[gets up during the soliloquy to see Vivien Leigh]

It wasn't all that long ago that the 1953 version of Julius Caesar showed up on TCM and, as I had it on my DVR, I watched it to do a post here. I've got another Shakespeare adaptation that TCM ran during 31 Days of Oscar, and now it's on again about two months later: the 1948 version of Hamlet, tomorrow (May 11) at 10:30 AM.

This is the Laurence Olivier version of the movie, and as you can guess, he plays Hamlet and even directs himself. I assume most people already know the plot of Shakespeare's play. Hamlet was the crown prince of Denmark, son of the king, but while he was studying in what is now Germany, his father died and his uncle Claudius (Basil Sydney) not only took the crown, but married Hamlet's mom Gertrude (Eileen Herlie)! Ballsy. However, something that looks like it could be the ghost of Hamlet's father has been walking the castle parapet at night. Hamlet, having returned home, is the only one who can hear the ghost, and it tells him that yes, this is the ghost of his father the former king and that Claudius killed him, so you Hamlet must avenge my death!

Meanwhile, advising Claudius is Polonius (Felix Aylmer), who has two kids. Laertes, his son, is sent off to France, while Ophelia (Jean Simmons) is in love with Hamlet, and the feeling is mutual. But to make certain that Stepdad doesn't suspect him, Hamlet feigns insanity until he can find out for real whether or not Claudius killed his own brother in order to usurp the throne. Hamlet concludes that yes, it did happen, but he still can't bring himself to kill Stepdad because, as Olivier tells us in an opening monologue, this is a play about a man who can't make up his own mind.

Since the major Shakespeare plays all have well-known plots, there's more to discuss than just the plot when talking about an adaptation. The first thing is what gets removed. Shakespeare's plays being so well-known, and having a lot of fans, taking stuff out to simplify things for a movie audience is likely to cause problems. Imagine if somebody tried to do Hamlet without the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, or Romeo and Juliet without Juliet on the balcony. But the play itself would run a good four hours if nothing is edited. As it is, Olivier edited it down to a little over two and a half hours in part by getting rid of Fortinbras on one hand, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the other. Also, if Olivier delivered the "The play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King" line, I must have missed it. So some purists may not like the edits.

Then there's always the chance you'll get actors who are good in normal movies, but not necessarily up for the difficult early 17th century Shakespearean dialogue. I mentioned this in the earliest days of the blog when I discussed Warner Bros.' 1935 adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which makes the inspired choice of putting the studio's comic actors into Bottom's acting troupe. Whether you think James Cagney does well with the material is a different question. (I happen to think he does OK, although the British stars are more natural.) And let's not talk about Edna May Oliver and Andy Devine at the beginning of the MGM adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.

However, Olivier is unsurprisingly quite good himself, and mostly gets good performances out of the others. Sydney and Herlie are, I think more of stage actors than movie actors as I didn't really recognize them from anything else. Simmons was at the beginning of her career, and I read some reviewers who think she's a weak point here, but I didn't notice that. Terence Morgan as Laertes, is a particular standout in a good way among the supporting cast. And watch for Peter Cushing and Anthony Quayle in small roles.

Then there's the staging. Olivier had made Henry V in Technicolor, but reverts to black and white here, which actually suits the material well with the brooding shadows of the ghost among other things benefiting.

Some people might want a complete presentation of a Shakespeare play, but if you've never actually seen a production of Hamlet before, the Laurence Olivier version isn't a bad place to start.

Beware the Ides of March

I didn't intend to blog about multiple movies with Julius Caesar as a character in close succession, but the movies all showed up on one or another movie channel a few weeks apart, so we get a third film featuring Caesar: the 1953 MGM adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, tomorrow at 11:45 AM. (Yes, tomorrow is March 16, and the Ides of March are traditionally on the 15th. But because the 31 Days of Oscar grouping of movies by decade, as a 50s movie it had to air on a Wednesday.)

According to the Wikipedia article, this is a fairly close adaptation of the Shakespeare play, but I was in the academic track in high school that did a different selection of Shakespeare plays, so I got Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth instead. The movie opens not long (history suggests a year, but time is telescoped to make it seem like a couple of days) before the Ides of March on which Caesar (Louis Calhern) would be killed. He's just killed some of his biggest rivals for power in battle, and the braying mob in Rome wants him made king/dictator; as we saw in Cleopatra the idea of anybody being a king was supposed to be horrifying to republican Rome. But Marc Antony (Marlon Brando) seems to be encouraging Caesar to take the crown.

