614
PARTISAN REVIEW
now allied with suffering France, the French court in the Olivier film is any–
thing but the "enemy": it's a harmless, comic-opera realm of fairy-tale
absurdity. After the French surrender, the court becomes the perfect setting
for Henry's bluff but delicate wooing in two languages.
The battle scenes in Olivier's
film
are a glorious but bloodless spectacle.
They displace the center of the play from Henry's troubled ruminations on
the responsibilities of kingship as he wanders among his men on the eve of
the battle, where he expresses the qualms that link him to Shakespeare's
next hero, Hamlet. Olivier delivers these speeches movingly. but simply cuts
other scenes that give the playa harsher edge, such as the confrontation with
the three traitors in Southampton and ..he execution of Bardolph, one of
Prince Hal's antic playmates from the Falstaffworld in which he sowed his
wild oats. By including and heightening such scenes, Branagh not only dark–
ens the play but conveys what Olivier's static, timeless, highly visual con–
ception neglects, Henry's growth, his transformation.
The untried Henry of Branagh's opening scenes is not yet the com–
manding Henry of the siege of Harfleur. There's still much of Prince Hal
in
the baby-fat of his fleshy face. The French Dauphin, with his gift of tennis
balls, can mock him as a young wastrel for his "wilder days." In short, part of
him still belongs plausibly to the Falstaffworld; he's not a plaster god but a
human being, a man who could easily be underestimated. Ultimately, this
will
lend credibility to the heroic side of the play. Henry's harsh justice towards
his own men foreshadows the savagery of combat, and gives heft to his
transition from the errant prince to the warrior king.
Branagh is able to have it both ways. The bloody carnage, the Beck–
ett-like landscape after battle, the utter exhaustion of Henry and his men
af–
ter a victory they can barely savor: this is grim-faced war as we know it
today, the kind of victory for which men pay a fearsome price. Yet Branagh
also puts great timbre and resonance, as well as stirring evidence of personal
growth, into Henry's heroic speeches, such as his vaunting ultimatum at
Harfleur and his great St. Crispin's Day speech. Some of this effect is iost
in
Olivier's more artificial setting, where the ramparts of Harfleur are like a
stage-set for toy soldiers.
This is in line with Olivier's performance of
Henry
Vas
still essentially
a
stage
play, which begins quite comically on a literal stage and proceeds
among storybook castles in which Olivier is still basically the player king, the
actor in greasepaint and costume. Thus the siege ofHarfleur is performed as
if
it were a puppet-play, with little sense of menace or challenge. This is no
art film like Branagh's, but broadly popular filmmaking, designed to ease a
mass audience into alien literary language and a distant world. There's none
of the sweaty, violent horror that Branagh hurls at us, with his modern post–
Beckett sensibility.
As
a result, Branagh shapes a modern hero out of
Shakespeare's least modern, most patriotic play - a hero with a past, a hero
