Word: tearsheet
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...acting--with a few negligible exceptions--is superb. The heart of this play--Prince Hal (Bill Camp) and Sir John Falstaff (Jeremy Geidt)--beats with perfect rhythm. Mistress Quickly (Remio Airaldi), Doll Tearsheet (Maggie Rush), the Archbishop of York (Herb Downer), and Justice Shallow (William Young) are particularly memorable. Under the direction of Ron Daniels, these characters are shaped pertinently from the text. Not simply characters from Shakespeare, they are characters we interact with daily They are our friends and families; they are ourselves...
...then decided that the more Falstaffian comedy he includes, the better American audiences will like it (he may be right about this). So he has imported Doll Tearsheet from 2 Henry IV and interpolated a low-life scene from that play. And just before the end of the show, after the climactic Battle of Shrewsbury, Coe brings on Falstaff to declaim his long paean to the wonders of sherry sack--which also comes from the later play--and thus mars Shakespeare's carefully wrought conclusion. There are, too, some lines that have been moved from their proper place...
...cleanly spoken Worcester, though he overacts the Welsh rebel Glendower (who has parody built into him and does not need any more superimposed). And Karen Stott gives pleasure through Lady Mortimer's prescribed song (with a real on-stage harp accompaniment by Sophie Gilmartin), though her Doll Tearsheet, as I indicated, belongs in the sequent play, which I wish Coe would offer us complete before long...
...iconic images which crowd the film: the old King's breath freezing in the chill sunlight of his vast hall, Hotspur's (Norman Rodway) peripatetic motion caught by a camera tracking in tight close-up, the gross Falstaff beside the cruelly emaciated Justice Shallow (Alan Webb), Doll Tearsheet (Jeanne Moreau) demonstrating how a tender and accomplished whore might satisfy an impossibly fat old patron. The Battle of Shrewsbury is simply the finest, truest, ugliest war footage ever shot and edited for a dramatic movie. Welles fills Falstaff with motifs to create visual unities: the vast castle wall which dominates shot...
...dollars, he shot the film in Spain with Spanish extras. The corner cutting shows in nearly every scene. Dubbing has made Shakespeare's words fit badly in the mouths of the supporting players and sometimes of the principals (Sir John Gielgud as Henry IV, Jeanne Moreau as Doll Tearsheet). The background of Avila sits oddly with the Elizabethan drama. By having Sir Ralph Richardson narrate .he film with quotations from Holin-shed's Chronicles, Welles evidently loped to sew his fragmentary film together; instead, he has exposed its ?patches...