This obviously terrifies any number of Caesar's other rivals. Some of them just want power for themselves, probably recognizing that the Republic had been fatally wounded for several decades already. This notably includes Cassius (John Gielgud) and Casca (Edmond O'Brien), although not so much Brutus (James Mason) at first. Brutus is less after power than concerned about the Republic being preserved, leading to a reluctance to join a conspiracy against Caesar. But Cassius and Casca aren't stupid. They know how to manipulate people, and so make it look as though there are quite a few Romans who want Caesar to be stopped before he gets too much power. Ultimately, after a lot of soul-searching, Brutus agrees to take part in the conspiracy.

Caesar, depsite having heard the warning to beware the Ides of March, and much to the chagrin of his wife Calpurnia (Greer Garson, in a one-scene role), goes to the Senate, where he gets killed, stabbed first by Casca and then the other conspirators, before Brutus has to deliver the coup de grace that leads Caesar to utter "Et tu, Brute".

All of this occurs inside the Senate, but waiting outside is another braying mob. Brutus, the intellectual, gives an eminently logical speech about Caesar, while Marc Antony, the one person not a part of the conspiracy, knows how to whip up that mob to the point they'll turn on the people who killed Caesar. The conspirators are going to have to flee rome, but even then they're not going to be safe, as Marc Antony and the other members of the triumvirate hunt them down.

This version of Julius Caesar is probably best-known for the fact that Marlon Brando was cast as Antony. Brando is one actor who was decidedly not known for being a Shakespearean actor, unlike those British members of the cast, notably Gielgud. (James Mason had also done a fair amount of Shakespeare before becoming a movie star.) Brando was also known at the time for his less-than-stellar diction. To be honest, Brando's diction is not particularly a problem, although there are times where his delivery devolves into something like his character from The Wild One.

Unsurprisingly, Mason and especially Gielgud handle the dialog well; somewhat more surprising is Edmond O'Brien, whom I wouldn't have thought of as being adept at Shakespeare. Louis Calhern dies halfway through and gets a relatively small number of scenes, and the female roles are small and an excuse cast big names. In addition to the aforementioned Garson there's Deborah Kerr as Brutus' wife.

Overall, Julius Caesar is the sort of movie MGM was very good at producing, and the quality shines through in pretty much every scene, other than possibly the battle scenes looking more like southern California than Italy. But there wasn't much that could be done about it without busting the budget. This version of Julius Caesar is definitely worth a watch.

Love around Shakespeare

During one or another of the free preview weekends, I had the chance to DVR Shakespeare in Love. It's on often enough, including twice tomorrow on Starz Edge: at 7:41 AM and 11:16 PM. So I recently sat down to watch it and do a full-length post on it.

The scene is London in 1593. Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush) runs a theater and is deeply in debt to some people who want to be paid off now. Philip, of course, doesn't have the money, leading the creditors to try to injure Philip much the way latter-day loan sharks would do. But being a bit of a schemer, he has an idea. He works with a young, up-and-coming playwright named Will Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes), and tells his creditors that Will is working on a great new comedy tentatively titled Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter.

Now, as we all know, Shakespeare never wrote a comedy about Romeo and Ethel. Indeed, in the movie, he hasn't even begun to write one. Worse, he seems to have a case of writer's block, which is bad enough for him, but think about his friend and nominal boss Philip! Still, the show must go on, so Shakespeare writes a few things for Romeo and starts holding auditions.

Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) has always been interested in the theater, to the point that she wouldn't mind actually acting in plays. But there are a couple of obstacles. One is class: she's the daughter of a well-to-do merchant, and she is betrothed to be married to Lord Wessex (Colin Firth), with the Queen's (Judi Dench) blessing. There's no way such a person could take part in a low-status profession like acting. But even with that, there's a second reason, which is that in the 1590s, acting was exclusively a male profession, with men even taking the female roles.

