Page 107 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

96 / Shakespeare in the Movies

Vitagraph's J. Stuart Blackton produced a one-reeler in 1910. Flo-
rence Turner, as Viola, emerged from the Great South Bay onto a
Long Island beach at Bayshore, which subbed for enchanted Illyria.
Twelfth Night, which remained a perennial theatrical favorite, was
not brought to the screen again until 1947, when a Spanish musi-
calized version, Noche de Reyes, was directed by Lucia Luis, starring
Fernando Rey. Russian director Yakow Fried adapted the story in
1955, via an elaborate production, for Lenfilm; Dvenadtsataia noch
featured Katya Luchko in dual roles as Viola and Sebastian, with
Anna Larlonova as Olivia. Though considerably less known than the
Soviet adaptations of Shakespearean tragedy, this is an equally fine
interpretation. Despite the obvious loss of the Bard's dialogue, Fried
(who likewise devised the screenplay) managed to sustain the proper
tone of sophisticated romantic comedy, undercut by the broad,
vulgar clowning of Sir Toby Belch (M. Yanshin), Andrew Aguecheek
(G. Vipin), and the Clown (B. Freindlich). "It is culture shock to hear
an Elizabethan ballad sung as though the vocalist were a strolling
troubadour at the local Russian Tea Room," Kenneth Rothwell and
Annabelle Melzer noted in Shakespeare on Screen, hastening to add:
"What the film lacks in faithfulness to the Elizabethan World
Picture, it more than compensates for with rollicking energy and
honest enthusiasm for the subject."
Critics agreed that the film, which arrived on American shores at
the height of cold-war animosity, neatly cut across cultural barriers,
speaking to the essential humanity of all people despite careful cut-
ting that reduced the running time to a mere ninety minutes. Fried
effectively opened up the play by moving key scenes outdoors,
taking advantage of the striking Soviet seacoast, while filming those
sequences that had to be set indoors on the most decadently elegant
settings left in postrevolutionary Russia.
Also, he filmed in Sovocolor to avoid the bleak starkness associ-
ated with that country's black-and-white Shakespearean tragedies.
"Most of his principals," A. H. Weiler pointed out in the New York
Times, "temper (their) fervor with an appreciation of Shakespeare's
snarled romances. . . . Although they are Russians and their language
gives Twelfth Night an exotic flavor, they play the comedy in the
lusty spirit of the Bard." At a time when nuclear war seemed
inevitable, Russians and Americans managed to happily make a tem-
porary truce via a mutual respect for Will.
Other than a tasteful Hallmark Hall of Fame NBC televised per-
formance in 1957 starring Maurice Evans and Rosemary Harris,