It's been a few years since my first screening of Olivier's
Henry V, an experience which was muddled by impossible expectations. For one thing, I had just seen Olivier's
Hamlet, in a beautiful 35mm print, and loved it (with none of the reservations implied in the posts above). I had also just read James Agee's many reviews of
Henry V,
one of which begins, "The movies have produced one of their rare great works of art." I don't remember my exact reaction to that first viewing, only that I didn't love the film, but also couldn't bring myself to dislike it, not with that pedigree.
Having viewed the five other Shakespeare films in this marathon over the past couple months, I was probably better prepared today to judge
Henry V on its own merits. And for the first hour, it wasn't looking good. I've never read the play and know very little about English history (perhaps Basil can lend me that Birdsall S. Viault book— oh, wait, that was modern history; nevermind), so I'm partly to blame no doubt — but I found the firsts couple acts here to be largely impenetrable. It's not that the language is impossibly dense and obscure; rather it's that there was little in the performances and staging to draw me in and force me to really listen to that language. I was content instead to disengage from the words and just admire the gorgeous Technicolor — like watching a foreign language film with the subtitles turned off. Luckily Robert Krasker's photography made this pretty worthwhile:
One problem, I think, is that the presence of the audience at the Globe has the opposite effect on me than probably intended. Instead of drawing me into the playing through identification, it added a layer of distanciation. I wasn't watching the play, I was watching an audience watch the play — which, in practice, left me with very little to watch. It's similar to when, in a comedy, if a character tells a joke for the benefit of another character, I'm very unlikely to laugh; if, instead, the same joke is told as an aside for my benefit, the chances of my laughing go way up.
The second and more pressing problem is that these opening acts, as presented by Olivier at least, are structurally rather weak. It takes forever for Henry to even emerge as a main character, leaving me without a protagonist to really invest in. There's a surprising amount of boring exposition (enlivened briefly by some tennis balls), including a seemingly regressive move back to Falstaff's death from
Henry IV, Part 2 — an event which means very little to poor, undereducated me.
I'm relieved to see that Agee concedes some of these problems (at least in one review; he goes back and forth a little), writing, "The gradual transference from theater to screen seems to me good or better than good in each single idea, but a little heavy and bulky taken altogether, and in spite of shrewd editing and, within each single scene, exquisite pacing the movie is during its first hour or so almost as fitful and choppy as the play." He later adds that, despite personally enjoying the comic performances, he is "not convinced that they survive three hundred years with enough vitality to make them honestly and generally amusing, without a sort of 'cultured' over-generiosity toward them which I rather disike in any context and find particularly distasteful in humor." That is, I think, totally spot-on, at least as it relates to the
Henry V on display here. (I find much of Shakespeare's comedy elsewhere amusing both honestly and generally.)
So, I had just about given up on the film when, to my surprise, the move to Agincourt brought it fully to life for me:
But more on that later.
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