Word: film
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. Can David Lean's 1962 epic possibly be adapted for the tube? Yes! The videotape (RCA/Columbia) looks smashing, and the laser disc (Criterion), with its superior sound and visual resolution, even better. Both offer the fully restored film that was successfully rereleased in February, and both preserve its wide-screen format...
...biblical epic. And finally the monarch of Britain -- and of this robust new movie -- shows his face and speaks. It is an entrance angled to register awe for Kenneth Branagh. But how much awe can a 28-year-old actor, little known outside Britain and directing his first film, expect to inspire? Branagh recalls that when Judi Dench, who plays Mistress Quickly, first saw this scene, "she laughed in my face and said, 'I've never seen an entrance like that! Who do you think you are?' " He retorted, "The film is not called Mistress Quickly the Fourth...
...general's gift of being the man you automatically follow," says Richard Briers, who plays Bardolph in the film Henry and will assay King Lear in the Renaissance's tour of the U.S. next year. Branagh needed that royal self-assurance to build a major acting company and mount a large film. He will need more of it to sustain his career at its current velocity. "Quite soon," says Terry Hands, the RSC's artistic director, "Ken must decide whether he will be an admin man or a great actor. If a leading actor is also running the whole show...
This week he invades U.S. movie theaters (in New York City and Los Angeles, with a dozen other cities to follow next month). He will buck the odds as he did when making his film -- as Henry V did on his French campaign -- and with no smaller an appetite for success. Did Olivier make a landmark film of Henry V when he played in and directed it in 1944? Then the new Olivier would do it again -- bloodier and maybe better -- in hopes of luring the unlettered moviegoer for whom Shakespeare is a synonym for Sominex...
Just to make the challenge sporting, Branagh would plan his film while starring in three roles with his Renaissance Theater Company. And he would shoot his Henry, for a pinchpenny $7.5 million, in seven weeks, less than a third of the time Olivier took. On the first day, the novice director didn't know to shout "Action!" until someone poked him in the ribs. How could he make a decent film under so daunting a shadow...