eparis2 Reviews

The Tempest (1960 TV Movie)

The Tempest

[6/10 · 17 September 2022]

The reality of Schaefer's Tempest is so much less than its possibilities that it seems more tragedy than romance. Running time is seventy-six minutes, which means more slashing rather than cutting. For instance, the first scene is replaced with narration, the masque of the goddesses is gone, and Prospero's speech from 4.1 that begins "Our revels now are ended" is transplanted to the end of the play, where it replaces the epilogue.

The costumes are eclectic, with Ferdinand in an embarrassingly skimpy gladiatorial outfit.

On the other hand, the best actors in the film, Richard Burton as Caliban and Roddy McDowall as Ariel, are so completely covered either by fabric or makeup that their facial expressions are largely concealed. Still, their voices are memorable, and Lee Remick makes a beautiful and effective Miranda.

Maurice Evans as Prospero is disappointing. He ranges from underplaying to posturing, only occasionally getting the truly magical verse right.

The Tempest (1983 Video)

The Tempest (1983 Video)

[6/10 · 17 September 2022]

If there were a superb version of The Tempest, it would be possible to discard this production entirely. Until that time, the Bard has enough strengths to make it worth watching.

The filming on a stage set is well handled, and the traditional strips of fabric that serve as waves and other such stage devices make the bare boards seem more natural.

John Serry's music is good enough to notice and enjoy even in the midst of the play.

Efrem Zimbalist Jr. Is an enthusiastic Prospero whose performance often makes up in sincerity what he lacks in ability to read poetry. He certainly looks the part and frequently seems magical enough to be believable. He successfully projects both benevolence and hope.

J. E. Taylor is an attractive Miranda who is excellent except when she weeps.

William Hootkins as Caliban and Ron Palillo as Trinculo give effective if standard performances.

The worst acting comes from Nicholas Hammond (70s television's Spiderman). In this ostentatiously American film, Hammond is hampered by a British accent that would be more appropriate for Gilbert and Sullivan.

Forbidden Planet (1956)

Forbidden Planet

[8/10 · 17 September 2022]

Adaptations of The Tempest include the forgettable The Tempest (1998), an American Civil War version which starred Peter Fonda as Guideon Prosper; the R-rated and thoroughly eccentric Prospero's Books (1991), notable for John Gielgud's performance; Paul Mazursky's Tempest (1982), a twentieth-century transformation with a powerful cast; "Requiem for Methuselah," an episode from the original Star Trek series with William Shatner's Captain Kirk as Ferdinand; and perhaps the most famous of all, Forbidden Planet, which explores the play's subtext.

Morbius (Prospero) is truly happy to be away from other human beings and left to his studies, and an overt struggle appears between Morbius and Commander Adams (Ferdinand) for Altaira's (Miranda's) loyalty.

Walter Pidgeon makes a powerful, egocentric Prospero figure - realistic, sympathetic, and even tragic. Morbius sacrifices himself at the end to protect his daughter from the evil of his own subconscious, the Caliban of this version.

Anne Francis may be too flirtatious and seductive for a girl who was raised alone with her father and a robot, but she is very good at what she does.

Leslie Nielsen is a serious and even dashing Ferdinand.

The Tempest (1980 TV Movie)

The Tempest

[8/10 · 17 September 2022]

The BBC Tempest does almost all of the lines and does them with intelligence and skill. No one is an embarrassment to Shakespeare, and some cast members are at least minor ornaments.

Nigel Hawthorne's Stephano is agreeably disreputable, and Warren Clarke's Caliban has the right blend of stupidity, simplicity, and ferocity.

Michael Hordern's Prospero, however, is almost as difficult to praise as to fault. He does not have the majesty and benevolence that Prospero sometimes has, nor does he suggest the scholarship and wisdom which are also part of the character. Instead, Hordern attains a schoolmasterish authority, which contains a touch of darkness. He sometimes seems to be more Miranda's teacher than her father, but throughout the production, he never loses control of his classroom.

