Word: elizabethans
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With the possible exception of "Antony and Cleopatra," "Henry V" more than any other of Shakespeare's plays strains even the plastic Elizabethan stage beyond its limits. Oliver in his role of producer-director makes the most of the potentially wonderful freedom and mobility of motion pictures, thereby giving "Henry" a breadth of scope utterly unrealizable on the Elizabethan stage...
...Globe Theater and follows him and his company through the first "act" of the play as Olivier imagines it was performed in Shakespeare's time. Although it might be argued that the cinematic version of the Globe contains inaccuracies of construction, this taste of the full flavor of the Elizabethan stage, of the intimacy of contact between the actors and the audience, the roll of the eye and the spoken aside followed by a howl of laughter, makes this first part of the picture in its way the most delightful...
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...