Cards on the table: I'm not the biggest Shakespeare fan. I like his stories well enough, but I'm not going to pretend that the language barrier isn't a huge issue for me. When you read his work, it's some of the most beautiful, lyrical combinations of words in the history of the English language. But when you sit back and have it thrown at you with hardly any time to figure out what each character is saying, then it loses some of its impact and starts to feel like a chore. I know you're not supposed to admit that, but fuck it. I'm admitting it.
I've never read Henry V, Shakespeare's historical play about the battle of Agincourt, so I had to go by my knowledge of French and British history to understand what exactly was going on. Predictably, the French are portrayed as either mincing cowards or jittery balls of nerves, given all the subtly of the villains in that piece of shit movie I watched in the last entry. However, the saving grace here is director/star Laurence Olivier, who fucking slays this material and delivers it with enough conviction to suck you in. Hell, even when I didn't know what the fuck he was saying during his extended monologues, his delivery sold it. He's an actor who gets this material and doesn't do that actor trick where they try to speak it really fast in an attempt to fool people into thinking it's "fluid."
Aside from that, what I love about this movie is the approach. The first half hour of this film is a filmed play, with curtains being drawn and glimpses of the actors backstage rushing through costume changes and getting ready for the following scenes. It throws you off at the start, but eventually you get used to seeing the actors playing to the crowd. Then the camera starts panning in on a drawn curtain that dissolves into a landscape, and the film proper begins, with standard cinema scene changes and some truly epic battle scenes. For 1944 this is a fairly bold move, and it works.
Another thing that works is that a ton of the background paintings look obviously fake. They seem a bit too artificial to not have been intentional, but somehow this also works. We are constantly being reminded that we need to imagine ourselves in a past time, and the fake backgrounds bring just the right amount of fantasy into this historical to make it feel dreamlike. Shakespeare adaptations are typically exercises in showing off how great a certain actor is, but Olivier here is perfectly willing to add sweeping camera moves and artistic flourishes to give us an idea of the scope of this story. If he was showing off just to prove that he can direct, then he succeeded. Good job, Larry.
This film isn't without its downsides through. The two big ones for me are the humor and the romance. Shakespearean humor is usually the cringiest bullshit imaginable for me. It's just not funny watching some guy getting tormented by a leek while making goofy faces. The annoying thing about these jokes is there's always that smirk, like "eh? eh??? isn't this funny?" No it isn't, motherfucker. Get back to the battle. Also, the scenes with Princes Katherine (played by Renee Asherson) are atrocious. There's two big ones, and both are terrible, the final one being a courtship between her and Henry that just goes on and on with no payoff. Fuck did I hate that scene.
As for ranking, while there was a lot that I liked about this movie, it was offset by the language barrier and the stuff that annoyed me. I recognize that it's a great adaptation and a great film, but it's not one that I'll probably ever watch again, unless I get on a Shakespeare kick and decided to read all his plays. I'm going to ram this one right between Nanook and Salo, so Henry V lands at #35.
The List
Next time: I join a bunch of hip as shit people and go Fishing With John. I'm already two episodes in. Did I like them? Will I like the others? Tune in to find out!
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