Macbeth (III) (1960 TV Movie)

Macbeth

[4/10 · 10 September 2022]

This Hallmark Hall of Fame production of Macbeth is poorly lit; the actors appear either over-exposed by a bright spotlight or lost in shadow, and in both cases, facial expressions are difficult to read.

The soundtrack also has its flaws, with the actors throwing away some lines in too-soft whispers. The style of performance is overly theatrical, a caricature of Shakespearean acting.

The costumes and hairstyles are Hollywood-medieval, and the fight scenes, filmed with what sounds like wooden swords, are unrealistic, to say the least.

The witches are played as old hags in black robes.

The Macbeths are not a young couple, and Lady Macbeth could easily have doubled as one of the witches, particularly in the "unsex me now" scene, which is complete with music that is meant to be (but is not) unnerving.

The only outstanding aspect of the film is Pat O'Malley's performance as the Porter in the knocking-at-the-gate scene.

Macbeth (1948)

Macbeth

[6/10 · 10 September 2022]

This production is notable for its crisp cinematography, voice-over soliloquies, distracting Scottish accents, and brutal pruning of Shakespeare's text. The elimination of entire scenes made way for new scenes not often in the play, including horses galloping across the countryside, the execution of Cawdor, an elaborate procession to Macbeth's castle, Lady Macbeth dispensing drugged wine to Duncan's guards, Birnam Wood creeping along to Dunsinane, and Lady Macbeth running around screaming like a loon.

Welles also added a new character called "Holy Father" in order to make the play seem a more direct struggle between good and evil. Unfortunately, the character has the hairstyle of Heidi and the screen presence of a large wooden door.

Nevertheless, Orson Welles makes a charismatic and commanding Macbeth, and Jeanette Nolan (in her screen debut) is lovely and quietly scheming as his lady.

The witches (one male and two female) are costumed traditionally as hags with long gray hair.

Welles as always used black and white film to good effect, producing an eerie and expressionistic film.

Macbeth (1971)

Something weakened this way comes, you could say.

[6/10 · 10 September 2022]

Polanski has directed Macbeth as an R-rated horror film. Blood is more than a physical presence here; it has almost become a character. Many of the images are either terrible or grotesque. The witches bury a severed human hand, and there are extra, added witches whose nudity is truly repulsive.

However, many of the realistic details, including animals such as the bear being brought in for bear baiting, help to energize the story and even to actualize some of Shakespeare's metaphors.

Jon Finch as Macbeth and Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth are much younger than is usual and, therefore, much more believable as lovers whose passion for each other becomes a poison for Scotland. Finch, who had never acted in Shakespeare before but went on to appear in ~four Shakespeare films, gives his most natural performance here, aided perhaps by the voice-over soliloquies.

Because of Playboy's participation in the project and Francesca Annis' nudity, many reviewers have underestimated this production.

Macbeth (1983 TV Movie)

Macbeth

[7/10 · 10 September 2022]

As with most of the BBC Shakespeare films, this Macbeth is a straightforward representation of Shakespeare's play, largely faithful to the text, but it is not without its flaws.

The acting style in this production is very subdued, often depriving the play of its energy.

The cast (with few exceptions) is singularly unattractive, including Lady Macbeth; she is, however, young, and her reading of the "unsex me now" scene is sexually charged.

Nicol Williamson's Macbeth is alternately dour, growling out his lines, and agitated, with the labored breathing of an asthmatic.

The Porter is not perceivably drunk and is certainly not funny.

The witches, however, are excellent; old crones in shabby, hooded cloaks, with gnarled hands, their lines are clearly articulated, not drowned by sound effects, as is often the case.

