1973 – Charlton Heston – If Henry V is Shakespeare's attempt at a stage epic (assisted greatly by his poetry that addresses and rouses the audience's imagination), Antony and Cleopatra may well be his mock epic. The play certainly enjoys deflating the noble image of Marc Antony, who is torn between the Roman ideal of duty and the love-lust he feels for the pleasure-lov…
1941 – Orson Welles – Orson Welles' first film explored the life of press baron Charles Foster Kane (Welles) in the effort to solve the riddle of his dying word “rosebud.” The movie has been so often called the greatest film ever made and the world's most honored film that we forget how much of its mythic power derives from Welles' deep tragic sens…
1996 – Kenneth Branagh – Shakespeare's tragedy of the Danish prince (Kenneth Branagh) who is visited by his father's ghost (Brian Blessed) and learns that his uncle (Derek Jacobi) killed him is performed with an uncut text—all 3,906 lines of it. In contrast, Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 version with Mel Gibson retained only 37% of the original text. It…
1953 – Joseph L. Mankiewicz – Shakespeare's tragedy of the assassination of Julius Caesar and its aftermath is famous for its refusal to take sides among the conspirators. This objectivity in the play may be one of the saving graces for this film since the movie combines so many different acting styles. The variety among the players and the overall quality of their work ultim…
1962 – Sidney Lumet – It is sometimes said that in tragedy something of value dies (usually a physical something) and something of value gets born (usually an intangible something). This work by America's greatest playwright focuses on the difficulty of that birth process. On July 22, 1941, Eugene O'Neill presented his wife Carlotta with the manuscript of this play for …
1995 – Oliver Stone – The considerable obstacle to appreciating this film results from the choice to place in a tragic framework such relatively recent events. Shakespeare wrote tragedies about historical kings—Richard II, Richard III—who had ruled over a hundred years earlier, and the ancient Greeks based their tragedies on myth and legend. Oliver Stone's attemp…
1970 – Franklin J. Schaffner – Great men are bred throughout history. Some of them are born to greatness. Some of them reach for greatness. But very few of them actually believe that they have been great all through history. George S. Patton embodied a type of historical hubris, honestly believing that he had fought on nearly every famous battlefield since the dawn of time. It would…
1980 – Martin Scorsese – What supplied this film with much of its punch when it first appeared was its language. Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro had talked about making a prizefighting film based on middleweight Jake La Motta's autobiography since the early 1970s. The original script by Mardik Martin and the rewrite by Paul Schrader employed a more grammatical, literary dia…
1985 – Akira Kurosawa – To list the many obstacles preventing most viewers from watching renowned Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's Ran is to confirm how small a mainstream audience the film will usually enjoy. First, it is based on King Lear, not Shakespeare's most accessible play. Next, Kurosawa sets his adaptation in 16th-century Japan as the aging warlord Hidetora…
1968 – Franco Zeffirelli – The two leads were only 15 (Olivia Hussey) and 17 (Leonard Whiting) when filming began, and though the demands of the Shakespearean verse sometimes overmatch them (especially Whiting), young audiences in the late 1960s responded to this story of young love from the early 1590s. Much of Zeffirelli's attention wisely goes toward “ventilating&#x…
Orson Welles sometimes said that every character he played in his own films was a variation of Faust, that they had all bartered their souls and lost. Although his Othello, for example, was filmed over four years with uncertain financial backing, Welles still managed to invest some of the scenes with an epic scope. The opening shots of lago, played by Michael MacLiammoir, being hoisted in a basket…