On its 75th anniversary, a look back Olivier's Henry V--faithful Shakespeare adaptation and calculated wartime propaganda.
In 1944, the United Kingdom was a country recovering from the Blitz. Children remembered being shipped out to the country to avoid Nazi bombing raids. Roald Dahl, the Royal Air Force’s flying ace who would kick off a new wave of children’s literature all on his own with works likeafter the war, was trying to win the hearts and minds of Americans with propaganda and espionage in the United States.
There are about a million Shakespeare adaptations, but if you’re like me, then that is not a good enough reason by itself to justify bothering to watch a movie. His writing may be the worst-treated of any writer’s in history, based on the sheer number of adaptations and how many of them are joyless and ill-considered . Olivier must have known it. Hisbegins as a lavishly faithful staging of a you-are-there view of the Globe Theatre, ca. A.D. 1599.
As the story shifts from England to France, the Bard’s words invite us to envision the grand armies in our mind’s eye—a necessity back in his own time. Not for Olivier. We are transported through movie magic to a recreation of 15th century Normandy, with period-appropriate knights in full field plate being lowered onto the backs of their horses using pulley systems.
It’s wild, then, to think this came out of a shameless propaganda campaign. Faced with the bloody horror of invasion in a time of mass destruction and the threat of a world order of gruesome fascism, and on the eve of another raid on Normandy’s beaches, Britain yearned for a tale from the old glory days.was partially funded by the British government and openly thanked the troops in its acknowledgements.
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