Macbeth (1981 Video)

Jeremy Brett and Piper Laurie front a foggy, fiery, effective Macbeth

[8/10 · 10 September 2022]

The Bard versions of Shakespeare's plays are filmed on a mostly bare wooden stage without an audience, and this one is no exception. However, using fog (dry ice), fire, and the swirling draperies of the witches (which vaguely resemble multicolored moss), this production creates an atmosphere suitable for Macbeth.

If there is nothing extraordinary about it, there is nothing sub-standard about it either. The acting is uniformly professional, and even those choices that might seem questionable, such as Piper Laurie's cold-blooded, sometimes detached Lady Macbeth, can certainly find support in the text.

Jeremy Brett is as emotional as Laurie is emotionless. His is a compelling, ultimately believable portrait of a good man gone almost completely bad.

The witches, who appear with their familiars and are young and attractive, give an interesting spin to the play's "Fair is foul and foul is fair."

Macbeth (II) (1981 TV Movie)

No Toil, No Trouble, Browning's Macbeth a Shakespearean Stunner

[8/10 · 10 September 2022]

The Lincoln Center Macbeth is a filmed stage production full of energy; it has a few minor problems of picture and sound quality resulting from this format, but the dialogue is clear, and the acting is good throughout.

The witches, one male and two female, sing most of their lines.

The Macbeths are an attractive, younger couple, full of ambition even before the witches' prophecies. Philip Anglim's Macbeth is slightly pompous and has shifty brown eyes, which sometimes appear unfocused, making him seem mentally unbalanced.

Kenneth Campbell's performance as Macduff is particularly strong.

At the end of the play, when Macduff fights Macbeth, Anglim, full of regret for the slaughter of Macduff's family, refuses to draw his sword to fight; Campbell, however, kills him anyway, afterward placing the cross he wears on Macbeth's chest.

Omnibus: King Lear (1953) Season 2, Episode 3

King Lear

[6/10 · 10 September 2022]

This production of King Lear, which seems to be the fairy-tale version of Shakespeare's play, eliminates large portions of the script and some of the characters, and fails to achieve the emotional intensity of the text.

The costuming is rather outlandish, the ladies wearing Elizabethan ruffs and Lear sporting a cartoonish cape and crown.

Edgar does not exist except as Poor Tom, and Edmund has been eliminated entirely.

Orson Welles - large, surly, and fierce - is neither overblown nor understated; the rest of the actors, however, are frequently melodramatic in their readings.

The sets are stylized, and the film creates little real feeling of Lear being exposed to the elements; the only concession to realism is an occasional token gust of wind. The violence is also surrealistic, with slow-motion stabbings and bloodless eye-gouging.

King Lear (1970)

King Lear

[6/10 · 10 September 2022]

Peter Brook dressed his characters in animal skins, loaded them into wagons, and set them in a black-and-white, minimalist world. The verse is lopped and hacked rather than merely cut, and it is spoken with a brutality that sometimes seems to smash it into prose. This Lear is expressionist and absurdist, cruel and bleak.

Except for the Fool's songs and some electronic sounds, the film features no music, only harsh human voices.

Sometimes beautiful, sometimes hateful, this production at times reaches the levels of pain that Shakespeare built into the play. However, the bleakness is so uninterrupted that it occasionally becomes boring.

The cast is powerful, with Paul Scofield especially impressive.

Performance: King Lear (1998) Season 7, Episode 1

King Lear

[6/10 · 10 September 2022]

King Lear is about old age, but not everyone in it is old or should appear to be so. David Burke's Kent seems of an age with Ian Holm's King Lear. Finbar Lynch's Edmund and Victoria Hamilton's Cordelia, though they do not look like contemporaries of Kent and Lear, do not look young either.

Clearly, visual impact was less important than other considerations. Some of the sets, for example, are orange, and some actors wear matching costumes, a choice more distracting than edifying. Some of the readings too have a sameness about them, and Holm's Lear is too often simply angry, too seldom the victim of terribly mixed emotions.

