WalstoneCounty.com

There have been over six hundred film adaptations of the thirty-seven plays of William Shakespeare, who, for all intents and purposes, was the greatest playwright of any age. This is not because he was always particularly good with plotting or that all of his plays are assured successes, but because he had an eye and heart for the human being, who is at the center of the drama. Not only have so many of his idioms entered into the everyday speech of people world-wide, but he spoke politically, philosophically, comically, and tragically without ever forgetting that his plays should first and foremost reflect life as it is lived and as it should be. He wrote during a flourish of English drama, was a product of his day and the thought of the day, and yet his plays have transcended time and culture to be adapted into works in Japan, every European country, the United States, Africa, and Latin America.

But, he has never flourished quite the way he has in any other form than in film. Since the beginning of cinema, producers have taken his works and adapted them—sometimes with disastrous results, sometimes even as movies intended for teenage audiences, and sometimes these products of the Hollywood, British, and Japanese film industries have set the standard for Shakespearean performance and interpretation. This article hopes to highlight some of the greater moments, laugh alongside some of the weakest, and re-think some of the over-looked film adaptations of the comedies and tragedies that have risen in popularity somewhat slower than some of the others.

Shakespeare's comedies have been as sought after by Hollywood producers as the great tragedies. This goes as far back, if not farther, than the shamelessly hokey thirties version of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Whereas Twelfth Night, or What You Will has never been successfully adapted to the screen, all of Shakespeare's other major comedies have been translated on both sides of the Atlantic. Though reading a lot of Shakespeare's comedies (like reading a lot of Moliere) will show you quickly the belabored formulae he utilized in these sixteen-odd pieces, there are a few that stand out as particularly popular.

Though never as sold out as audiences for A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's early pastoral comedy As You Like It has pleased crowds for centuries. In fact, it was the subject of Kenneth Branagh's latest Shakespearean adaptation. A rarely seen and joyous screen adaptation is found in 1936's Paul Czinner film starring Laurence Olivier.

Those familiar with Olivier's seminal screen performances as Hamlet, Henry V, and Richard III, will be surprised at how unconscious Olivier's performance as Orlando really is. This film catches him right in between his status as a matinee idol and as a serious actor, showing off some of his more raw talent (usually buried underneath his sumptuous diction). Though the film does have that same 1930's hokum associated with Cagney's Shakespearean debut as Puck in Midsummer, As You Like It remains as jaunty and lovely as the play.

Another joyous screen adaptation is Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing. No other adaptation of the comedies comes as close to retaining the full spirit of the source material than this celebrity-infused (and beautifully shot) film. Though Keanu Reeves is probably the strangest casting since Rooney, he thankfully doesn't have much screen time. The sweetest scenes are between former husband and wife Branagh and Emma Thompson, who is at her most glowing as Beatrice. The film is also interesting for highlighting young Robert Sean Leonard and Kate Beckinsale in some of their early screen roles. Many Branagh favorites—such as Brian Blessed and Richard Briers—fill the rest of the casting palate, with delightful supporting roles played by Michael Keaton and Denzel Washington. Still, Branagh is the main draw—fretting and pouting and using his wild expressions to fully bring an Elizabethan character to life.

On the flip side of Much Ado About Nothing—a critical and box office success—there is Branagh's later comedy (in fact, musical comedy) Love's Labour's Lost—adapted from another early verse comedy akin to As You Like It. Though still retaining the verve of the play, the film confused audiences and put off critics who were holding Branagh up to the standards of Much Ado.

Branagh's idea of cutting half of Shakespeare's text and replacing it with songs of the 1930's only half works. But, his direction of the musical scenes is not meant to be taken seriously, making the film wildly akin to Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You—another all-star cast musical where the cast can't sing that well and it's just pure fun. In a screen highlight, Berowne's "Love, first learned in a lady's eyes" speech from Act IV lovingly fades into Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek." Also, the cast's version of "They Can't Take That Away from Me" is likely to bring tears to your eyes.

Still, Branagh's odd casting of Alicia Silverstone (way past her box office prime) and horror/slapstick film regular Matthew Lillard seem completely out of place. Nathan Lane—as with most of his film performances—also comes off as a distraction, even utilizing unnecessary ad-libbing. And, yet, the film is not the disaster that everyone thinks it is. Though a major setback for Branagh (who has continued to harp on the Bard comedies in most recent years), the film is a delight if you're not expecting wit.

It seems unlikely that The Taming of the Shrew could be plausibly adapted to any period after the 1950's because of its blatantly sexist Act V speech. And yet, its two greatest screen translations are well past the age of the Equal Rights of Women. And what better Shrew in Hollywood can you find than Elizabeth Taylor?

