quiet trickster

This was always going to be an indulgence, because I could probably quote reams of Henry V verbatim, particularly Olivier’s version. And having never seen it on the big screen, I found it impossible to resist.

It really is, still, glorious stuff, in bright, beautiful Technicolor, rich in form and action, image and sound.

The Globe Theatre start is priceless, building to the switch to the fully cinematic section in a witty appropriation of the text’s imprecation that the audience be forgiving and fill the gaps that theatre cannot show. The sets too are wonderful, with the ‘Book of Hours’ style backdrops and the attendant distorted perspectives. The cast is fantastic – Olivier (huh, so like an actor to give himself all the best lines) is splendid, noble and gorgeous.

It does, of course, take terrible liberties with the text, most famously in the Southampton sequences, where the English traitors’ plot is excised, leaving only Henry’s magnanimous pardon of some poor yeoman who insulted him, instead of the trap he sets for the traitors to set their own fate (Act II, Scene II)

And, yes, Olivier’s wonderful battle scene, with the single most striking cavalry charge in cinema, is wildly inaccurate. (Branagh’s version is slightly more accurate – what really lost the battle for the French was the mud…)

But if it can’t be anything but propaganda (perhaps most explicitly in the Duke of Burgundy’s speech towards the end), it was pretty much propaganda in Shakespeare’s day. For me, the standout moment has always been the sequence in Act IV, Scene I, where Henry sits, unrecognised, with his soldiers, and argues with them over the justification for the coming battle. One of the soldiers has this speech:

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at such a place;’ some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.

“We few, we happy few…”
“…We band of buggered.”

Posted on 21st August, 2007 at 7:30pm in media and tagged with blatant propaganda, Edinburgh International Film Festival, gratuitous Joss Whedon reference, Henry V, Laurence Olivier, Shakespeare, sumptuous technicolor, we died at such a place.