Nevertheless, the production has strengths. The storm scene, for example, is quite believable. Ian Holm, as he did in the National Theatre production on which this film is based, removes his clothes (or almost all of them - the water and the camera's distance make it difficult to be sure). Throughout, the passions that activate these characters seem newly minted, not worn by their centuries of use.

The production is professional, and if no actor (except for Holm) stands out as extraordinary, no one falls below that uniformly high standard either.

King Lear (1982 TV Movie)

King Lear

[7/10 · 10 September 2022]

The BBC King Lear is, overall, a solid production that presents the play in a traditional, straightforward fashion and retains most of Shakespeare's lines. This production manages to explore much of the darkness inherent in the script without eradicating the humor.

Michael Hordern's Lear, who is all doddering pomposity, becomes so obnoxious that many viewers sympathize with Goneril and Regan when they give him the boot.

Cordelia is, in dress and manner, a humorless puritan; she seems petty and jealous of the approval Lear bestows upon her sisters in the dowry scene.

Michael Kitchen's Edmund makes an entertaining villain, and Frank Middlemass' Fool, costumed in black with a large, oddly shaped hat and clown-like make-up, is a strange combination of a witty fool and an old country bumpkin.

King Lear (1983 TV Movie)

Granada Television's King Lear Captures the Heart of a Classic Shakespeare Tragedy

[8/10 · 10 September 2022]

There is laughter in King Lear as well as suffering, but suffering eclipses everything in this production. Too much is cut; too many elements are added, including the mad king ripping up a rabbit and eating it raw.

Olivier appears too fragile for the part, ready to collapse at any moment under no greater weight than his wispy white hair. However, he bears his burdens successfully, and if this is not Olivier's greatest Shakespearean role, it may be his most endearing. He is joined by an extraordinarily watchable cast, an object lesson in the ability of film to assemble a more powerful ensemble than the stage can reasonably match.

After Olivier, Leo McKern and John Hurt are the most memorable.

If the performances have a fault, it is that some of the deference the other actors felt for Olivier comes through in their characterizations.

The bright, pastoral colors of the film offer an effective contrast to the script's dark messages.

Othello (1981 TV Movie)

Othello unmoored in this movie

[6/10 · 9 September 2022]

James Earl Jones was supposed to be the BBC's Othello, but British Actors' Equity objected to an American in the part.

Anthony Hopkins as an Arab (not African) Othello so underplays and minimizes the role that the result seems to be something other than tragedy.

The sets, which are Jonathan Miller's usual cluttered interiors with references to paintings, are part of the problem.

Penelope Wilton's Desdemona appears unattractive and willful.

Bob Hoskin's Iago is the most interesting part of the production, realistic and vicious, scheming and low-class, funny and angry. If Iago were meant to act the villain at every moment in the play, this would be a nearly definitive performance.

Othello (1951)

Orson Welles's Othello: Moor! Moor! Moor!

[8/10 · 9 September 2022]

The term "flawed masterpiece" should have been invented for Orson Welles. His Othello is visually enthralling, filled as it is with vast spaces that somehow seem to constrict and confine the humans who move through them. Welles' juxtapositions are as sharp as jealousies - the faces of Othello and Desdemona picked out of the dark or Desdemona talking to Emilia and looking through a window filled with spikes. The film begins with funerals and with perhaps the most striking of all the visuals, Iago hanging in a metal cage as the crowds and corpses go by below.

Orson Welles is a fascinating rather than believable Othello. His great strength as an actor is not the portrayal of innocence, but his voice is often magical.

Suzanne Cloutier is a pattern for all pure and elegant Desdemonas, and Micheál MacLiammóir (who seems to have been working up to Richard III) for villainous Iagos.

Othello (1995)

Othello

[8/10 · 9 September 2022]

Making Shakespeare into a movie is a tricky business. Oliver Parker has succeeded in keeping the main outlines of the characters and the central emotions of the play. The visual images are strong and the musical score effective. However, two-thirds of the lines are gone and with them has gone some of Othello's breadth of soul and largeness of purpose, some of the depth of Iago's malice, and some of the pity and pain in Desdemona's death.

