Today on TCM, one musical after another is on the schedule and I’ve written up musicals here so often that I have to take a break from the singing and dancing and move a little further down the schedule to write about something else. So what’s playing later, as we hit the late night hours, at least on Eastern Standard Time? Shakespeare in Love, that’s what. Using that as my pivot point is pretty easy because I have more than a few thoughts that immediately spring to mind when I think of that movie, which doesn’t happen very often so perhaps I should say instead, when that movie’s title crosses my line of vision. Here are just some of those thoughts.
The first movie I think of when I see the title Shakespeare in Love is the same movie most people think of when they see the title Shakespeare in Love, which is, oddly enough, not Shakespeare in Love at all but another movie entirely, Saving Private Ryan. The reason for that is the fact that the war movie in question was heavily favored to win Best Picture and when it won Best Director for Steven Spielberg on Oscar night, the entire population watching figured its Oscar for Best Picture was only minutes away. Then Shakespeare in Love won and everyone watching uttered a collective, “Wait, what?” This was all attributed to Harvey Weinstein’s marketing machine at Miramax that targeted Oscar voters like a dog targeting a slice of American cheese hurled through the air like a Frisbee (at least, that’s how I always fed my dog American cheese). And it was pretty impressive feat but, as a result, the movie suffered a backlash of sorts in that it was assumed it was only the marketing that won it Best Picture and that its win had nothing to do with the movie itself. Well, let me say right here and now that while I’m no huge fan of Shakespeare in Love, and I’m not, I don’t really care what won that year and despite the D-Day sequence being extraordinary, I find much of the rest of Saving Private Ryan a disorganized mess (and not in that good “oh, they’re commenting on the disorganization of the mission/war” way, just in a kind of sloppily written way). Still, it does have that D-Day sequence which pretty much explains Spielberg’s Oscar (and, for the record, I have absolutely no problem awarding someone a directing or acting Oscar for only one small part of their overall effort because sometimes that small part is amazing, like the D-Day sequence) but it also has the sloppiness which made it okay for voters to kind of give in to the marketing onslaught and feel okay about voting for Shakespeare in Love.
Okay, that’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Shakespeare in Love, here are some others. I think of Shakespeare on film and how little I like Shakespeare on film. I’ve seen quite a bit of Shakespeare on stage and on stage, it’s fantastic. On film, I’ve never really gotten the same feel. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s works have so many scene changes, they never feel stage bound when adapted to film so that works in their favor. The most successful Shakespeare adaptations have always been the Romeo and Juliet adaptations, from the way too old Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard to the more reasonable Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting right up to Claire Danes and Leonardo Dicaprio, but that play has never done anything for me. No, if I had to pick my favorite cinematic adaptation of the Old Bard’s work, I’d have to go with Roman Polanski’s MacBeth, from 1971. Saw it in the theater on a re-release in the eighties and it’s stuck with me ever since.
The main problem with adapting Shakespeare’s work to the screen is how much of it to adapt. Many times, filmmakers cut out multiple scenes and even rewrite dialogue. The dialogue for the 1936 version of Romeo and Juliet received major rewrites to the point where it’s pretty obvious, even to a non-Shakespearean scholar, that the dialogue often sounds a bit too modern to have been penned by Willy. The 1968 version also rewrote dialogue but stayed a little truer to the original feel of the language so it’s less noticeable. Anyway, that’s why you’ll see an “adapted by” credit attached to a writer, who may even be nominated for an Oscar, with a Shakespearean movie. It may seem a little ridiculous but they do a lot more adapting than you’d think.
More important than the dialogue rewrites are the chopping up or off of scenes. This isn’t really any different than what happens in the theater. I was involved in a few Shakespearean productions myself and I can tell you that the director almost always excises multiple scenes to cut the play down to a more reasonable length. Some folks, like Kenneth Brannagh, decide to go all out and include every word. He did this with his 43 hour version of Hamlet (maybe it just felt that long) and, honestly, it wasn’t necessary. I think Olivier’s truncated version works better.
And that’s about it. Lots of musicals today on the schedule but Shakespeare in Love is the one that got my attention. Just goes to show, even a movie that isn’t high on your personal favorites can still make you think about so many things connected to it and the cinema as a whole. That’s I love the movies so much (and writing about them and talking about them with all of you). Maybe I should have called this post “Ferrara in Love.”