One of the examples of Shakespeare’s universal appeal is the fact that even his earliest plays, historical dramas, happen to be popular and that their audience includes people who do not actually care that much about English medieval history. Compared to the Bard’s later masterpieces like Hamlet, Macbeth or The Tempest, those plays might look crude and simplistic, but they still have that Shakespearean appeal and represent a challenge for future generations of stage and screen artists. In Britain in 1944, one such play proved rather useful for wartime propaganda purposes, and Laurence Olivier, the famous stage and screen actor, producer and director, was asked by the British government to adapt Henry V. The result was a film that later earned Olivier an honorary Oscar.
The play Henry V deals with King Henry V of England and his military campaign in France during the Hundred Years’ War between the two countries. In 1415, freshly on the throne and with a reputation as a careless, hedonistic and irresponsible youth, Henry waged the campaign in order to strengthen both his own domestic authority and the English hold on vast territories in France. His campaign was only partially successful, mostly because of illness among his troops. Forced to retreat towards the friendly port of Calais, Henry and his tired and dwindling army encountered a superior French force near the castle of Agincourt on 25 October. Using a good defensive position and superior longbow tactics against arrogant French knights, Henry carried the day and turned himself into one of England’s greatest national heroes. Ironically, that triumph proved to be the last major English victory in the Hundred Years’ War. Only a generation later, Joan of Arc would turn the tide and begin finally to drive the English out of France.
The Battle of Agincourt perhaps did not have major historical or military significance for the outcome of the Hundred Years’ War, but it provided future English historians and artists with great inspiration for uplifting, patriotic works of art. The same thing that had inspired Shakespeare inspired Olivier too, and he dedicated his film to British commando and airborne troops. However, despite being created mostly for morale-boosting purposes, Henry V was more than a piece of simplistic propaganda.
First of all, Olivier was rather ingenious in his adaptation. Equipped with a relatively high budget and the first Technicolor cameras, he decided to use the talents of Dallas Bower, Alan Dent and himself to adapt Shakespeare’s language and bring it closer to the common man. Another decision was to ground the play in realism by shooting it as a stage play being performed in the Globe Theatre in 1600. That provided a few amusing, almost humorous behind-the-scenes segments about stage actors’ lives in Shakespearean times. Production sets by Carmen Dillon and Paul Sheriff transcended their artificiality by being modelled on illustrations in medieval chronicles, giving the film a somewhat fairytale, surreal atmosphere. That effect is somewhat diminished when Olivier uses locations in Ireland (which was a neutral country in WWII) and thousands of Irish regular army extras to reconstruct the battle. The battle scene is the most spectacular, but it lacks the emotional impact and excitement usually associated with similar scenes in historical spectacles.
Apart from that, the film suffers from Olivier trying to be faithful to Shakespeare in the wrong places, especially when dealing with rather boring segments about the common soldiers in Henry’s army. Olivier’s scene of royal seduction, on the other hand, still possesses a certain surreal and charming quality.
Despite its flaws, Henry V held a good reputation for decades, but, unfortunately, newer generations would almost certainly compare it to the more modern and artistically ambitious 1989 version by Kenneth Branagh. Those comparisons are very bad for Olivier’s work, since they reveal that the 1944 version had its text drastically changed and trimmed for propaganda purposes, making Henry in Olivier’s version a much nicer person than the Henrys in Branagh’s version and real history. Anyway, even with the later work that diminished its reputation, Henry V is a film to be seen and appreciated by both lovers of classic cinema and those who like Shakespeare.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on October 22nd 1999)
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Movie URL: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/22638-the-chronicle-history-of-king-henry-the-fift-with-his-battell-fought-at-agincourt-in-france?language=en-US Critic: AA
