Henry V
1989: Kenneth Branagh

This was the film that established Kenneth Branagh as the enfant terrible of British Shakespeare production for the better part of a generation. It was legendarily produced on a (relative) shoestring, with the complicity of a number of friends who had worked with him in live theater. The very austerity of the production becomes, before all is said and done, one of its greatest assets. It imposes a discipline on the play that not all of Branagh’s later work has been able to emulate. Like George Lucas, he seems to have treated a larger budget as license to take more liberties, and those haven’t always been for the best. Nevertheless, this in itself is in fine form.

Even daring to make another version of Henry V on the cinematic scale of this film invites comparison with the 1944 Olivier production, and the comparison is wonderfully fruitful, both for what it says about the cinematic media, and what it says about the cultures that produced them.

In terms of the medium, it is intriguing how much this film does with little: the sets are modest but highly stylized; the indoor sets are spare, not gaudy, but often distended in odd ways. The outdoor scenes are confined. There is no dramatization of the strategic or even large-tactical views of battles. Warfare is all intimate, brutal, and dirty. Olivier’s waves of clean knights galloping under a sunny sky make no appearance here; by the end of the process, everyone is covered with mire and blood. The use of color leans toward a modern restricted palate, avoiding the exuberance of the Olivier vision. The chorus (Derek Jacobi in fine declamatory form) is explicitly anachronistic, waving his hands at cinematic machinery and lights, after (in what seems like an ironic inversion of even that anachronism) striking a single match as a sole source of light, to introduce his “O, for a muse of fire...” speech. It’s — no pun intended — electrifying from the start. The moods are suggested and occasionally robustly supported by a fine score by Patrick Doyle, who has worked with Branagh for quite a while and has turned in some excellent work. The Non nobis at the end is a wonderful and stately piece of music that has often been extracted for church performance; in context, it’s gratingly ironic, while it remains beautiful; one church musician of my acquaintance expressed shock and dismay when he finally saw the movie from which he’d been performing the piece. It’s part of a deliberately mixed message.

As noted elsewhere, Olivier’s film is a triumphalist piece of British propaganda; it’s hard to begrudge it at the time. Branagh produced this at a time of turbulent upheaval — the age of the Tienanmen Square uprising, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and shortly before the ill-advised Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which precipitated a generation more of violence and upheaval in the Middle East. English politics at the time were not entirely clear, but many resented their foreign policies, as many resented those of the United States. There is no triumphalism here, no exceptionalism about how the British are better than (in the case) the French, or anything like that. The play is given range to say what it says, and Branagh does not pull the teeth of its boasting, but neither does it reinforce it by any external means.

Viewing the film strictly as an expression of Shakespeare’s play itself, it’s highly successful. It’s cut — they all are, somehow — but it preserves much of the original language and shape of the play.

The acting brings together a roster of extraordinary actors from Britain at the time; it more or less introduced the world to Emma Thompson, whose relatively minor role here is completely captivating, but points forward to even more amazing work in Much Ado About Nothing a few years later. It also features Brian Blessed (Augustus in I, Claudius), Richard Briers (Leonato in Much Ado), Geraldine McEwan, Christian Bale, Judy Dench (countless roles), Ian Holm (Sam Mussabini in Chariots of Fire), Michael Maloney, Paul Scofield (Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons), Christopher Ravenscroft, Robert Stephens, and Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid in the Harry Potter series). All of them pull their weight, and create a wholly engaging film from beginning to end. It would be hard to think of another Shakespeare film with equivalent acting power, unless it were the Olivier Richard III.

One fussy detail, because I am first and foremost a Latinist by professional training: the Non nobis does — at least as I hear it — contain one indefensible error that very few will probably detect: the traditional Latin text of the Non nobis is Non nobis, Domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam: “Not to us, Lord, but to your name (dative case) give the glory.” Unfortunately, either Doyle or someone advising the choral performers bobbled the wording so that it came out as sed nomine tuo, which just doesn’t make any sense, since it would be in the ablative case (“give glory by means of your name”?). If Latin isn’t one of your things, that probably won’t bother you. It bothers me. The piece is nonetheless quite lovely.

If I were to make a top-ten list of must-see renditions of Shakespeare on film, both this and the one by Laurence Olivier would be on that list. The idea of doing so is faintly silly in any case, and I won’t (at least deliberately) do so...at least not yet. I might someday. In any case, this is an exceptionally good film, with exceptional acting and exceptional production values conjured brilliantly from the slenderest possible means. It deserves to be celebrated and savored repeatedly.

Prices between the following seem rather fickle: check and see what you find.

Buy Henry V from Amazon, Region Free Import.

Buy Henry V from Amazon.