The twin crimes of being boring and false
Shakespeare wrote a false history.
Olivier made it boring.
That's about all I have to say on this film.
The 1995 version is only slightly better.
5/10
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MovieChat Forums > Richard III (1956) Discussion > The twin crimes of being boring and fals...
Without elaboration, your comment is useless.
"It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's LIVING!"
Captain Augustus McCrae
I'm not convinced elaboration would've helped.
shareBoring - matter of opinion, tho watching a ruthless character claw his way to the top is not that for me. False - there is a disclaimer at the start about old legends, scorned by proof, still worth telling.
For me it is Olivier who makes this. What a protean actor, you would not know it is the same man who played Hamlet, or Othello (or Heathcliff). Josephine Tey thought the same. She must have seen him act this part before the movie was made, because she described his performance in her crime novel 'The Daughter of Time' (which should be read by every Richard III fan). A character describes it as 'the most dazzling performance of sheer evil, it was. Always on the edge of toppling over into the grotesque, and never doing it.' Luckily, it is now captured on film for all time, so we can see what she saw. I sure did.
One of the few films I have seen more than once. Looking forward to getting the blu-Ray version, with the deleted battle scenes.
You won't be disappointed; the picture is absolutely beautiful.
share"Boring - matter of opinion, tho watching a ruthless character claw his way to the top is not that for me."
Absolutely! I'm always riveted by this movie. It never feels its length. I love Olivier's performance (so chilling, yet funny and charismatic, and yes even weirdly tragic) and the Book of Hours aesthetic.
As for false, well, that's baked into the original play, but the movie makes it plain that is the case with the preface about printing the legend.
Don't blame Shakespear! He had to write Richard as a villain, because he had to answer to the royal descendant of Henry Tudor, who'd killed Richard and literllaly taken his crown.
Not that there's a lot of good to be said about Richard, other than that he probably didn't kill his nephews (the Tudors had a better motive). He did steal his nephew's crown, he had zero legal right to be king.
There actually was a legal right, after it was shown that Edward IV had been committed to Eleanor Butler before his (secret) marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. If that were the case, then the children of Edward and Elizabeth were legally illegitimate. Parliament settled the case under Titulus Regius. Which Henry Tudor tried to be sure was destroyed, every copy. By luck, a copy did survive, and we can read the text. So, there was, in fact, legality to Richard's taking the throne.
This, by the way, wasn't the only, or the first, time the charge of illegitimacy helped to take a throne during this general time frame: in 1479, Isabel Trastamara claimed Castile on the grounds that: 1) there had been a previous agreement between her and Enrique IV of Castile (which was broken when she married against Enrique's will); and 2) that her niece, Juana, was not Enrique's daughter but the product of Enrique's wife and her lover Beltran de la Cueva. Because of this, and having lost the war that resulted, that niece has come down in history as Juana la Beltraneja.