Word: elizabethan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...most moving scenes in Shakespeare, Falstaff was killed off. To replace him, his pal, Pistol, the quintessential burlesque of the Elizabethan soul, was played far down to the groundlings...
Because in writing Henry V Shakespeare was much hampered by the limitations of his stage, there was heavy work for the one-man Chorus, who, in persuasive and beautiful verbal movies, stirred his audience to imagine scenes and movement which the bare and static Elizabethan stage could not provide...
Olivier's Henry V. Olivier's Henry V frees Shakespeare from such Elizabethan limitations. The film runs two hours and 14 minutes. Seldom during that time does it fudge or fall short of the best that its author gave it. Almost continually, it invests the art of Shakespeare - and the art of cinema as well - with a new spaciousness, a new mobility, a new radiance...
...begins with shots of 17th-Century London and Shakespeare's Globe Theater, where Henry V is being played. The florid acting of Olivier and his prelates (see cut) and the Elizabethan audience's vociferous reactions are worth volumes of Shakespearean footnotes. For the invasion, the camera, beautifully assisted by the Chorus (Leslie Banks), dissolves in space through a marine backdrop to discover a massive set such as Shakespeare never dreamed of - and dissolves backward in time to the year 1415. Delicately as a photo graphic print in a chemical bath, there emerges the basic style of Shakespearean cinema...
Next came folk singers Josh (One Meat Ball) White, Burl (Blue Tail Fly) Ives and Woody (Ballads from the Dust Bowl) Guthrie, and jazz purists like Pianist Mary Lou Williams and Saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, and guitar-strumming Balladeer Richard Dyer-Bennet, singing Elizabethan love lyrics. His best sellers: Burl Ives, and an album of American country dances...