COMMENTARY : William Shakespeare, Screenwriter : Today, the Bard’s gifts seem better suited to the large screen than to 20th-Century theater

“The purpose of playing ... was and is, to hold, as t’were, the mirror up to nature.”

Hamlet, advising the Player King

In the summer of 1937, drama critic Ivor Brown traveled to Denmark’s Elsinore for what promised to be a remarkable production of “Hamlet”--to be staged in the courtyard of Kronborg castle, on the site of the play’s historical events. The performers were London’s storied Old Vic players--including 30-year-old Laurence Olivier as Hamlet and 24-year-old Vivien Leigh as Ophelia. The audience was to include the current King of Denmark.

It was remarkable, but for unexpected reasons. As show time approached, the skies clouded over, rain drenched the courtyard, and an instant decision was made to retire en masse --King and all--to a nearby hotel, and restage “Hamlet” in the ballroom. Brown watched, marveling, as, in that packed hall, the actors improvised new movement on the spot, producing “as good a performance of ‘Hamlet’ as I have ever seen.”

For Brown, the incident exemplified Shakespeare’s plasticity and resilience, the fact that, in doing these plays, “the crime lies not in making the experiment, but in the botching of it.”

Perhaps Olivier was recalling that Elsinore deluge seven years later when, in his 1944 film of “Henry V,” he had rainfall interrupt a performance at the original outdoor Globe Playhouse. In this bravura scene, it was the living experience of Shakespeare that Olivier wanted to suggest--later moving with suave ingenuity from the Globe’s soggy, roistering confines to the pageantry and bright charge of the battle of Agincourt on a vast green field under high, windy skies.

For Olivier, this “Henry V” was to be the first real Shakespeare movie: More than the silent movie pastiches which lost the words (like the 1928 Fairbanks-Pickford “Taming of the Shrew” with its memorable credit “written by William Shakespeare, additional dialogue by Sam Taylor”); more than the 1936 “Midsummer Night’s Dream” co-directed with William Dieterle at Warner Bros. by the German theatrical legend Max Reinhardt (with a spectacular Puck and Bottom by Mickey Rooney and James Cagney); more than the 1936 “As You Like It,” in which Olivier himself had played Orlando to Elisabeth Bergner’s Rosalind.

The stiff, over-reverent staging that afflicted “As You Like It”--with its cargo of leaden jesters, bewigged pomp and gesticulating dukes--was probably what he most wanted to supplant. His “Henry”--at first a play, then a mixture, then unabashedly a film--takes us by degrees from the Shakespeare in the theater to Shakespeare as Olivier most wanted to realize him, with charging cavalry and furious battle.

Forty-five years later, Kenneth Branagh’s new “Henry V” has struck an unusually strong chord. And it suggests something fascinating. While Branagh’s version is almost as exciting as Olivier’s, his movie so reinterprets the overall vision--that it demonstrates, all over again, the infinite variety of the plays. Branagh’s “Henry” is dark instead of light, despairing instead of lightly ironic, bloody and grim instead of jubilant.

But neither version should be seen as definitive. Working in the fever pitch of World War II, with advice from Winston Churchill, Olivier chops out those sections which might subvert a spirit-raising, nationalistic intent: notably the epilogue in which the Chorus reminds us that everything won in the play’s battles was lost, bloodily, in the next generation. Branagh omits scenes that might cut the ambivalent, earthier tone he wants: Out goes the famous low-comic leek scene with soldiers Fluellen and Pistol.

Yet both star-directors found everything they needed for these two opposed visions in the play itself. And Orson Welles, using a fragment of “Henry V” for his great Falstaff movie, “Chimes at Midnight,” found a third: a suggestion that Henry, in going off to war, destroyed his more human and sensual side for the stiff outward morality of his father’s uneasy-lying crown.

This world of meanings, this inexhaustibility and scope, isn’t peculiar to just the “Henry” plays. Consider the various “Macbeths” of film makers Orson Welles (magic and mystery), Akira Kurosawa (Kabuki tragedy), Roman Polanski (blood and sex), George Schaeffer (the traditional proscenium view) and Andrzej Wajda (a “Siberian Lady Macbeth.”)

Interestingly, in this century, it may be more in the movies than the stage where Shakespeare gets his richest arena, where his work now most truly belongs.

It’s often been suggested--most recently by Branagh himself--that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would have gravitated toward film: that his innate practicality and showmanship, as much as his towering genius, would have made him an ideal movie maker. Indeed, throughout “Henry V,” the Chorus--a role played perhaps by the actor-writer himself--complains constantly that he cannot show us sea voyages or battles; that he is cramped, trying to represent things “which cannot in their huge and proper life be here presented. . . . in little rooms confining mighty men.” He seems to yearn for the richness, breadth and spectacle that are the movies’ basic advantage, to long for the 20th-Century art form that can make, just as he saw it, a stage of all the world.

