Page 18 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

Introduction / 7

Not everyone would agree. In 1953, author and critic Eric Bentley,
reviewing Julius Caesar for the New Republic, insisted: "The now
widespread notion that Shakespeare's plays are 'filmic' is true only
to the extent that they are made up of an unbroken succession of
short scenes." Other than this, Bentley argued that "the actual film-
ing of Shakespeare never fails to remind us how utterly he belongs to
the stage." By "us," of course, Bentley means "me." Because his
theory proceeds from a flawed premise: A specific failure on the part
of a single film's director reveals a more generalized and unsolvable
problem. John Gielgud as a Cassius, Bentley reasoned, "who walks
through a real street loudly talking to himself can only seem
demented." On the stage, ancient Rome is suggested rather than re-
created, and this convention works.
Bentley confuses director Joseph Mankiewicz's handling of that
moment (more accurately, Mankiewicz's failure to cinematically
handle it) with the greater issue of whether the problem can be han-
dled at all. In Laurence Olivier's Hamlet a solitary speech is effec-
tively presented as a voice-over, which is the perfect cinematic
equivalent of a Shakespearean soliloquy.

All the World's a Stage

Another scribe went further still, stating that iambic pentameter
(characters speaking in a stylized rather than realistic manner) ren-
dered Shakespeare irreconcilable with the cinema. "The basic trou-
ble with any Shakespearean film," critic Richard Mallett asserted in
Punch, is that "the more circumstances and scenery are made life-
like and convincing, the less easy it is to accept the convention of
heightened, rhetorical, rhythmical dialogue." If Mallett were right,
then musical movies such as On the Town—in which Frank Sinatra
and Gene Kelly sing their lines while dancing around a real New
York—ought not to work. But here's the rub: Under Stanley Donen's
inspired direction, it does.
Mallett is wrongheaded when he suggests that cinematic mise en
scene is essentially realistic. Masterpieces of 1920s German Expres-
sionism and the following decade's Universal horror films make clear
(as do Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands or David Lynch's Wild at
Heart) that mainstream movies can stretch into surrealism. Then
again, even seemingly naturalistic sets in movies by realists like
Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon) are, if that filmmaker is to be
believed, more subtly stylized than is initially obvious. Simply put,