Franco Zeffirelli—though his career is full of misgivings—might be the best at translating Shakespeare to the screen. This is because he has never forgotten that Shakespeare is loud and his characters (although they talk a lot) think from the pelvis and not from the brain. This is something even Olivier forgot in a major way. Zeffirelli's version of The Taming of the Shrew features Taylor and Richard Burton at their most public even though it was originally a vehicle for Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.

Always loud and boisterous, Taylor still has a glimmer of her great early roles as Kate, while Burton plays Petruchio with his usual panache. While Taylor plays the Act V speech in all seriousness, Zeffirelli still leaves us questioning the Shrew's "taming."

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum is an offering from the late twentieth century that translates The Taming of the Shrew to a contemporary high school setting. Though Shakespeare is never directly credited with the creation of the story, 10 Things I Hate About You in no way hides its Elizabethan origins. Though made in 1999, it shares a lot with Zeffirelli's sixties-era Shakespeare films. Using teenagers as replacements for the action-before-words Elizabethans, the film actually gets closer to how Shakespeare ought to be performed rather than the "Over Forty and Feelin' Foxy" crowd who drench his texts in thoughts and preambles.

Though the late Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles get the most screen time, it is Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Larisa Oleynik as the Lucentio-Bianca couple who are the key to the success of the movie as well as some hilarious adult supporting actors in the multitalented Larry Miller and Alison Janney. Kate ("Kat" in the film) is still a shrew, Petruchio ("Patrick") is still kind of an over-bearing bounder. And yet the taming becomes an excellent coming-of-age story rather than a stifling of Kate's spirit.

While his comedies are pretty and fun, the wealth of Shakespeare's gifts are stored in his tragedies, which have always provided the meat of an actor's cravings on stage and screen. They also have always translated well into any film period that has passed us by. The early Hollywood obsession with Roman epics, the golden ages of American and British cinema, and the best of darker, contemporary offerings.

Shakespeare's Roman plays—though full of anachronisms—do showcase some of his less self-conscious plotting (perhaps because of the sound annals of Plutarch on which they are based) and some of his most unique characterization. The greatest of the adaptations of these is, hands down, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar.

This 1953 Caesar makes some of Branagh's star-studded casts pale in comparison. John Gielgud, James Mason, Marlon Brando, Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr—some of the best actors and persona-players of their day. The adaptation—though a product of Hollywood—remains elegant and stirring and some of Mankiewicz' best direction is on display as well.

Some of the other Roman tragedies have not translated as well to the screen as Caesar, but their having been made at all has kept the Roman plays in the consciousness of modern movie-goers. An over-looked achievement is the 1972 Antony and Cleopatra—co-written, directed, and starring Charlton Heston. Though perhaps the most recognized star of the Hollywood of the Golden Age, Heston languished in the seventies with a string of box office flops, many of them with financial connections to Europe. Antony and Cleopatra—the film that almost stopped dead his Shakespearean career—is a visually stunning and emotionally engaging film.

Antony and Cleopatra seems an excellent source of film adaptation with its short and cinematic scenes. And, yet, its reputation as a Shakespeare script is considered dubious even compared to something less known—such as Coriolanus. Heston only directed two films and the poor reviews of this one were enough to keep him out of the director's chair for most of his career. Still, though Heston has entered the American pop culture as a bit of a blowhard, his performances of Shakespeare's work are always dynamic. This alone is enough to put Antony and Cleopatra in your queue.

Shakespeare's earliest tragedy—what used to be his most confusing in terms of scholarly research and is now growing in recognition—is Titus Andronicus. The ultra-violent and character-deficient play is being used in theatres all across the country as a paradigm of our age. The director who has brought the most attention to it is Julie Taymor, who has wowed the world of theatre with her visually-charged productions such as Broadway's The Lion King (oddly enough, an adaptation of Hamlet). She has spent the greater part of her time on Titus, and this was cemented with her 1999 film adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

Though impressive as a film debut, upon closer examination Titus remains an empty experience. Using Shakespeare's half-thought metaphors with a heavy-handedness that directors usually try to avoid (when Titus compares Rome to a den of tigers, all of a sudden tigers leap toward the audience), it never quite makes any point. As proof of its inconsistency, Titus is not a story that can be simply told. One would have to bring something to it to make it work. What Taymor brings is an un-formed idea early on that the film is about children and violence in children's media. But, Titus Andornicus, like it or not, was probably a play Shakespeare thought highly of as a young man, but rose above quickly—simultaneously rising above the achievements of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd.

