Laurence Olivier's Richard III: Titles and Opening Scenes

David Garrick's Heir

Laurence Olivier opens his 1955 Richard III with stirring tympani and trumpets and titles reading "Laurence Olivier Presents Richard III by William Shakespeare With some interpolations by David Garrick Colley Cibber etc." Viewers unfamiliar with English theater history might suppose that Garrick and Cibber were screenwriters and that the title resembles the one that supposedly opened the 1929 Taming of the Shrew with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford: "Written by William Shakespeare with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor." (Erskine 341). In fact, Garrick was an eighteenth-century actor and Cibber an eighteenth-century playwright, and Olivier's reference to them gives us our first hint about the relationship between his movie and Shakespeare's play.

Read the rest on Substack!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Accurate List of Hamlet's Soliloquies

Image
Though Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech is his fourth soliloquy, many websites call it his third. They're skipping the twenty-line speech that follows his interview with the Ghost, which in my view is a particularly bad mistake since Hamlet's monomaniacal vow there is at the heart of his tragedy. The internet's cosmic sinkhole of misinformation will never be filled, but it's worth throwing some dirt in when we can, so here's an accurate list of Hamlet's soliloquies, with a short description of where they occur and what they say, along with a few observations.
Read more

Seven Reasons Why Someone Who Doesn't Usually Read Epic Fantasy Might Want to Try Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy

Image
I gobbled up a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy when I was a kid, but had largely stopped reading it by the time I went to college. Though I still read SF&F by "literary" writers, for years I didn't read anything that might be found in a bookstore's science-fiction-and-fantasy section. I even sold my collection of SF&F paperbacks, something I regret, much as Ray Bradbury regretted selling his collection of Buck Rogers comics . About fifteen years ago, I began reading science fiction and fantasy again. I'm not sure why. Perhaps what happened to me was what C. S. Lewis told his goddaughter might happen to her—I became "old enough to start reading fairy tales again" (dedication in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe ). Or perhaps I was inspired by reading fantasy children's books aloud to my daughters (the greatest reading experience of my life). Or perhaps the change came when, prompted by good reviews, I read Susanna Clar...
Read more

"To Be or Not to Be" in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet

Image
I once asked readers of this blog to vote for the best of four movie performances of Hamlet's fourth soliloquy (3.1.58-90). (If you'd like to compare them, they're posted here .) I now regret not asking about more than the acting since other elements contribute so much to these interpretations. For instance, each rendition is reinforced with a different setting. Franco Zeffirelli puts Mel Gibson's melancholy musings in a crypt, while Kenneth Branagh, who won the poll, has his Hamlet rage at a one-way mirror behind which Claudius and Polonius are hiding. Michael Almereyda—like many of you, I'm eager to see his Cymbeline —has Ethan Hawke meditate in voiceover while walking past the "ACTION" shelves in a Blockbuster, a contemporary setting in 2000 that now looks as dated as rotary phones and typewriters. Elsinore Laurence Olivier sets the soliloquy on the castle tower that he first shows us at the beginning of his 1948 film. As I described in my p...
Read more