Theatrical Performances Within Films
Another way in which film-makers use Shakespearean texts is to feature characters who are actors performing those texts, within a wider non-Shakespearean story. Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are the two plays which have most often been used in this way. Usually, Shakespeare's story has some parallel or resonance with the main plot. In the 1933 Katharine Hepburn film Morning Glory, for which she won her first Best Actress Academy Award, Hepburn's character Eva Lovelace becomes slightly drunk at a party and very effectively begins to recite To be or not to be, when she is rudely interrupted. In James Whale's 1937 fictional biopic The Great Garrick, Brian Aherne, as David Garrick, performs part of the final scene of Hamlet, in full eighteenth-century garb. In Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 To Be or Not to Be, the title soliloquy becomes a subtle running gag: whenever Jack Benny's character - the pompous actor Joseph Tura - begins the speech, a member of the audience loudly walks out: usually to make love to Tura's wife, played by Carole Lombard. (This also happened to Mel Brooks' character Frederick Bronski in the 1983 remake.) In the 1955 film Prince of Players, a biography of Edwin Booth, Richard Burton appears in the title role and performs several scenes from Hamlet. The 1969 Robert Bresson film A Gentle Woman has the wife and husband attending a performance; in which we see the character Elle engrossed in the scene from Hamlet beginning to fence with Laertes, to the end of the play. Shelley Long's character plays Hamlet in the 1987 film Outrageous Fortune. Kenneth Branagh wrote and directed the low-budget In The Bleak Midwinter (released in the USA as A Midwinter's Tale) immediately before shooting his famous Hamlet. Shot in just 21 days, and telling the story of a group of actors performing Hamlet on a shoestring to save a village church, the film is a tribute to Ealing Comedies, and to the foibles of the acting profession, shot in black and white. The PBS documentary Discovering Hamlet is about the stage production that Branagh appeared in years before making the film, and includes scenes from that production. The film Hamlet 2 centers around a high school drama class and their teacher, played by Steve Coogan, attempting to stage a very experimental and controversial musical sequel to Hamlet.
The BFI National Archive contains at least twenty films featuring characters performing (sometimes brief) excerpts from Hamlet, including When Hungry Hamlet Fled (USA, 1915), Das Alte Gesetz (Germany, 1923), The Immortal Gentleman (GB, 1935), The Arizonian (USA, 1935), South Riding (GB, 1937), My Darling Clementine (USA, 1946), Hancock's 43 Minutes (GB, 1957), Danger Within (GB, 1958), The Pure Hell of St Trinian's (GB, 1960), Shakespeare Wallah (India, 1965), The Magic Christian (GB, 1969), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask (USA, 1972), Theatre of Blood (GB, 1973), Mephisto (Hungary, 1981), An Englishman Abroad (GB, 1983), Withnail and I (GB, 1986), Comic Relief 2 (GB, 1989), Great Expectations (GB/USA, 1989), Hysteria 2 (GB, 1989), The Voice Over Queen (USA, 1990) and Tectonic Plates (GB, 1992).
Read more about this topic: Hamlet On Screen
Famous quotes containing the words theatrical, performances and/or films:
“January, month of empty pockets!... Let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer’s forehead.”
—Colette [Sidonie Gabrielle Colette] (1873–1954)
“At one of the later performances you asked why they called it a “miracle,”
Since nothing ever happened. That, of course, was the miracle
But you wanted to know why so much action took on so much life
And still managed to remain itself, aloof, smiling and courteous.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)