Henry V on film

bardolatry: news, views & reviews of Shakespeare on film

Our Henry V reviews, thus far:

Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 Henry V, starring Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Paul Scofield (John Murphy)

Laurence Olivier's Henry V on DVD from Amazon

Henry V on Film __________________________________________________________________

Henry V is surely one of the Shakespeare Plays most amenable to screen adaptation. First, it’s an epic, larger-than-life story. Loaded with princes and nobles galore, decked out in the garments and weapons of chivalry, Henry V tells a tale of intrigues and betrayals, courtly romance and heroic battles against outrageous odds. In this sense, and in spite of the otherwise notorious difficulties of bringing off Shakespeare in the medium of feature film, Henry V might be one of the few of the Bard’s plays which can actually work better on screen than on stage, given the vast resources of filmic make-believe. Or, as the tale’s narrator, Chorus, laments in the Prologue:

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention.
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
into an hour-glass,,,,

(Or here, in the beginning of Act IV:)

And so our scene must to the battle fly;
Where--O for pity!--we shall much disgrace
With four or five most vile and ragged foils,
Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous,
The name of Agincourt...

But there is also a quieter, more personal and poetic side to Henry V which requires, not big special effects budgets, but great actors. Henry V has some of the juiciest "character parts" in all of Shakespeare: Mistress Quickly, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym (not to mention Falstaff, the greatest of all, if you do what Kenneth Branagh does, and steal a bit from Henry IV, parts I and II to fill out the narrative.) And that’s just on the English side. On the French side there’s the elegantly depressive King Louis and his mouthy, peacock of a son, the Dauphin--or "the Dolphin" as Exeter snidely calls him at one point. To-die-for character parts, all of them.

Meanwhile, let’s not forget the protagonist, King Henry V, one of the most coveted of all Shakespeare roles after Hamlet and Lear. This all-too-human warrior and king, who only yesterday (in Henry IV, I and II) was a riotous youth who preferred the companionship of thieves and whores--wouldn’t you, if the company included Sweet Jack Falstaff?--has suddenly grown up to become that most attractive of all epic heroes: the warrior poet. Is it any wonder that today’s Lear was yesterday’s Hamlet, and the day-before-yesterday’s Hal?

But there are as many different approaches to this character and this play as there are actors and directors; but whichever reading or interpretation one gives to the play, the decision-making process will tend to hover around certain key questions:

-- Does this play glorify war, or can it be interpreted as an anti-war piece?

-- Is Henry a calculating cynic, a naive idealist, or a tormented king with a conscience?

-- How does one (or can one) square Henry’s bloodcurdling threats at Harfleurs with popular conceptions of the "chivalrous Christian king"?

-- How is one to explain, dramatically, the completely improbable victory, at five- to-one odds, of the English at Agincourt? Luck...God’s will...the heroic virtues of the English?

-- How should one view Henry’s abandonment of his former Cheapside friends, even to the point of having one of them hanged for robbing a church?

-- Are the Cheapside characters mere stereotypes and providers of "comic relief", or flesh-and-blood human beings living through tragedies of their own as a consequence of Henry’s decisions?

There are two famous film versions of Shakespeare’s King Henry V, one directed by Sir Laurence Olivier in 1943, and the more recent film by Kenneth Branagh in 1989. Let us take each film separately, and look at how these enormously gifted filmmakers dealt with these questions and conundrums in the medium of film.