Word: carious
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Understandably, Cariou is not a match for Sri Laurence Olivier, whose Henry V is the one Shakespearean role in which he is indisputably supreme. Carious does not quite have all the voice needed for the "Once more unto the breach" harangue, as magnificent a military pep-talk as anyone has ever trumpeted forth. What is curious is that the British soldiers vigorously hurl balls at the toy cardboard-and-paper castle and have to interrupt the attack to listen to Henry's oratory. Kahn's direction here undercuts the need for any spur to action...
Cariou is absolutely first-rate, though, in the long and difficult introspective soliloquy on "ceremony," and in the ensuing prayer ("O God of battles, steel my soldiers' hearts"). And his blunt wooing of the French princess in the final scene is wholly admirable. At the performance I attended, Carious was clearly off form in the noble "Saint Crispian" speech (scene caption, if you can believe it: "The Machine Creates the Believable Lie; Point of No Return"). In the line "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers," he even left out the middle phrase, which is probably the most...
Unfortunately, there is nothing royal about Camelot's carious screen version. It has been brought crunchingly down to earth by the churlish touch of Director Joshua Logan. To be sure, the film is a re-creation of the triangled plot involving King Arthur (Richard Harris), Queen Guenevere (Vanessa Redgrave) and Lancelot (Franco Nero), the interloper-knight who gives his rivals at the Round Table their joust desserts, thereby arousing the lady's passions. The King ignores their affair until the appearance of his bastard son Mordred (David Hemmings), who sunders the kingdom with slander and rumor...