Henry V
1944: Laurence Olivier

Olivier’s Henry V is one of the first big-screen cinematic extravaganza productions of Shakespeare ever, and the first major one in color. Olivier’s earlier As You Like It (Paul Czinner, 1936) and later Hamlet (1948) were in black and white. This one takes abundant — even extravagant — advantage of the capacities of color for the film, and it is indisputably a feast for the eyes. It also has big-screen battle scenes and the like, and a stellar score by Sir William Walton — from which the Passacaglia on the Death of Falstaff has been used in many other contexts (e.g., Ken Burns’ The War) and remains lyrically effective and timeless even after all these years. As cinematic scores go, it’s one of the very best.

It’s also impossible to consider the film outside its own historical context. It was made at least partly as a piece of British propaganda near the end of the not-quite-finished Second World War. It is unabashedly patriotic, and confident in the rightness of the English cause down to the last frame. It fairly begs for comparison with the much more muted tonality of the Branagh version of 1989 — reticent about war and its enormous cost and waste. Which of them is right? Either one, of course — there is no hard boundary around what one can or cannot claim from the script as it is written, and both approaches are supported adquately by the text, without inflicting any particular hardship on it. The comparison is not about which one is correct, but about how much variety of perspective one can achieve from these very different productions.

The play takes the unusual but sensible step of beginning with the overt theatricality of the piece, which echoes, effectively, the Chorus’s prologue, and then sliding almost imperceptibly into a photorealistic version of events. The Chorus declaims forcefully that what you are going to see is nothing like the real thing, but that you will have to rely on your imaginations to get from the signifier, effectively, to the signified. And yet — here is perhaps the irony — before the play is finished, the scene has moved (it’s hard to say exactly when that happens, but it does) from the stagey presentation of the opening scenes in the Globe Theater to the “vasty fields of France”.

The play as a whole rides more than usually on the portrayal of a single character — specifically that of the King himself. He is a complex character, and one toward which we can take any number of different views. Is he a true believer in all he claims, or is he a charlatan? In the course of Henry IV, Part I in particular, before he has become king, Hal shows himself to be the quintessential player — especially in the duple play-within-a-play of the second act. Is everything he does merely an affectation? Is it all put on? Olivier takes one approach to this; other actors seem to take a different one. Here Henry seems (as perhaps he needed to seem in 1944) to be more or less genuine. He is wily and a good warrior, but he is not quite the slippery character that an uncut version of the script would lead one to believe. That being said, he declaims his famous set pieces — both the hortatory “Once more into the breach” and the later St. Crispin’s Day speech — with rare style and elegance. It’s not the only way to play Henry, but it’s a good one.

The supporting roles here are all palusibly handled as well, certainly — one may recognize Pistol (Robert Newton) as the Long John Silver of the later Disney Treasure Island — and nobody is letting the production down. Many other faces may look familiar, too, if one has spent much time watching the films of the period, though the names might not be exactly (sorry...) household words today.

It’s worth noting that this version of the play adopts without comment what many historians of the 1940s believed about the main cause of the English victory at Agincourt — namely the dominance of the English longbow. Though it’s never really discussed in the play, the longbow, with its 100-lb. pull weight, was indisputably a formidable weapon in its time, and its appearance, followed in due course by the musket, pointed to the end of mounted shock combat in Europe. The longbow is not given quite so much credit for the victory today, however: there are other reasons that weren’t wholly understood in 1944. As it turns out the simple overcrowding of the field by the French knights, who charged down a slightly narrowing valley until they began (as computer models have shown) to foul one another before the reached the English, probably had as much to do with the English victory as any other rationale. It also appears to be the case that the soil in that particular valley is capable of generating some very sticky sucking mud, from which an armored man who has fallen on his face might well not be able to extricate himself. There is significant evidence that many found themselves face down in it and suffocated. Those who choose to believe that God fought for the English at Agincourt are of course free to do so. That much is claimed in the bracing and wonderful Agincourt Carol, which Walton actually adopted into his score — but the theological authority for the claim is otherwise somewhat questionable.

This is without a doubt one of the finest pieces of twentieth-century filmmaking, and its panache and zeal from top to bottom cannot help being contagious. Anyone who wants to be familiar with Shakespeare on film at all needs to watch it — and the Branagh version as well.

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