Filming Shakespeare

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 801, 26 November 1954, Page 24

Filming Shakespeare

By

PHILIP

HOPE-WALLACE

| Drama Critic of "The Man- | chester Guardian" and "Time and Tide"

T is nearly two decades since the first sound film version of Romeo and Juliet was produced in Hollywood by Irving Thalberg. Recently in London we saw the Venice prize-winning Romeo and Juliet of Renato Castellani. This film was made largely on Italian soil and in fairness it should be said that it is beautiful to look at; but so in its way was Thalberg’s Romeo, which was also far more loyal to Shakespeare; indeed, one recalls Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, as one of the best Juliets of our time. At any rate, I think that older version had much more of the text and much more of the true warmth and pathos of the play. Let us call it the first of the successful filmed Shakespeare experiments. Basically the problem has always been the same: what to do with the

camera while the verse is being spoken. Thalberg in Romeo, Laurence Olivier in Henry V. and Hamlet, Orson Wellece in Macheth

and Othello-all have approached the problem differently. A brief examination of the plays themselves shows, of course, that the one thing the Shakespearian theatre never is, is a theatre of the eye; it is a theatre of the mind’s eye. Not just that there was no scenery, no accuracy of costume at the Globe Theatre where many of Shakespeare’s plays were first | enacted. The nature of the place, where were given in broad day‘light, forbade visually effective detail. The actors do not merely describe where they are and whether it is cold or hot (see Macbeth, any of the first few scenes), they also describe to each other who it is who has just come on stage and how one character looks to another. It was through the ear that Shakespeare made his audience see. A moment’s thought will show that in listening to a Shakespeare play in a theatre, as in listening to music drama, one’s eyes and ears do not work at full pressure all the time. One looks; then, during some long speech, one so to say

"turns off’ one’s sight, as one might turn off a tap, and takes in the impact of the drama by ear. At other times, of course, the cut-and-thrust of the dialogue keeps one watching as one watches a tennis tournament, and this the cinema can admirably match. In a play, such as Julius Caesar, which Joseph Mankiewicz put on the screen more or less straight for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the cut and thrust of the dialogue between Cassius (John Gielgud) and Brutus (James Mason) and Antony (Marlon Brando) was just like perfectly photographed stage playing: But what’ happens in deeply pondered soliloquies such as Macbeth’s "Tomorrow and tomorrow and_ tomorrow..." or in Hamlet, "To be or not to be"? Ideally, after taking a look at the speaker’s face, we want not pictures but an absence of all outer visual stimulus for the next few minutes. And precisely what the cinema cannot give us-

without abdicating altogether — is a blank, an empty screen. If you remember, Orson Welles took his camera away from

Macbeth’s brooding brow and trailed it about the battlements, peering at the storm clouds for minutes on end while his voice droned on. Olivier’s blond Hamlet’s lips remained sealed while he rolled his eyes and the sound track only whispered his words to us, which was another solution only partially successful. In Hamlet, too, there was the extreme and, to me, repugnant example of "illustrated" soliloquy. When Queen Gertrude began telling Laertes about the way his. sister Ophelia was drowned with the famous "purple patch," "There is a willow grows aslant a brook .. ." we were transported out of the castle doors to a willow by a brook and shown Ophelia afloat on the weeds, where she looked not pathetic but very silly indeed. Yet another approach was used in the film of Henry V: that of stylisation. We began by witnessing an "actual" Shakespearian production of the play in the Elizabethan Theatre; then we moved out into a "real" world, yet even then (continued on next page)

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there was a slight suggestion all the time that we were watching the "illuminated’ pictures of a Book of the Hours or a Missal of the period, not of Shakespeare but of King Henry V. This was in some ways the most satisfactory of all the films so far, though in the King’s prayer before battle and his long selfcommunings it ran into the same problems as Macbeth and Hamlet had to face almost continually. Castellani in Romeo and Juliet fatally drops out too much of Shakespeare’s text, not even letting the magical love scenes run their course. And he chips in himself with explanations which do not really matter beside this loss of the warm heart of the play. He uses dubbed voices extensively; in the case of Mercutio, killing the character stone dead; in the case of the Duke of Verona, achieving perfect illusion. His Juliet is a simple childlike girl, who had no acting experience and there are times when Castellani is able to make her "seem to act" as a camera can make a child or an animal seem to act (by cutting, montage, and so on), but the character does not come through in the round. Nor does Romeo. This latest Romeo and Juliet, glowing with the gold-red stones of Verona, is lovely to look at and often what is called "exciting cinema." But I do not think it has brought us any nearer to finding the best way of putting Shakespeare on the screen,