that neither man had time to develop. Stuart Gordon’s successful Chicago stage productions of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit was soon followed by his participation in NASA’s “Why Man Explores” symposium with explorer Jacques Cousteau and novelist James A. Michener.

Hitchcock guided the inexperienced Joan Fontaine through his first American film, Rebecca (1940), going to great lengths to get her into the mood she needed to be in, and he also inspired and controlled a major performance by Judith Anderson as the vengeful housekeeper Mrs. Danvers while allowing Laurence Olivier to give a merely external performance as the male lead. In the work of Fontaine, Anderson, and Olivier, Rebecca penetratingly surveys different styles of acting, favoring Fontaine but finally letting Anderson dominate with work where she is “doing nothing well” on the surface but with clearly contrasting emotions battling underneath the mask of her face. The Master was mainly let down by the actors in Foreign Correspondent (1940), but he brought out dark undercurrents in the expert comic performances of Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941). Hitchcock used Cary Grant for the first time in Suspicion (1941) as a sexy, irresponsible playboy who may or may not be murderous, and he reveled in Grant’s ability to do or say one thing ambiguously enough to suggest another thing at the same moment.

I used to enjoy listening to the National Weather Service forecasts on my short-wave weather radio. An endlessly repeated taped message updated every few hours might be less than thrilling, but the voices of the half-dozen or so forecasters made it come alive. Each one had an identifiable style and intonation; it was easy to assign personalities, even faces, to them. Ten years ago the announcers were all men. There was the one I labeled the grand elder, with his pontifical voice and distinctive, rolling rhythms. When cost-cutting forced the station to move from Manhattan to the grounds of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, way out on Long Island, he disappeared from the airways. Perhaps the daily commute on the Long Island Expressway was too much for the old fellow. I am sure I wasn’t the only listener to mourn the loss of his avuncular cadences. Another announcer who appealed to me spoke fluently until he came to an American Indian place name such as Manasquan or Wanaque (both in New Jersey). Then he hesitated. I could imagine the look of terror in his eyes when he scanned the next line of the script, and there it was, a word with fearsome Q-sounds or daunting combinations of consonants and vowels. If I had had any way of getting in touch with him, I would have comforted him by explaining how lucky he was to be broadcasting in the New York–New Jersey metropolitan area. Up in northern Maine, the forecasters have to cope with names such as Caucomgomoc and Chemquasabamticook. Some announcers proclaimed their individuality with what seemed like deliberately odd pronunciations of common words. The most original was the fellow who figured out a new way to say “climate,” an achievement I would have thought was impossible. He did it by lengthening the separation between the two syllables and heavily stressing the second: “cly-matt.”Eventually, the Weather Service hired its first woman announcer, a welcome addition; she made her mark immediately by shortening the phrase “Here are the latest Central Park observations” to “Here is the latest Central Park.”