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Richard III Streaming.
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Ian McKellen’s “Richard III” is a incandescent 20th Century adaptation of the Shakespeare unique. McKellen sets the murderous intrigue and civil strife of the play in an imaginary fascist period of English History. In doing this, he removes the chronicle from its historical context and demonstrates the timeless nature of its themes. The unusual sage was site during the War of the Roses, a bitter succession conflict which took plot in pre-Tudor England. None of the medieval butchery is lost on us when we discover it win spot in a fascist context.
The central theme of Richard III is not ambition or ruthlessness but the power of momentum. Richard relies on both physical and rhetorical momentum for his success. Physically, he must always be on the proceed. Once his movement is stopped he is doomed. Richard makes this abundantly obvious in the play and in the film when his transportation is destroyed at the Battle of Bosworth field and he can no longer depart. Richard says “a horse a horse,my kingdom for a horse” meaning that without movement he loses the battle and with it his life and his kingdom. This signature death speech is even a bit ironic in the film since it is Richard’s jeep that is shot out from him which means that he is speaking metaphorically when he refers to it as a horse. What could be more fitting for a fascist leader?
Momentum is also crucial to Richard’s rhetoric. On two occasions in the play, Richard must convince a woman whose husband he has murdered to marry him. Richard accomplishes this the first time by matching each of the widow’s arguments with a witty reply until she has none left. But Richard is later unable to do this with the second widow. He begins his confident stream of witty retorts but is flustered by and then outdone by her. Rhetorically he has lost his momentum and with it his power to dominate and control.
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Momentum is as crucial to fresh despots as it was to the tyrants of Shakespeare’s time. Hitler mesmerized a generation of Germans with speeches whose assert made slight sense but whose momentum carried the day. And like Richard III, Hitler was only successful as long as his army could maintain on the fade. I wonder if any Panzer driver stuck in the mud and snow of Stalingrad in 1942 found himself muttering “a horse a horse, my kindom for a horse”?
A gala ball: The York family celebrate their reascent to power; the War of Roses (named for the feuding houses’ heraldic badges: Lancaster’s red and York’s white rose) is almost over. Actually, the year is 1471, but for reveal purposes, we’re in the 1930s. A singer delivers a swinging “Arrive live with me and be my savor.” Richard of Gloucester (Sir Ian McKellen), the reinstated sickly King Edward IV’s (John Wood’s) youngest brother, moves through the crowd; observing, watching his second brother George, Duke of Clarence (Nigel Hawthorne) being quietly led off by Tower warden Brackenbury (Donald Sumpter) and his subalterns. With Clarence gone, Richard seizes the microphone, its discordant bid cutting through the singer’s applause, and he, who himself made this night possible by killing King Henry VI of Lancaster and his son at Tewkesbury, begins a victory speech: “Now is the winter of our discontent made magnificent summer by this sun of York” (cleave to Edward, who regally acknowledges the tribute) . But when Richard mentions “grim-visaged war,” who “smooth’d his wrinkled front,” the camera closes in on his mouth, turning it into a grimace reminiscent of the account known to any spectator in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre: that he wasn’t honest born “with his feet first” but also “with teeth in his mouth;” hence, not only crippled (though whether also hunchbacked is perilous) but cursed from birth, his physical deformity merely outwardly representing his inner scandalous.
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Then, mid-sentence, the image cuts again. Richard enters a bathroom; and as he continues his monologue we peek that only now, relieving himself and talking – with narcissistic pleasure – to his believe image in the mirror, he truly speaks his mind; contemptuously dismissing a war that’s lost its menace and “capers nimbly in a lady’s bedchamber,” and determining that, since he now has no delight but to mock his have deformed shadow, and “cannot explain a lover,” he’ll “demonstrate a villain and abominate the slothful pleasures of these days.”
