An odd turn of
my mind this morning led me to recall the opening line of the great speech with
which Shakespeare brings Henry IV, Part II to a close: "I know thee not, old man" etc
etc. [Spoken by the newly crowned Prince
Hal to his old tutor and drinking companion, Sir John Falstaff.] Google quickly supplied me with the entire
speech, which I read through, tears forming in my eyes. This took me to Kenneth Branagh's much
acclaimed film re-make of Henry V, and courtesy of Netflix, I watched Derek
Jacobi deliver Prologue's opening speech.
I am of that generation that fed on the theatrics of Lawrence Olivier's
classic film versions of Shakespeare's
plays, including, of course, Henry V, and I quite naturally felt a certain
disappointment at Branagh's distinctly low-key approach to that best-loved of
Shakespeare's history plays. But then I
called to mind something said to me by a student of literature who was, a lifetime
ago, a good friend -- Richard J.
Onorato.
As I have
recounted in my Memoir, Richard and I were members of the Winthrop House Senior
Common Room at Harvard at the end of the 50's.
Richard was a handsome, incredibly fit man with a wry sense of humor and
a picture-perfect tennis playing style, who was then engaged in writing a
doctoral dissertation on Wordsworth that eventually became a very well-received
book. One day I was going on about how
wonderful Olivier was in his film version of Henry V, when Onorato broke into
set me straight. What you don't realize,
he said, is that Olivier has just one acting trick that he uses in every
scene. He conveys intensity by making
his voice rise to a higher and higher pitch, making you think that he has
grasped the emotional essence of the speech, when in fact he might just as well
be reading the telephone book [we still had telephone books in those
days.] He then proved his point
irrefutably by imitating Olivier perfectly.
Thereafter, I
was never able to watch Olivier on the screen without thinking of what Dick had
said. It spoiled a number of movies for
me.
2 comments:
it's been said that in acting, the key is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you have everything. A strategem like Olivier's is a part of it, no doubt.
Have you seen Orson Welles's 'Chimes at Midnight'? He claimed that "If [he] wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that's the one [he'd] offer up."
http://youtube.com/watch?v=fuFGx5AyZ2A
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