Is all this so far-fetched? Despite Shakespeare’s rank as the greatest of playwrights, few today write plays like his. Working in a theater grown parsimonious and pinched, they create smaller dramas with smaller casts and range. The great epic style of the Elizabethan drama they leave, instead, to the movies--to historical dramas, science fiction and adventure films. Sadly, those same adventure movies, in the ‘80s, have mostly become blood-engorged spectacles, the near moral equivalent of the bear-baiting shows which competed with the Globe plays in the 1590s.

Questions of artistic value aside, we can find more kindred spirits to the Elizabethan playwrights in “Lawrence of Arabia,” “8 1/2,” “Fanny and Alexander,” “The Godfather” or “Citizen Kane” than in the bulk of contemporary drama. In films like these, there’s a scenic or emotional grandeur that gets some of the charge Shakespeare made with stage craft and his language: its rich shimmer, its sugared gleam, its vaults and plummets of ecstasy and grief.

Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 “Romeo and Juliet,” the most popular of all the recent Shakespeare movie adaptations at the box-office, shows how close to a modern scenario the plays, judiciously cut, can seem. And in the films of Olivier (“Henry V,” “Hamlet,” “Richard III”) and Welles (“Macbeth,” “Othello,” and “Chimes at Midnight”), the most spectacular visual designs never inhibit the soaring phrases. Olivier’s “Hamlet,” favorite film of the young Roman Polanski, takes place in a multileveled, many-chambered castle, where the camera ceaselessly prowls through corridors and up and down staircases. Welles’ 1948 “Macbeth,” shot on the cheap, is a primitive Scottish nightmare in cavernous sets that dwarf the characters, who scuttle like rats within them. Welles’ “Othello” cuts surreally from country to country. And his “Chimes at Midnight”--which takes place mostly in huge, drafty-looking castles, on battlefields and in a vast barn-like inn, full of nooks and crannies for fat Jack and his venal, gargoyle crew--is a hive of boisterous activity. In it, speeches either roll out in royal grandeur or tumble like jets of liquor spurting from the reveler’s mouths.

Shakespeare’s dramatic credo--to “hold the mirror up to nature”--might have been invented for the movies. In the camera’s gaze, we get, effortlessly, that reflection of reality the writer always sought, even in his most fantastic domains. We get that consummate, close-observing realism that always lies beneath the overpowering lyricism and poetry.

Shakespeare’s heart lies in that lyric gift, but also in his seeming effervescence of spirit, his capacity--more fully developed than any playwright’s before or since--to pass freely among a vast crowd of characters and live within them all, cloaked in a multitude of skins and voices. That quality works perfectly for the movies. So do his scope and color, his humor high and low. Equally, his supreme gift for characterization makes the plays great magnets for actors--who love to take on all his roles, from the most famous to the most seemingly insignificant.

In the movies, there have been almost as many Shakespeares as directors to interpret him. There is the gray, Bergmanesque, post-Beckett philosopher of frost, betrayal and entropy in Peter Brook’s 1971 “King Lear.” There is the Italianate sun-drenched voluptuary aflame with youth, “hot days and mad blood stirring” in Franco Zeffirelli. There is the horror-soaked bloody bard of Polanski’s “Macbeth.” There is the sonorous dark symphonist of Grigori Kozintsev’s “Lear” and “Hamlet.”

Topping the list, there is the Shakespeare of those two bravura actor-directors Olivier and Welles--who preserve much of the language and give it the rich frosting of their lusty visuals. They were the most dedicated of all movie Shakespeareans. The imaginary landscape of movies-not-made is littered with the projects they could not realize: including Welles’ partly-filmed “Merchant of Venice” and Olivier’s planned “Macbeth” with Vivien Leigh as his savage queen. For Olivier, Shakespeare was the main avocation of a lifetime. For Welles, he was the very “staff of life”--and Welles’ own tragedy might have been that he was too kindred in spirit to the roaring, universally curious Elizabethans to mesh with cooler, more calculated and phlegmatic temperaments today.

Yet each man still tried, repeatedly, to the end of their lives--when both of them were working to mount new films of that ultimate cry of pain and rage, “King Lear.” Olivier succeeded--though on television, and not under his own direction. Welles failed--though, ironically, he had already played Lear for American TV (on “Omnibus”) three decades earlier, guided by the young Peter Brook.

The intensity and constancy of their efforts--and the music and power of movies like “Chimes at Midnight” and “Hamlet”--redeems and ennobles all their losses. Now Branagh takes up the torch again. If it is argued that he is unequal to his predecessors, at least he has the flames up in the sky again. After such a long hiatus of notable adaptations, the highest value of Branagh’s “Henry V” is to remind us how much we miss when no one tries the experiment or dares the “crime”--when no one dips into that rich vault that another great screenwriter, Ben Hecht, called “the world’s greatest march of words.”