Laurence Fishburne brings an intense realism to Othello, but he is sometimes less than adept at handling the longer speeches.

Irene Jacob is a picture of desirable innocence, but her accent slows and encumbers her lines.

Kenneth Branagh is the most effective actor in the film, combining charm, malice, and subtlety to create an entirely believable (and still horrifying) Iago.

Othello (1965)

Olivier's Magnificent Moor

[8/10 · 9 September 2022]

Brilliant and infuriating in almost equal measure, this production is always watchable.

Olivier's Othello is part charlatan and part champion, and his portrayal of a Moor has been attacked as racist and praised as perfection. Olivier lowered his voice, lifted weights, and invented a rolling walk for the performance, but he says the walk was designed to keep his big toes from standing straight up, not as any sort of African stride. Ultimately, this Othello is a large reading, less noble, more passionate, and sooner jealous than most.

Maggie Smith's Desdemona is charismatic if not especially innocent, and Frank Finlay's Iago (criticized for underacting in the National Theatre production from which the film came) has the right mix of restraint and villainy.

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (1981 Video)

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (Bard Productions, 1981)

[10/10 · 9 September 2022]

William Marshall's Othello is the noble Moor, with no trace of the bluster and ostentation that are sometimes imposed on the part. He is a heroic soldier and faithful lover destroyed during the course of the play by his mistakes and those of his friends and by the villainy of his chief enemy. Marshall's deep, flexible voice and natural dignity are especially impressive.

Jenny Agutter's Desdemona is beautiful and self-possessed, a believable senator's daughter. While she seems more knowing than perhaps Desdemona should be, her sympathy for Othello and absolute loyalty to him are clear.

Ron Moody is effective as a blunt, unattractive but trustworthy Iago, who is, of course, deception personified.

If this production has a fault, it is that not all of the actors live up to the high standard set by the main characters.

Hamlet (2000)

Hamlet (2000)

[4/10 · 6 September 2022]

Ethan Hawke makes an incapable, uninvolved Hamlet.

Almereyda's film lacks not only important lines, continuity, and style, but also the complexity viewers expect from Shakespeare's greatest (or at least longest) play.

Ethan Hawke's slacker Hamlet sports a Peruvian wool cap through most major scenes, including the "To-be-or-not-to-be" soliloquy, which takes place in the action section of a Blockbuster Video store. Many of Hawke's pivotal lines are shouted into answering machines or over telephones. However, it matters little since Hawke doesn't understand his part anyway, and he would probably be just as unintelligible in contemporary prose as he is in Shakespeare's verse.

Murray''s Polonius is just short of pathetic and never laughable or ridiculous as the character should sometimes be.

Stiles' Ophelia is a dramatic undergraduate obsessed with Polaroids, who contemplates drowning herself long before Hamlet's madness, her father's murder, and her brother's absence cause a psychological overload.

Diane Venora as Gertrude is the most interesting character in this film: jealous of Ophelia, ultimately disloyal to Claudius, and protective of her son (even to the point of deliberately drinking the poisoned wine).

The theme of poison in the play is drowned out by the sound of firearms, which seem to both exhilarate and terrify Hawke's Hamlet, keeping him at a safe emotional and physical distance from confrontation. The blood-splattered final scene violently sprays bullets into Hamlet, Laertes, and Claudius.

Hamlet (1948)

Hamlet

[6/10 · 6 September 2022]

Olivier could have produced an extraordinarily vigorous Hamlet, bursting with energy and boasting a physical panache that few others could equal. Instead, he has, unfortunately, deprived Hamlet of more than half his lines and many of his actions. He is more the paperweight of Denmark than its prince.

