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Ocfober, 1 945
FILM AND RADIO GUIDE
39
Forthcoming Photoplays of Interest to Teachers and Students
Are Shakespeare’s plays suitable screen fare for mass audiences today? After its experience with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Warner studio said no. After its experience with Romeo and Jnliet, MGM said no. Both of these screen versions, lavishly produced, imaginatively directed, and widely publicized, added to Hollywood’s prestige but hardly to its income. Now comes from England, for United Artists release in America, a $2,000,000 Technicolor version of Shakespeare’s spectacular and patriotic Henry V (V for Victory) , in which Laurence Olivier, producer, director, and star, fulfills a cherished ambition. Financed by J. Arthur Rank, Britain’s new film magnate, who is planning to give Hollywood some serious competition, the film is said by British
BY WILLIAM LEWIN
reviewers to have dispelled the Shakespearean hoodoo. Cabled reports call the production “superb” and “masterly,” by no means “boxoffice poison.”
Mr. Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh, who made cinema history in Go7ie With the Wind, will appear soon in another J. Arthur Rank film, Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, recently produced in England by Gabriel Pascal at a cost of some $3,000,000. The picture is in Technicolor. Claude Rains plays Caesar. Some of the scenes were made on location in Egypt. As production expenses mounted, Mr. Rank is reported to have philosophized: “We’re in for a penny, in for a pound ; why spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar?” All concerned are reported thoroughly satisfied with the film, including the critical Mr. Shaw.
who now declares that “the screen is the greatest dramatic medium of our time.”
J. Arthur Rank has also under way a series of eight experimental films for children. Director Mary Field, who has made notable classroom films for GBI, is in charge of the project. She estimates that with Mr. Rank’s organization of children’s movie clubs in Britain, there is a Saturday matinee audience of 200,000 in England and that the world audience of children should, with the development of the children’s-theatre movement, include millions.
Teachers of English will be glad to learn that no less than four of the novels of Charles Dickens are promised on the screen. Sir Alexander Korda plans a screen version of Pickivick Papers. A first-rate script
Laurence Olivier as Henry V in the Technicolor production of Shakespeare's play, recently releosed in England and soon to
be shown in America.