Page 103 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

92 / Shakespeare in the Movies

the happy marriages at the end: "There is, sure, another flood
toward, and these couples are coming to the ark." Still, the film's
rewards far outweight its limitations.
Czinner consistently employs animal imagery to express Shake-
speare's themes. For the opening, featuring Orlando and his beloved
servant, the camera slowly moves over realistic foliage, capturing
natural characters with a simple barnyard backdrop, including pigs
and chickens. Cinematographers Hal Rosson and Jack Cardiff create,
through drab black-and-white images, the appropriately realistic
sense of hard farm life. We are then prepared when Oliver, Orlando's
cruel brother, intrudes and slaps our hero across the face. The
camera cuts to the court of usurper Duke Frederick, where the blind-
ingly sterile white of brightly lit palace buildings conveys the emo-
tional coldness found here. Swans swim by proudly, while ostriches
arrogantly stroll about as Rosalind and the duke's fair-minded daugh-
ter, Celia (Sophie Stewart), are encountered. We have met two sets of
characters belonging to two different worlds; shortly, they will all
slip off to the magical realm of Arden.
First, though, they meet at the wrestling match, allowing Czinner
to reveal considerable gifts at cinematic storytelling. There's nothing
stagey about the way he portrays this event; beginning with a long
shot showing the court in attendance, moving to medium takes on
Orlando wrestling with Charles (Lionel Braham), then to close-ups
on Rosalind and Celia's reactions, the sequence is removed from any
theater origins.
The forest looks self-consciously unreal, which is the very point.
Of the true Duke, Charles the wrestler discloses: "He is in the
forest, and a many merry men with him ; there they live like the old
Robin Hood of England . . . and fleet the time carelessly, as they did
in the golden world." The play is about man's unending desire to
leave the everyday world behind and seek an ideal existence, regain-
ing the glory of the good old days or, rather, what we want to believe
were better times, easy to do now that they are gone. Arden is
Shakespeare's Shangri-la. Such a spirit is present, thanks to a set
design, constructed in shades of gray, allowing us to see an Arden as
removed from dark farm or bright court as they were from one
another. Lazare Meersom's ability to bring alternative worlds to
vivid life on-screen had earlier been displayed in the Gallic classic
Carnival in Flanders. We encounter a wood teeming with differing
classes: aristocracy, minor nobility, middle class, peasants, country