Thus, Richard’s first soliloquy, which actually opens the play on a London street, brilliantly demonstrates the signature elements of this movie’s (and the preceding stage production’s) success: not only its updated 20th century context but its creative exhaust of settings and imagery; boldly cutting and rearranging Shakespeare’s words without anytime, however, betraying his intent. Indeed, that pattern is already place with the prologue’s assassinate of King Henry VI and his son, where following a telegraph describe that “Richard of Gloucester is at hand – he holds his course toward Tewkesbury” (slightly altered lines from the preceding “King Henry VI”’s last scenes) Richard himself emerges from a tank breaking through the royal headquarters’ wall, breathing heavily through a gas mask: As his shots ring out, riddling the prince with bullets, the blood-red letters R-I-C-H-A-R-D-III appear across the hide.
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And as creatively it continues: Richard woos Lady Anne (Kristin Scott Thomas), Henry’s daughter-in-law, in a morgue instead of a street (reach her husband’s casket), and later drives her into drug abuse. Henry’s Cassandra-like widow Margaret is one of several characters omitted entirely; whereas foreign-born Queen Elizabeth is purposely cast with an American (Annette Benning), whose performance has equally purposeful overtones of Wallis Simpson; and whose playboy-brother Earl Rivers (Robert Downey Jr.) dies “in the act.” Clarence is murdered while the rest of the family sits down to a lavish (although discordant) dinner. When upon Richard’s ally Lord Buckingham’s (Jim Broadbent’s) machinations, he is “persuaded” to choose the crown, he emerges from a veritable film star’s dressing room complete with full-sized mirror and manicurists (sold to the attending crowd outside as “two deep divines” praying with him) . Tyrrell (Adrian Dunbar), already one of Clarence’s murderers, swiftly rises through uniformed ranks as he further bloodies his hands. Richard’s and Elizabeth’s final spar over her daughter’s hand takes region in the train-wagon serving as his field headquarters; and we actually glance that same princess wed to his arch-enemy Richmond (Dominic West), King Henry VII-to-be and founder of the Tudor dynasty, with lines taken from Richmond’s closing monologue. Perhaps most importantly, we also glance Richard’s coronation, which Shakespeare himself – honoring that ceremony’s perception as holy – decided not to show; although even here it is presented not as a glowing blueprint of station but only in a brief snippet rerun immediately from the distance of a private, black-and-white film shown only for Richard’s and his entourage’s serve.
And exciting as this project is, its stellar cast – also including Maggie Smith (a formidable Duchess of York), Jim Carter (Prime Minister Lord Hastings), Roger Hammond (the Archbishop), and Tim McInnerny and Bill Paterson (Richard’s underlings Catesby and Ratcliffe) – uniformly explain themselves more than up to the task.
Even if the temporal setting didn’t already spell out the allegory on the universality of atrocious that McKellen and director Richard Loncraine obviously intend, you’d have to be blind to miss the visual references to fascism: the uniforms, the gathering modeled on the deplorable Nuremberg Reichsparteitag, the long red banners with a unlit boar in a white circle (playing up the image of the boar Shakespeare himself uses: similarly, Richard’s and Tyrrell’s first meeting is location in a pig-sty, and Lord Stanley’s [Edward Hardwicke's] prophetic dream follows an incident where Richard, for a split-second, loses his self-control) . But the imagery goes even further: Richard’s narcissism is reminiscent of Chaplin’s “Stout Dictator;” and you don’t have to ogle this movie contemporaneously with the latest “Star Wars” installment to visualize Darth Vader during his gas mask-endowed entry in the first scene.
“[T]hus I clothe my naked villany with unusual mature ends stol’n out of holy writ; and seem a saint when most I play the devil,” Richard comments in the play: if there’s one line I regret to leer prick it’s the one so clearly encompassing the intention many a unique despot assumes power, too; by cloaking his right intent in the veneer of formal legality. Even so: this is a highlight among the unique Shakespeare adaptations; under no circumstances to be missed.
Also recommended:
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition
Olivier’s Shakespeare – Criterion Collection (Hamlet / Henry V / Richard III)
BBC Shakespeare Histories (Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Richard II, Richard III) DVD Giftbox
BBC Shakespeare Tragedies DVD Giftbox
Henry V
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet
Hamlet
Peter Brook’s King Lear
Julius Caesar
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