Word: agincourt
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Laurence Olivier's magnificent screen production of Shakespeare's Henry V was first disclosed to a group of Oxford's impassive Shakespeare pundits, there was only one murmur of dissent. A woman specialist insisted that all the war horses which take part in the Battle of Agincourt should have been stallions...
...Wales, Henry V (at 28) had to prove his worthiness for the scepter by leading his army in war. He invaded France, England's longtime enemy. He captured Harfleur, then tried to withdraw his exhausted and vastly outnumbered army to Calais (see map). The French confronted him at Agincourt. In one of Shakespeare's most stirring verbal sennets, Henry urged his soldiers on to incredible victory. English mobility (unarmored archers) and English firepower (the quick-shooting longbow) proved too much for the heavily armored French...
...Battle of Agincourt is not realistic. Olivier took great care not to make it so. To find the "kind of poetic country" he wanted, and to avoid such chance anachronisms as air raids (the picture was made in Britain during the war), Olivier shot the battle sequence in Ireland.- Making no attempt to over-research the actual fight, he reduced it to its salients-the proud cumbrousness of the armored French chevaliers, and Henry's outnumbered archers, cloth-clad in the humble colors of rural England. A wonderful epitomizing shot-three French noblemen drinking a battle-health in their...
Inspired Sequence. But the most inspired part of Shakespeare's play deals with the night before the Battle of Agincourt. It is also the most inspired sequence in the film. Olivier opens it with a crepuscular shot of the doomed and exhausted English as they withdraw along a sunset stream to encamp for the night. This shot was made at dawn, at Denham (a miniature British Hollywood) against the shuddering objection of the Technicolor expert. It is one of many things that Olivier and Cameraman Robert Krasker did with color which Technicolor tradition says must not or cannot...
...arms were not favorably impressed by his nonchalance: they expected him to draw enemy bombs. His good friend and commanding officer Major Randolph Churchill (an old-style aristocrat who now writes a column for United Feature Syndicate) cried something to the effect that this was not the Battle of Agincourt. Waugh forsook his lonely eminence, in icy rage removed his coat. "It was not your rudeness I minded," he explained to Major Churchill, "it was your cowardice that surprised...