Scenes are rearranged, lines rewritten, and words changed. There is no trace of politics: Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and even Fortinbras vanish. Olivier's voice-over, "This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind" (from the Gary Cooper film Souls at Sea), might more appropriately have been, "This is the tragedy of Hamlet made simpleminded." Hamlet becomes an immobile young man troubled by the twin demons of indecision and incest. In this cut-up, cut-down Hamlet, the prince cannot act until he resolves his feelings for his mother and his girlfriend and determines they are not one and the same.

Sadly, the strength of the film is not in the text or the actors, but in the questing, fluid camera, and the confining, claustrophobic set.

Hamlet (1990)

Hamlet (1990): Zeffirelli's Oscar-nominated version, starring Mel Gibson and Glenn Close

[6/10 · 6 September 2022]

Zeffirelli intended this to be the most action-packed Hamlet ever filmed, but ultimately his interpretation of this Shakespeare classic is not much more than an update of Olivier's 1948 version.

Mel Gibson's action-hero Hamlet is the most considerable contrast with the Olivier film. Gibson's Hamlet is unquestionably unstable and unstoppable from the first moment the camera meets his eyes, while Olivier is a brooding, dull Hamlet.

Zeffirelli begins in medieval Denmark with the funeral of the murdered king and flashes forward to the widow's wedding with her former brother-in-law. The political and military struggle with Norway is completely cut from the film, as well as the rich opportunity for character development that can come from actually performing those lines.

Close's Gertrude is an irrational little girl in her second adolescence. She literally skips toward Claudius and nearly entices her only son to bed.

Polonius is too darkly serious, depriving the play of the comic relief the character usually provides.

Bonham Carter's Ophelia is convincing in her madness, but mainly as an extension of the ghost-like instability she communicates through the entire picture.

Horatio's part is underplayed, particularly when he is unable to proclaim himself "more an ancient Roman than a Dane" by threatening suicide to follow the prince.

And without Fortinbras, of course, Denmark is left to no one.

Great Performances: Hamlet (1990) Season Unknown, Episode Unknown

Hamlet

[7/10 · 6 September 2022]

The New York Shakespearean Festival (and its Great Performances filmed version) may have hit their market, but they missed the mark, beginning with the casting of the primary character. From uncertainties of where his hands should go to his tight and nervous movements, Kline's weepy Hamlet is awkward, much like some of the Hollywood characters he plays.

Michael Cumpsty's Laertes is unsettling, appearing to be the younger brother of Ophelia, his spunky sister. She insists on Hamlet's honorable intentions and screams uncontrollably.

The costumes appear to be dressy-casual wear the cast found in their closets, though Claudius looks like a survival from the days of the British raj, while Laertes seems a strange cross between yuppie and wise guy. Oddly, Gertrude encourages Hamlet to "cast off (his) nighted color," while she herself is clad in a black evening dress.

The set is so bare it's almost naked.

Polonius is the greatest strength in this adapted stage performance, simply because he tends to be the only actor who fully understands the humor and dialogue.

While individual moments and even scenes in this production are strong, on the whole it is somewhat dry, and for students, it may be slightly more effective as an aid to sleep than as a guide to the play.

Hamlet (1969)

Hamlet (Review)

[6/10 · 6 September 2022]

Tony Richardson's film started as a stage production in London, and it still has much of the ambience of London's Roundhouse Theatre and the second half of the 1960s.

Nicol Williamson's Hamlet is edgy, frenetic, and sometimes downright peculiar. This is Hamlet as an angry young man, except that Williamson does not look at all that young in comparison to Anthony Hopkins as Claudius and Judy Parfitt as Gertrude. Williamson's unusual appearance, strange energy, and North country accent mark him as a rebel who means to bring down the establishment.

Hopkins and Parfitt as the morally, politically, and sexually corrupt Claudius and Gertrude provide a sufficiently wicked establishment to justify any amount of self-righteous rebellion.