Shakespeare's later tragedies have always been the Holy Grail of Shakespearean films—most times they have resulted in films that have fallen short and sometimes they have represented the best in modern interpretation. Othello, the Moor of Venice is a unique Shakespeare play in that its language is advanced far above most of Shakespeare's works and it is one of the only tragedies without the plot influences of the supernatural. The characters are required to stir in their own problems without the help of gods or ghosts. And, yet, it has never come off too well on screen.

One of the earliest attempts at giving it a shot in the movies was the 1952 Orson Welles version. Orson Welles, of course, had a great mind but an uneven artistic temperament that left most of his screen work unfinished and muddied. Othello was one of the most tortured shoots of his career. Because of funding, he had to take incredibly long breaks in photography which weakens his attempts at uniting the film's direction.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the casting of Welles in the role of a Moor (regardless of what scholars say, someone of African and not Arabic descent). This has not kept the great actors from playing the tortured soldier, from Olivier and down to Anthony Hopkins (incredibly, on television, in the 1980's!).

It would be an incredible forty-three years before a cinematic Othello would be portrayed by a Black man. And this man was Laurence Fishburne. Perfect casting, only complimented by the perfect casting of Branagh in the role of Iago. And yet, Oliver Parker's wildly uneven scripting and direction makes the 1995 Othello a disappointment. Even later, a mildly controversial high school drama—O—directed by Tim Blake Nelson and starring Mekhi Phifer missed the point of the play entirely. Like it or not, Othello is not a story about race, but about jealousy.

Unfortunately, this great play has never made a great film, except in its operatic version by Giuseppe Verdi. Franco Zeffirelli brought the power of his opera staging to a rare 1986 film version of Otello starring Placido Domingo. As powerfully acted and dynamic as Zeffirelli's other screen ventures, it remains the best cinematic exploration of the jealousy and envy of Othello.

No Shakespeare play has been adapted more times than Macbeth—the "cursed" Scottish play with as many different authorial interpolations as one could manage while still remaining a unified and excellent Shakespeare text. Orson Welles, who had once adapted Macbeth into a Caribbean setting for a WPA theatre production, attempted Macbeth (in an unfortunate full Scottish brogue) for his 1948 adaptation.

Even over-looking the critical and commercial disaster the film was on both sides of the Atlantic, the film is nearly unwatchable. Using an odd screen adaptation (twisting of the story is more the idea) and sets inspired by German expressionism (without the...you know...craft), the film, in all of its various running times, is a nightmare. It would be a while before the real story of Macbeth would be shown in the cinema.

Roman Polanski's 1971 version of Macbeth (more aptly titled in Europe as The Tragedy of Macbeth) is by far the greatest cinematic translation of the work of Shakespeare. Following shortly after his girlfriend Sharon Tate was mercilessly killed by the Manson Family, Polanski (along with co-scriptwriter Kenneth Tynan) gave us a Macbeth that was realistic, chilling, powerful, violent, and entirely un-sexy (despite the copious amounts of nudity).

Whereas so much Shakespeare is performed by people of great diction and flailing arms, no actor in Polanksi's Macbeth knows their next line is coming. The dialogue is as natural and belabored as real speech. Despite a hectic production schedule, Polanski's Macbeth also comes closest to adapting Shakespeare's sense of how violence affects people and how greed can be suicide. A fully nude Lady Macbeth rubbing her hands of the invisible blood, the pissing Porter, Macbeth "seeing" the dagger, and the opening shot, where on the grey beaches of Scotland, a warrior needlessly beats a dead soldier just to see more blood are among the many stunning images that represent the best of Polanski's career. To get the money required, the producer's credit has the unfortunate name of Hugh Hefner, but without him, the film might never have been made.

What sets this film apart, however, is not its brutality or the barren eyes of its anti-heroes, but the fact that Polanski (a victim of the Holocaust and Tate's murder) needed to make it. It was not a script choice or because of a producer's pocket money, it was a film Polanski had to make as it seems like a script Shakespeare had to write. It's the only time Shakespeare and a present-day director have had that sort of "working" relationship. Still another elegant adaptation is in Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, which has risen in popularity through the years of some of that director's best work.

Of course, the best known tragedies we save for last. The other most adapted tragedy is Romeo and Juliet. In some critical ages, the play has been dismissed as precious; in others, it is considered the play that marked the turning point for Shakespeare's more serious writing. In the end, it is a play about the folly of youth and the ignorance of the aged (or simply the ignorance of the ignorant). Regardless, it is beloved, and yet for years, the characters of Romeo and Juliet (roughly 19 and 14, respectively) had been played by people in their thirties—until Franco Zeffirelli changed everything.

Casting the remarkable Olivia Hussey (surely one of the greatest finds of any film director in the sixties) and Leonard Whiting, who were the actual ages of the characters, Zeffirrelli crafted a crude and enthralling adaptation in 1968 that has set the bar for classic interpretations of Shakespeare ever since. It was also box office gold and brought Romeo and Juliet to another generation of young people at a time when young people were beginning to dictate society.

