Rethinking Remakes : Two views of ‘Henry V’ are compelling; two ‘Liaisons’ may be one too many

A few months ago, quoting the curmudgeon who growled, “The only reason to remake a movie is if it wasn’t made properly in the first place,” I was, to a degree, playing devil’s advocate. I meant specifically the muck that’s been made in American remakes of French films, which have managed to lose everything in translation.

Their grisly history aside, it would be foolish to hold a blanket anti-remake grudge. Especially now when there are two pungent examples of material tackled on film for a second time, the “Henry V” by the 28-year-old Belfast-born actor-manager, Kenneth Branagh, which dares to swagger onto Laurence Olivier’s turf, and “Valmont,” Milos Forman’s rather extensive re-working of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” which comes right on the Louis heels of the Stephen Frears version.

The L.A. County Museum of Art ran Olivier’s 1944 “Henry V” just last weekend; it might actually stand up in a regular run paired with Branagh’s--the uses to which each director has put Shakespeare’s text are so illuminating.

With his first film direction, Olivier mounted his rousing history in a deliberate attempt to stiffen his countrymen’s sinews, to give heart to fellow Britons in their sixth year of war with Germany. His Henry was a knight in shining armor; he may have brooded in the night before Agincourt, but the outcome of that battle never really seemed in doubt.

And Olivier’s film got exactly the results he wanted. It seemed to burnish that essential quality of English endurance so needed at that time and to call it forth; it was patriotism at its most uplifting--and most effective.

I know a little about “Henry V’s” effect on American wartime audiences; I was in one of them, a junior high schooler who drank in the unqualified praise of Time magazine’s cover story, ignorant of the James Agee who wrote it. (The article also gave instructions on how to pronounce the potentially tricky Olivier ). I’ve seen the film many times since. But it wasn’t until looking at both “Henrys” in one night that I realized just what I--and perhaps we--had gotten from Olivier. First.

It was a backstage pass to Shakespeare’s theater, where that “wooden O” came so alive. A whiff of Will’s theater audiences and a goggle-eyed look at his rouged boy actors playing women. A flowing art history lesson and a sense of great period detail: bowl haircuts with high sidewalls; high-waisted “pregnant” dresses, and padded headdresses. A feeling for how wars were won or lost in Medieval times--because of the nimbleness of English bowmen and the ponderousness of the heavily armored French, almost rusting before our eyes when they were unhorsed.

The imprint of Olivier’s artists went into some subconscious archive. Only years later did I recognize that the source for this French court might have been the Duke of Berry’s “Tres Riches Heures.” That some of composer William Walton’s themes came from the same roots as the “Songs of the Auvergne.”

Directing actors, Olivier also taught wicked irony. In the French encampment, a messenger darts in breathlessly to tell Leo Genn’s Lord High Chancellor that the English lie within 1,500 paces of his tent. Turning with biting calm, Genn asks, “Who hath measur’d the ground?”

Most of all, Olivier taught Americans not to be afraid of Shakespeare, to lean into the words as we would lean into the wind, to trust that we would understand them and to come away understanding, dazzled, on a language high.

Only now, measuring it with the biting, complex intelligence of the Branagh version, do we see what Olivier left out: nearly all subplot, most of his king’s self-doubt, the play’s political side, its commentary about the cost of imperialism. Only from Branagh do we learn about the three noble English traitors; Olivier’s day had enemies enough without English ones. Only Branagh lets Henry hang one of his own old companions from his roistering youth, Bardolph, who has ransacked a church. From Branagh we see soldier Henry’s dangerous side: this is the king who can threaten a French town, Harfleur, with the threat of a murderous rampage, “Your fathers taken by their silver beards and their most reverend heads dash’d to the walls; Your naked infants spitted upon pikes.” And only Branagh dares the Chorus’ melancholy postscript: that Henry’s son, Henry the Sixth, managed to lose the France his father had fought for, and “made his England bleed.”

