As you suggest, I think Olivier does suffer from delivering a now unfashionable form of acting. As well as being “classical” he was very much of his period - his filmed Hamlet is overtly Freudian, his Henry V is overtly patriotic. Still, his voice is absolutely beautiful, and when you watch him deliver this performance as Richard III he is majestic.
P.S. For anyone else interested in this, the only copies I could find available were at Amazon. I couldn’t find any that were free. But thank you anyway. Maybe I just missed it.
However, the following site recommended by Fuzzy_Wuzzy is excellent.
I think he did a good job fooling you. His “epic scope” was done on a very small budget. Slo-mo and tight shots can do wonders.
To me the Oliver speech lacks any emotion or soul. The moment where Branagh goes quiet for “We few…” In that moment, in his eyes, I see someone who knows he is probably leading them all to their deaths against 5-1 odds. The rest is the bravado needed to have some chance. A brilliant bit of acting.
Nitpick. He is not carrying his brother’s body. He is carrying young Christian Bale who played Robin, the boy slaughtered with the baggage train. He was low born and IIRC the son of Pistol.
The attack on the baggage train did happen so there is no surprise that Shakespeare put in a scene that made the bad guys look worse. He happened to leave out the part where Henry ordered maybe up to several thousand prisoners put to death. The number seems to be in dispute but not the order.
I agreed. I got a lot out of that book, and often go back to it when seeing a new (to me) Shakespeare production.
I wish Branagh, and the production team for Excalibur, had bigger budgets. They did their best but it’s all too obvious that they just couldn’t afford to fill the battlefield with armored knights.
Yes, I’d pick Branagh over Olivier, too. Different methods, different times, but Branagh’s King Henry is the one I’d follow into the jaws of hell.
Tom Hiddleston did Henry V for PBS not long ago, and it was pretty good, but not in Branagh’s league IMHO.
Shakespeare didn’t leave that out – it’s definitely in the text, although it may be cut in one or both film versions. Henry gives the order twice, actually, once before he gets the word that the boys have been killed and once after.
The boy isn’t Pistol’s son, incidentally (although the tavern characters do make up a family-of-choice of sorts); he’s probably the same boy that Prince Hal gave Falstaff as a page in 2 Henry IV, so he’s someone the king would have met and known.
Call me a dinosaur, but I prefer Olivier. Branagh is better at the more personal scenes, like wooing the princess, but Olivier is better at the grand speeches.
Thanks for that. It’s been a while since I read the play.
I figured he wasn’t his son but he was his ward of sorts.
ETA I rewatched the battle scene. In your second quote he says the first two lines as the Herald rides up. He grabs him and roughs him up a bit then it jumps to the Herald asking for time to gather their dead. No mention of killing prisoners.
Yeah, I had a feeling it might have been cut from the film version. (They both edit out or downplay some of Henry’s less admirable characteristics, although Branagh is better than Olivier in this regard.)
I recall an interview with Branagh where he told of how scared he was giving the speech in front of so many Shakespearian actor more famous than he. When Ian Holm grunted and mumbled something like “That’s the way it’s done,” he nearly collapsed from relief.
I don’t think its specifically Olivier’s directing, it’s merely how Shakespeare was done on film until more recent times. The first generation of film actors were all 100% from the stage (previously the only kind of acting there was). And acting in films was scoffed at by professional actors in the early days as not being real acting, but as being just a gimmick. Same thing would happen with film vs TV and network TV vs cable and now cable vs Netflix etc.
Anyway, any stage actors worth their salt have performed lots of Shakespeare, it’s simply always part of how acting is learned. So needless to say, among professional actors Shakespeare is sacrosanct. Combine that with the notions that movies were viewed as inferior to the stage, and that by the 20th century Shakespeare was viewed as definitely not for the masses but for the upper crust, and what you get is films like Olivier’s.
IOW putting any of Shakespeare’s plays onto film* at all *was viewed as being crass and inappropriate. He did not write his plays in the language of film (master shot, medium shot, close up, reaction shots, A/B roll, or editing of any kind). So any Shakespearean movies that were made were shot essentially as just a filmed stage play. Film-type realism in every aspect (acting, lighting, sets etc.) was deliberately avoided, even in expensive productions.
For me, this is something that makes Branagh’s Henry V even more amazing. He does integrate both modern film-making techniques as well as realistic, ‘method’-type acting with the Elizabethan dialog and stories. And what he creates is a faithful adaptation of Shakespeare for modern cinema.
Olivier’s movie has a self-conscious staginess and cleanness that I actually like… I just don’t like it as much as Branagh’s gritty, post-Falklands, war-is-hell realism.