On the other end of the spectrum—nearly thirty years later—the story resurfaced and was re-imagined by the MTV generation for another box office success in "William Shakespeare's" Romeo +Juliet—directed by Baz Luhrmann. Both films are unique for their view of young love and their heavy cutting of the text. And, yet, both are perfect in very different ways. Whereas Zeffirelli's version retains the medieval Italian setting, Luhrmann posits us on a post-apocalyptic California beach where media and guns have replaced the Church and swordplay. Leonardo DiCaprio, who will certainly be one of the most genuine stars of his generation, and the luminous Claire Danes play the star-crossed lovers with a genuine bent that matches Whiting and Hussey in the original. Romeo "plus" Juliet still proved that Shakespeare could pack in audiences and, like 10 Things I Hate About You, proved that youthful verve still matched Shakespearean text in a way that makes everything else seem pretty phony.

The Shakespeare play that has most entered the consciousness of the English-speaking world is, of course, Hamlet. It has been represented on screen but a few times, though recorded in performance more than perhaps any other play. It has also been re-imagined more times than the chair, most recently in 2000 by Michael Almereyda with Ethan Hawke as Hamlet in an American corporation known as "Denmark" (Ha ha). But, the three biggies remain the ones directed by the best Shakespeare film directors: Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh.

The best is Olivier's. Though tied up in Freud's shameful pseudo-science, Olivier delivers the performance of his career in this 1948 film. Hamlet is a very difficult text. At an unwieldy length, you can cut a lot out and still retain the plot and yet, if you cut too much, you miss the philosophical gems that have enlightened audiences for years. Olivier's is a perfect combination of the two. While running smoothly at just over two hours, it still captures the bravura essence of the tragedy and has some excellent supporting performances, including Jean Simmons as Ophelia and a hilarious Felix Aylmer as Polonius.

One has to respect Olivier's moody, atmospheric, and brisk adaptation as he would've known Hamlet might've been his greatest film, and yet it never seems like a masturbatory star vehicle.

Years later, in a casting decision that would've turned the heads of the film community today, Mel Gibson was cast as the lead in Zeffirelli's version of Hamlet. It is, by far, the weakest of Zeffirelli's Shakespearean work and of the big screen Hamlets. It was one in a long stream of nineties costume dramas that left people scratching their heads (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is another example of this). While Gibson is not great, he's not particularly good. But, the problem is the script.

Cutting and rearranging like mad, it seems they were using Welles' Macbeth screenplay as a jumping off point. Regardless, there's lots to like. Alan Bates is the best screen Claudius while we also get to see Pete Postlethwaite (impressive in Romeo + Juliet as Friar Lawrence), Helena Bonham Carter, Paul Scofield, and Glenn Close in excellently cast parts.

Everything that made Branagh's Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing successes back-fires in his 1996 Hamlet, following closely on the tail of Zeffirelli's version and yet, excising none of the text, making for a four-hour film that never really feels epic. His celebrity casting, energetic performance style, and elegant crafting in his screenplays are sadly absent. The big problem is not the length (though films are the best places to cut Shakespeare's texts), but the setting.

It seems to be set during the Prussian War in one of those nameless, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, cropped-hair cut European countries that no one cares about. Basically, it never feels like the Denmark of Shakespeare. Using Blenheim Palace, the film is always pretty without ever being visually compelling—except for Branagh's few directorial touches using the mirrors for moments such as the "nunnery" scene. Branagh's interpretation of the character is perhaps more correct than Olivier's (getting rid of Freud and his Oedipal overtones), but virtually ever other cast member doesn't come off very well. Rufus Sewell slurs and sputters around as Fortinbras, Derek Jacobi and Julie Christie seem to have not played emotion in years, and there is absolutely no excuse for Jack Lemmon coming off on screen like he has no clue how to do his job. If Lemmon looked bad, believe me, it was the director's fault. Some of the scenes with virtually excisable characters come off the best. I happen to like Billy Crystal as the Gravedigger (though it would make more sense if he and Robin Williams had switched roles) and Gerard Depardieu's tiny scene as Polonius' henchman is chilling.

Shakespeare lived, wrote, and died a long time ago. And yet, we've never let him rest. Operas, theatrical adaptations, films, musicals, parodies, and centuries later, we still revel in what he revealed about us humans—our frailties, our foul-ups, and the times where we seem like Supermen. A sense of him has been captured on the screen. A whiff, really. His achievements are too much to be captured. This review, I hope, points to how many times we've tried to even bring his sense to the screen and his wit and his humor and his compassion for human life.