All this is in keeping with Branagh’s brutal, unbeautiful vision of war, what has been called its post-Falklands viewpoint. Before his battle of Agincourt, you never felt that Olivier’s troops were not fresh; you wonder that Branagh’s bloody, muddy wretches can march another meter. Olivier’s battle, with its singing flight of arrows, is swiftly paced; Branagh’s is the endless, exhausting terror it must really have been, a foot soldier’s nightmare. When the French come to surrender and to count the incredible numbers of their dead, Henry truly does not know who has won the day, and from where we sit, we don’t either.

Branagh’s slow-motion scenes of carnage are, truthfully, not cinema’s finest hour, a clumsy borrowing from Orson Welles’ “Chimes at Midnight” (“Falstaff”) battle sequences. But the long tracking shot which concludes them repairs a lot--it’s this modestly budgeted, tightly shot film’s one epic moment, as Henry, heartbroken, collects the body of Falstaff’s Boy, vilely killed in an express violation of the rules of battle, and trudges on and on across this vast panorama of death while first one voice (the actor-composer’s), then others take up the singing of “Non nobis, Domine.” (Not unto us, Lord but to Thee be the glory.) And there is a powerful sense that this Henry believes that the victory has come only with God’s help, because it is so miraculous .

Branagh has chosen to shoot his film almost entirely in tones of browns, beiges, tortoises, umbers, chestnuts and tans, and a little of that goes a long way to depress the spirit. Clearly, this vision scorns Olivier’s vivid blue skies, memorable heraldry and art direction for the ages, but it may make your memory yearn for just one un-dun scene. Branagh depends on the wooing of Katherine of France to lift things and it does, measurably.

Could anyone seriously believe Olivier as “such a plain king that thou wouldst think I had sold my farm to buy my crown”? Self-deprecation at its most endearing. The pudding-faced, unprepossessing Branagh could be just such a monarch, but as he lets the courting scene (with his own, regal, delicious wife, Emma Thompson) run its full length, his rough charm becomes irresistible, both boy and king are visible and the sparks between husband and wife make a delight of their own.

Absolutely, see both, their casts reflect the classical acting monarchs of both eras and the language is one of the civilized world’s glories. If you missed the Olivier, the video will never catch its sweep but at least the color does justice to its Technicolor original.

As for Milos Forman’s “Valmont,” its strengths lie mainly in its sumptuous production and in a sprinkling of its actors. Archly directed, its screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere, adapted from Choderlos de Laclos’ cautionary tale, may only stir memories of Christopher Hampton’s more glittering adaptation, on view only last year. Most peculiar of the Forman choices was to tamper with the structure of De Laclos’s classic, a change made, apparently, simply in the name of change--to give it a different tone from the Frears version. It’s a horrifying choice: trivializing the very character of the pious Madame de Tourvel (Meg Tilly in the Forman film), and making her affair with Valmont finally only a hard-won sexual diversion, not the episode which alters Valmont’s life and takes hers.

In “Valmont” a wink from the elderly and greatly experienced Madame de Rosemonde to young Cecile seals the film’s perfidy, its complete straying from De Laclos’ dry, intellectual toughness. What Forman has field-marshalled is beautiful but bogus, although some of his actors are splendid. Perhaps the trick is to create a third cast, the De Laclos All-Stars, imagine them in the Hampton script, and choose your own director.

First on the team would be Annette Bening’s Marquise de Merteuil, one of Forman’s real finds. It’s in keeping with the period, but to find a young venomous beauty at the center of all this intrigue is a brilliant stroke. Next, from the Frears’ version, would be Michelle Pfeiffer’s memorable seduced wife, whose loss of faith at the hands of the callous Valmont became a wrackingly piteous experience. Colin Firth’s Valmont is handsome and resistive; cast quite against physical type, John Malkovich was the very soul of feral intensity whose fascination was completely understandable. But the choice between Fabia Drake and Mildred Natwick as the sage Madame de Rosemonde is not one I would have the strength to make; like “That Obscure Object of Desire’s” solution to such a dilemma, both of them would have to play the role in turn.