Still, Viola decides to go to the theater dressed as a man, calling herself Thomas Kent, and trying out for the play. Shakespeare likes Thomas Kent, not realizing this is Viola. That's a problem because Shakespeare has already seen Viola at a performance put on for the Queen. When Shakespeare follows "Kent" home and finds out that Kent is also Viola, he starts a passionate relationship with her, including some unnecessary love scenes. (Shakespeare, you may recall, still has unseen wife Anne Hathaway and some kids back in Stratford.)

Shakespeare's love for Viola prompts him to write not a comedy about a pirate's daughter, but a tragedy about two young lovers whose love can never me. Meanwhile, Wessex realizes something is going on, and the Queen agrees to be the judge of a wager over whether a playwright can really capture the nature of true love. All of the plotlines are going to come together in the premiere showing of Romeo and Juliet....

Shakespeare in Love won a ton of awards, but even with that, there were still some things I didn't quite care for. The direction and camera movement reminded me of some of the things that irritated me watching a movie like Chocolat. Additionally, some of the characters come across as being a bit off in the wrong way, as though they all have late 20th century sensibilities.

On the other hand, the acting was mostly quite good. Ben Affleck shows up as the actor playing Mercutio, and despite being in a British movie about the 16th century, didn't stick out like a sore thumb. Dench was also quite good as Queen Elizabeth; Firth made me think of his character from Valmont; and the rest of the cast does quite well with the material.

If you haven't seen Shakespeare in Love before, it's definitely worth a watch. There are several DVD and Blu-ray releases, but looking at Amazon, only on of them still seems to be in print. The movie is also currenty available on Amazon Prime streaming.

The Dresser (1983)

I don't normally like to do posts on movies only available on streaming if they aren't coming up on TV, but I've got an almost full DVR as well as a bunch of recently-watched movies about World War II that I want to space out, so today's post is going to be about The Dresser, out-of-print on DVD but available at Amazon prime video.

The movie starts off near the end of a performance of Shakespeare's Othello at a theater somewhere in England in the early part of World War II. The curtain comes down, and we know that we've got a towering actor at the head of the company as Sir (Albert Finney, whose character is only called "Sir") starts lecturing the other actors about their performances. But we get hints that all might not be well when he goes back to his dressing room. His longtime dresser, Norman (Tom Courtenay) seems to tend to Sir either more like a mother or possibly a gay lover than an employee of many years. (They're not actual lovers; Sir is married to another member of the company referred to as Her Ladyship, played by Zena Walker).

The company has to take a train to Bradford to perform at their next venue, this time the play being King Lear, a fact that Sir doesn't seem to remember. And he's so full of himself that he takes the company for a leisurely walk down the station platform, forcing Norman to try to get the train from leaving the station. It's yet another sign there's something wrong with Sir.

But the real problems are going to come once they get to Bradford. Sir is in the market square, and suffers some sort of attack that alarms everybody and has him winding up in hospital. Surely the show can't go on with Sir in hospital. But Sir decides that he's going to check himself out against medical advice, and return to the theater which is his one true love. Nobody thinks that Sir can go on, but dammit if Norman isn't going to try, even though Sir seems unable to remember his entrance cue. And even if there's an air-raid.

There's really not much more than that to the plot of The Dresser, being a bit less of a story than a look at the workings of a stage company as well as a character study of Sir and Norman. In that regard, Finney and Courtenay are both excellent, and while both of them got well-deserved Oscar nominations, I think I prefer Courtenay's performance, with Finney's being a bit too over the top at times, possibly a bit of a fault of the script for writing the character that way. The supporting performances are quite good too, notably Eileen Atkins as Madge the stage manager.

If there is one fault with the movie it's that it made me think at times of Finney's following movie, Under the Volcano. Sir's illness/madness, and Finney's portrayal of it, are at times just as uncomfortable to watch as Finney's alcoholic in Under the Volcano, never mind how good the performance is. The Dresser at least doesn't have the idiotic ending that Under the Volcano does.

The Dresser is an excellent movie that rightly got a lot of recognition from critics and the awards bodies when it was released, but for whatever reason doesn't have such recognition today. Well, that might be a bit unfair, as it was based on a stage play and remade as a TV movie a few years back; that one does seem to be in print on DVD. In any case, if you get a chance to catch The Dresser, I strongly recommend it.