His portrayal is full-blooded, and unashamedly larger than life. Sir John Gielgud gave the best screen performance of several years. His Anthony is unorthodox, but alive and vibrant. Brando's performance is an actor's performance, not a scholar's: but what an exciting actor he is. Deborah Kerr, Greer Garson are adequate, but laurels must go to Sir John Gielgud (Cassius) and Marion Brando (Anthony). The actors on the whole are good, even if perhaps all of them are not fully aware of the little poetry this melodrama possesses. Simplicity is a comparative term for the directors' treatment, but it must be qualified by the word "imaginative."
JULIUS CAESAR MOVIE FULL
The photography is clean, crisp, black and white, while the grouping is full and significant and often exciting (notably in Caesar's death scene and the Anthony oration scene). Taking Shakespeare's script with no additional dialogue by Houseman, and only a few cuts, the director Joseph (All about Eve) Mankiewicz had translated it to the screen, realising that "the play's the thing." The film is not a literal, theatrical version but is made cinematic with a camera that is all the time on the look-out for subtleties in the text, and important qualities in the characters to underline and emphasis. M.G.M.'s Julius Caesar as an answer to Olivier and Welles, has been produced with simplicity, but with a simplicity that is imaginative. Hollywood was the main offender, but Hollywood, in its own eccentric way, has now more or less made amends and shocked the world by producing "Julius Caesar" with Integrity and honesty. Film versions were either too literal or too free, or they suffered from some particular fault such as misinterpretation. So we see that Shakespeare has not fared very well. There was too much mixture of convention (notably the continual progress from the Elizabethan Theatre to the actualities of the Agincourt campaign and back) and some lamentable interpretations of Shakespeare's moods. These faults were big, but only mainly because of an Imagination that was too high-brow. In his attempt to cinematic, by use of deep-focus photography and the roving camera, Olivier had the now-famous criticism fired at him: "Too many corridors by Furse (the scenic designer) and not enough passages by Shakespeare." The film Hamlet was not a success.īut "Henry V." on the whole, was a heroic performance from Olivier, stylised and colourful sets, and exciting camera work and rhythm at the Agincourt almost made us forget the film's faults. Many of the play's problems were ignored, perhaps because Olivier was too much concerned in making his camera the chief character. The central performance was colourless, devoid of poetry, and far loo consistent (for Hamlet). Olivier's Hamlet on the other hand was neither faithful to Shakespeare nor exciting and adventurous. Welles' "Macbeth," if not brilliantly acted, was exciting and adventurous, but any resemblance to Shakespeare was purely accidental. But apart from Olivier's "Henry V," the films have sacrificed too much Shakespeare. Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles, have realised this, and these two, more than any others, have tried to present Shakespeare cinematically. The main trouble with Shakespeare is that he talks too much for the cinema. Hollywood's "A Midsummer's Night Dream" (with James Cagney, Mickey Rooney and Dick Powell) has been described as "Hollywood's Midsummer Nightmare," and a very prosaic nightmare at that: commentators thought "As You Like It" (with Olivier and Elizabeth Berger) too heavily cut, theatrical and dull, while "Komeo and Juliet" (with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer) literal fidelity did not save it from almost every folly of which unimaginative simplicity is capable.
No film of Shakespeare has ever been wholly successful.
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