As we relaunch the Penguin Shakespeare series, David Thomson, film writer, critic and author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film picks his top ten cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare.
1. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935, Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle)
This is Hollywood in search of class, and the result is bizarre – not least because of the all-star cast and many difficulties with the verse. But the spirit is right. James Cagney as Bottom is very good and Mickey Rooney as Puck is sublime.
2. Henry V (1945, Laurence Olivier)
Maybe the Branagh version is fuller, with a far more realistic battle. But Olivier’s film has the look of pre-Renaissance painting and it has a terrific backstage angle as well as the green fields of Ireland for Agincourt. Never surpassed.
3. Macbeth (1948, Orson Welles)
Made on a very low budget and a short schedule, this version is full of theatrical ingenuity and a dark, clotted dread of the occult. Welles is the Thane and Jeanette Nolan is his wife.
4. Hamlet (1948, Laurence Olivier)
This version is like a romantic film noir, loaded with psychological dismay and a post-war feeling for the corrupt world. Olivier is still good and the great supporting cast includes Jean Simmons (Ophelia) and Stanley Holloway (the Gravedigger).
5. Julius Caesar (1953, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
Full of first-class clear speaking and fine star performances – James Mason as Brutus, John Gielgud as Cassius, Louis Calhern as Caesar and none other than Marlon Brando as Antony (so good that Gielgud invited him to join a London stage season).
6. Throne of Blood (1957, Akira Kurosawa)
This is a Japanese version of Macbeth in which the Scots warlords become samurai. But best of all is the visual equivalent of poetry and the use of music.
7. Chimes at Midnight (1966, Orson Welles)
All his life, Welles loved the Falstaff story and this skilled selection of scenes from Henry IV concentrates on Hal and Sir John – Welles is the knight and Keith Baxter is the prince who will abandon him.
8. King Lear (1953, Peter Brook; and 1987, Jean-Luc Godard)
Two ill-matched halves, the first made for American TV (at 75 minutes), with Welles as Lear and Alan Badel as the Fool; the second a radical comic-book interpretation, with Burgess Meredith, Molly Ringwald and Norman Mailer.
9. Romeo and Juliet (1996, Baz Luhrmann)
No version of Romeo has ever done better than West Side Story maybe, but this is the liveliest delivery of the text in which we have no doubt but that Leonard DiCaprio and Claire Danes are having sex and Miami is a hot, dangerous place.
10. The Merchant of Venice (2004, Michael Radford) Movies usually love trial scenes, but this story had been badly neglected until Al Pacino found the nerve to play Shylock. There are also fine performances from Jeremy Irons as Antonio and Lynn Collins as Portia.
And since this is only a game, I now elect to cheat. On the desert island I insist on having the scene where Jack Benny is forever interrupted in Hamlet’s big speech in To Be or Not To Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch); James Whitmore and Keenan Wynn singing ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ in Kiss me Kate (1953, George Sidney); plus all of Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991) – yes, I know the basis is Marlowe, but it offers a modern way with Shakespeare.
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