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46
FILM AND RADIO GUIDE
Volume Xll, No. 6
Screen Version of the Forum Scene in "Julius Caesar."
TOP — "Look! In this place ron Cassius' dagger through." MIDDLE — "Let but the commons heor this testament — " BOTTOM — "Here wos a Caesar! When
comes such another?"
odd way in which knights in heavy armor are lifted upon their armor-clad horses by pulley and tackle. We glory in the hardiness of the archers, and in the thundering charge of the knights. Now and then we catch glimpses of beautiful landscapes, the “fair fields of France." We enter the camps and see how the armies of the period housed themselves.
Those persons whom the comic characters, Falstaff, Fluellen, Gower, Macmorris, Pistol, N y m, and Bardolph have amused will enjoy seeing these counterfoils in real life. They may attend the last moments of the “Fat Knight” who “babbled of green fields” as he died. The production retains, but does not over-accent, the Shakespearean comic relief and the play upon dialects.
All this is so good that it is a pity that the entire production is not carried out in the vein of enlarged imagination and closeness to reality. Instead, the scenes at Southampton and at Harfleur, and the exterior of the castle of the French king, are all highly conventionalized. The castle looks more like a child’s toy castle, or more like an impressionistic painting, than it looks like any place in which human beings live. Touches of this spirit of convention appear in showing the doddering and halfmad French king, Charles VI, Queen Isabel of France, and even Princess Katharine.
Vivien Leigh makes a most beautiful Katharine, fully equal to Laurence Olivier’s youthful and heroic King Henry V.
Certainly every teacher of English should direct pupils to see this lavishly produced, beautiful and extremely instructive production of one of Shakespeare’s most epic plays.
F. H. L.