Richard III (1956)

Toronto Film Society presented Richard III (1956) on Monday, August 20, 1984 in a double bill with Here’s to the Memory as part of the Season 37 Summer Series, Programme 6.

Production Company: London Films.  Producer: Laurence Olivier.  Director: Laurence Olivier.  Assistant Directors: Anthony Bushell and Gerry O’Hara.  Screenwriter: Alan Dent, from the play by William Shakespeare.  Cinematographer: Otto Heller.  Editor: Helga Cranston.  Music: William Walton.

Cast:  Laurence Olivier (Richard III), John Gielgud (Clarence), Ralph Richardson (Buckingham), Claire Bloom (Lady Anne), Cedric Hardwicke (Edward IV), Mary Kerridge (Queen Elizabeth), Pamela Brown (Jane Shore), Alec Clunes (Hastings), Michael Gough (Dighton), Stanley Baker (Henry Tudor), Laurence Naismith (Stanley), Norman Wooland (Catesby), Helen Haye (Duchess of York), John Laurie (Lovel), Esmond Knight (Ratcliffe), Andrew Cruickshank (Brakenbury), Clive Morton (Rivers), Nicholas Hannen (Archbishop), Russell Thorndike (Priest), Paul Huson (Prince of Wales), Stewart Allen (Page), Wally Bascoe, Norman Fisher (Monks), Terence Greenridge (Scrivener), Dan Cunningham (Grey), Douglas Wilmer (Dorset), Michael Ripper (Second Murderer), Andy Shine (Young Duke of York), Rooy Russell (Abbot), George Woodbridge (Lord Mayor of London), Peter Williams (Messenger to Hastings), Timothy Bateman (Ostler), Bill Shine (Beadle).

Shakespeare and film joined forces about as early as could be, and the first film transposition of Shakespeare was of one of his many studies of kingship:  the great Beerbohm-Tree appeared in excerpts from King John in 1899.  At the Paris Exhibition of the following year, Sarah Bernhardt appeared in portions of Hamlet.  From Griffith to Polanski, the greatest of all dramatists has continued to appeal to all kinds of filmmakers; a book of 400 pages has been written on Shakespearean adaptations to silent film alone!  A few peculiarities before 1920:  Georges Melies himself as Hamlet (1907), Dolores Costello (Drew Barrymore’s grandma) as one of Titania’s fairies (1909), Theda Bara as Juliet (1916).

Richard III was made into film at least three times in the silent period, in 1908 (Vitagraph), 1911 (Co-Operative, with Sir Frank Benson), and 1913 (Sterling).  In the sound period, before Olivier’s version, the only notable attempt at the play is an excerpt spoken by John Barrymore in Warners’ Show of Shows (1929); the two versions of Tower of London, with Basil Rathbone (1939) and Vincent Price (1962) hamming it up as Richard, have little to do with Shakespeare.

As a play, Richard III has been, next to Hamlet, the most frequently performed of all Shakespeare’s works, and there are good reasons for this.  It is journeyman work, written before Shakespeare was thirty, in the early 1590s, and its action is scarcely sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.  Though it is titled The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, its central figure is hardly a tragic hero in the Aristotelian sense, beingn almost entirely a villain, with little psychological shading.  It becomes inn performance, usually with cuts, almost a morality play, with the exciting action leading rapidly and directly to the triumph of good over evil.  It also contains one of the most hackneyed of all Shakespeare’s lines–“A horse!  A horse!  My kingdom for a horse!–and the story is told of Barrymore playing the role and being interrupted by a guffaw at the familiarity of the line.  Without departing from the iambic pentameter, he ad-libbed, “Make haste, and saddle yonder braying ass!” (In these days of still freer conversation in the theatre, would that we all had such lines at our command!)

Richard Plantagenet may have been misrepresented by history, which as always is written by the victors.  In writing his play, Shakespeare drew upon many sixteenth-century chronicles, but especially on a life of Richard generally attributed to Sir Thomas More, who empathically did not present Richard as a man for all seasons.  Writing around 1515, More, if it was he, savagely indicted the king who had died at Bosworth thirty years before, still well within living memory; and Shakespeare, forty years on, followed the pattern.  It is well to remember that Richard’s conqueror had been Henry Tudor, who became thereby Henry VII, the father of Henry VIII (who reigned when More was writing), and the grandfather of Elizabeth (who reigned when Shakespeare was writing).  Twentieth-century apologists for Richard–Nicholas Murray Butler, and Josephine Tey, in detective fictional form, in The Daughter of Time–have gone so far as to convict not Richard but Henry VII for the murder of the little princes, who were his wife’s brothers.  The truth is probably that Richard Crookback (and even his deformity seems to have been exaggerated) was a Renaissance prince no better and no worse than any other.  The truth, however, though of interest to historians, scarcely matters to audiences enthralled, and totally convinced, by Shakespeare’s great portrait of a villain.

By the time Laurence Olivier came to make this, his third transposition of Shakespeare into film, he was approaching fifty and in full command of the filmic medium.  There is here an ease of treatment, undistracted by cinematic reaching, which makes the film, oddly, more of a film than either Henry V, which keeps returning to the Wooden O, or Hamlet, which for all its camera movement is very set-bound.  We have, therefore, a relatively immature play, worked on by a mature artist.  Olivier slashed Shakespeare’s text into a sequential line of spare action, making in  particular two major changes–omitting the curse of Queen Margaret (Henry VI’s widow) and therefore largely wrenching the play from its place as the culminating work (at least in chronological terms) in Shakespeare’s history cycle, but also bringing up the coronation of Edward IV from 3 Henry VI, which gives a contemporary audience all it needs to have to orient itself in the historical context.  But by beginning his film with Edward’s coronation, and actually making the crown, hanging in space, the film’s first image, Olivier makes kingship, and the fight for the crown, the central concern; and this element is further reinforced by having the structure of the film built upon the three coronations, of Edward, of Richard himself, and of Henry Tudor, as the “legitimate” succession  is secured at the end.

In a BBC interview with Kenneth Tynan in 1966, talking about his stage performance (in 1944) of Richard, Olivier said, of the “timeliness” of the production:  “There was Hitler across the way, one was definitely playing it as a paranoiac; so that there was a core of something to which the audience would immediately respond.”  Much more than the 1944 portrayal seems to have been, Olivier’s film performance has a malign, crazed Hitlerian quality.  And much of this malignity comes through a distinctly filmic device-the use of Richard’s shadow, whether cast on Lady Anne, or enveloping the whole frame, to suggest the all-consuming nature of his tyranny.  As one critic has remarked, Shakespeare’s play is a study of a particular tyrant, which Olivier’s film extends into a study of tyranny.

Supporting Olivier’s performance is a veritable host of British stage talent, some in even throwaway roles–John Gielgud as Clarence, or Pamela Brown (no more than an iconic presence, but how effective!) as Jane Shore.  With space to single out but one, I would hail Ralph Richardson, one of the most mannered of actors, whose mannerisms here, however, are perfectly subsumed into the role of the saturnine yet volatile schemer Buckingham.  Since we were never allowed to see his Falstaff, this may be Richardson’s greatest screen role.

Notes by Barrie Hayne