Richard III / Othello On the screen, Shakespeare gets scrambled and shrunken
Alleva, Richard
Richard Alleva SLICED & DICED 'Richard III'&'Othello' There is a subgenre of science-fiction called "alternative universes," exemplified by such novels as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High...
...For the most part, this film lacks real dramatic power because it never takes on the real challenges of the play...
...The paradigmatic scene is Richard's successful wooing of Lady Anne over the dead body of her husband, whom Richard murdered...
...And that points to what's wrong with this film...
...At each parry the woman's capacity for fury dwindles...
...This is odd because Iago is on stage almost twice as long as his general and is by far the showier role...
...How far can he get...
...Richard III is a melodrama, not a tragedy...
...Weirdly enough, Branagh comes close to being the "honest Iago" that his victims take him for, and the ambiguity makes this performance much more disturbing than the usual Machiavellian slyboots characterization of the ensign...
...Richard watching his own coronation on film in the palace screening room while he murmuringly plots with henchmen the destruction of the little princes in the Tower...
...The rest of the cast ranges from adequate to excellent with Kenneth Bra-nagh contributing an Iago so radically perverted that he seems to think he is doing the right thing when he works havoc...
...Reviewing Olivier's version, the critic and scriptwriter Paul Dehn wrote, "Wherever the play was loose-jointed or ill-fitting, Sir Laurence has been its tinker and its tailor, but never once its butcher...
...The most interesting thing about the new film version of Richard III-adapted by and starring Ian McKellen and directed by Richard Loncraine-is that it presents Shakespeare's play as taking place in just such an alternative universe...
...Richard's sexual magnetism might have been the deciding factor, but sexual magnetism is something that Ian McKellen, a clever actor, does not possess in abundance...
...Both of these films will soon be available on video...
...Olivier cut strenuously for his 1955 adaptation, but he approached each tune, each twist carefully and gave it its due...
...Yet the play isn't static, for nearly every scene is a dramatic stunt in which we watch the loathsome hero pull off some feat of deception or manipulation...
...Given the fact that director Loncraine sets wooing in the mortuary of an army hospital, with the corpses of soldiers all around, Anne's surrender could have been played as a desperate lunge at life after the trauma of war...
...But Shakespeare's passage to this conclusion is gradual and carefully graded, and so must be its staging and enactment...
...His dapper, mustachioed villain is an adequate representation of, say, Black Michael in The Prisoner of Zenda or some other subsidiary villain in a swashbuckler or spy flick, but Shakespeare's egregious monster he most certainly isn't...
...There is no convincing sense of place in this movie...
...But this notion isn't elucidated by either acting or staging...
...The current version gives us not a rendering of the wooing but an abstract...
...Unlike Macbeth, Richard never changes, and his soliloquies aren't so much self-inspections as verbal dances of self-delighting deviltry...
...Hhere are also several striking and suggestive images in Oliver Parker's version of Othello, but they don't cohere...
...But such visual fizz constitutes the one real triumph of this film, aside from Jim Broadbent's superb Duke of Buckingham...
...This is a London where tanks outnumber taxis, where noblemen in trenchcoats visit proletarian assassins in their tenement homes and dicker about the price of murder over cups of tea fetched by the missus...
...But if you're planning to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday on April 23, see if your library or video store has Olivier's Richard HI or Orson Welles's Othello...
...we keep asking ourselves...
...And an Othello without a proper Moor is as lame as a Hamlet without the prince...
...The York regalia is Nazi-like, with the family insignia, a wild boar, substituting for the swastika...
...Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am...
...Simpson...
...The directorial ideas stay fugitive because there is no central concept to hold them together...
...Richard Alleva SLICED & DICED 'Richard III'&'Othello' There is a subgenre of science-fiction called "alternative universes," exemplified by such novels as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, in which the United States groans under the yoke of the victorious Axis powers, and Kings-ley Amis's The Alteration, with its portrayal of an England that never experienced the Reformation...
...But Fishburne hath no such music...
...An Othello who burns like ice might be provocative, but Laurence Fishburne is merely as cold as a spring drizzle, delivering his lines in the manner of an English professor reading the text to a mildly bored class...
...A few insults, a little pleading, the blade offered and refused, the engagement ring slipped onto the lady's finger...
...Perhaps the best image of all is the last one: Richard falling backward off a high platform into the flames of battle below and shrieking with laughter all the way down, while on the soundtrack Jolson sings "I'm sitting on top of the world...
...It's not necessary to leave the text unabridged...
...Bernard Shaw was right when he observed that any actor playing the Moor "must have the orchestral quality in him...
...That we accept its outcome is due not to Shakespeare finessing the irrational but to his confronting it head on...
...In that respect this movie is inferior to Richard III...
...The treachery and lovelessness of a world in which brother murders brother here takes on the peculiar dreariness and metallic taste of our century...
...He never deceives her about his guilt, but, more insidious, so thoroughly undermines her view of herself as righteously raging widow that, when offered a sword and permission to kill Richard, she can't do it...
...Nevertheless, midway through the story, if the black general doesn't explode, or at least sizzle, the play never happens...
...Alas, McKellen and Loncraine have sliced and diced...
...It's a clever feat which vividly pictures an England that never was, but it skims a story that works only when laid out for us in fascinating detail...
...The incredible remains incredible and the scene goes for nothing...
...Throughout most of the scene Anne verbally attacks while Gloucester parries every thrust...
...There is no world...
...These are movies that don't shrink or scramble Shakespeare but instead expand cinema to contain the bard...
...You saw Lady Anne take Gloucester's lure, and you saw the trap shut with chilling finality...
...Surely this was inspired by Cagney's fiery finish in White Heat-"On top of the world, Ma...
...In the original text, it is the body of her father-in-law, whom Richard also murdered...
...But the play is called Othello, not Iago...
...Whatever the flaws of this adaptation (based on a Royal Shakespeare production directed by Richard Eyre), it does have many striking moments inspired by the need to recast the play in a twentieth-century setting of power politics and machine guns...
...Anne, Richard's wife, popping pills and injecting herself with heroin to dull the horror of being married to a monster...
...This is a country in which Oswald Mosley would have flourished and Edward VIII could have felt free to admit that he found fascism almost as attractive as Mrs...
...What would have defied our belief at the beginning of the scene wins credence at its conclusion...
...The England in which the York family seizes the throne from the Lan-casters only to be decimated by its own most infamous member, Richard Gloucester, the hunchback from hell, here assumes the aspect of fascist dictatorships between the world wars...
...I will long remember: McKellen delivering the first part of Richard's famous soliloquy, "Now is the winter of our discontent," as a victory speech at a York banquet, right after a big band singer finishes her number, "Come live with me and be my love...
...Always further than seems possible...
Vol. 123 • April 1996 • No. 8
