Page 46 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

The Winter of Our Discontent / 35

more wonders than a man, Daring an opposite to every danger."
When Catesby begs Richard to flee, the king stoically insists: "I have
set my lie upon a cast, and I will stand the hazard of the die." He
defiantly approaches Richmond, sword raised courageously, embrac-
ing his end. In life, he made a bad show of it; yet Richard partly
exonerates himself with a noble death. Such a character demands
respect without evoking sympathy, and such a character is present in
Olivier's film.

Coward Conscience
Richard III
United Artists, 1995; Richard Loncraine

An entirely different interpretation was offered at the end of Richard
Loncraine's 1995 version. The film, updated to the 1930s, had
Richard (Ian McKellen) squatting in a jeep. Rather than hoping to
fight on, the cowardly king flees after killing loyal Catesby. When
Richard's vehicle becomes stuck in mud, he shrieks fearfully; a
simple horse would allow him to escape. At last, he attempts to
sneak away, then finally dies (like the craven heavy in an old Hol-
lywood western), falling off a high building while pursued by the
stalwart hero Richmond. Loncraine's film does not update; rather,
it undermines Olivier's version—and Shakespeare's vision as well.
However controversial the 1955 Richard III may have seemed to
scholars, Olivier's effect is traditional compared to such experiments.
The atmosphere is stylized art-deco wallow, an outrageous thirties
retrofashion extravaganza, not a serious adaptation of an important
play. Characters cruise in sleek Bentleys,- there are elegantly slinky
gowns for slender girls, and men are attired in Gatsby-era tuxedos. In
contrast to such divine decadence, Tony Burrough's ominous sets
create an aura of modern industrialism, a bleak, workaday world
paradoxically set against colorful royal lives.
Some twentieth-century conceits are clever, such as Richard view-
ing his own coronation in the palace's private screening room, rather
like a modern ruler unconvinced of his achievement until he con-
fronts proof positive via the media; or when his distraught wife,
Anne, shoots up with heroin to dull her senses. Cleverness, how-
ever, carries only so far; the concept might have worked better as a