I've avoided Shakespeare in modern settings. Before this I'd only watched Olivier's version and read the play. And, I regret to say that all the way through this film the setting -- 1930s "Germany" -- was a bit of a distraction. You have never seen so many people smoking cigarettes. What saved the movie was the performances. Ian McKellen is far more a rude lump of foul deformity than Olivier ever even suggested and his performance as the central figure is superb, all squinched up, skinny and ugly. Richard the Turd, some have called him.
But then everybody is pretty good, with Robert Downey, Jr., perhaps the weakest of the lot. Kristin Scott-Thomas as Lady Anne is a close second to McKellen. She's also very attractive. Kate Steavonson-Payne has only a few lines but makes a succulent Princess Elizabeth. The exopthalmic Maggie Smith, as usual, sets the screen alight and Edward Hardwicke is the soul of morality as Dr. Watson -- I mean Stanley.
The story is familiar enough,. Richard, a deformed cripple, murders his way to the top. The first victim we learn about is Lady Anne's husband. McKellen has had him murdered and Scott-Thomas knows it. But he confronts her in the morgue where she is lamenting her late husband's fate over his body, which has two holes in its chest. Richard woos her on the spot. Yes, he says, he killed her husband -- but only because he loves her so much. He proffers a dagger and invites her to cut his throat. When she demurs, he claims he can do it himself, but she refuses the offer because of his "honey'd words." Not only that. She looks at him a little curiously and not much later falls under his spell. It always struck me that Lady Anne was kind of dumb.
The final battle takes place in a burned-out city, something like the Saigon of Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket." I was waiting to see how the hell they would work, "A horse! A horse! MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE!" into a battle that has tanks plunging through walls and jeeps with machine guns zooming around in a confusing manner and not a horse in sight. They did manage to work the famous line in, though. I won't say how.
The closing scene is surreal -- Richard is shot and plunges to his death in some kind of bonfire, laughing maniacally all the way, and then Al Jolson is singing "Top of the World." And I'm thinking: homage to Cagney?
Production design and related elements aside, what impressed me was how much of the play Olivier had left out and McKellen, who wrote it, has managed to squeeze in and how the text of the play itself was at least equally mangled.
But then everybody is pretty good, with Robert Downey, Jr., perhaps the weakest of the lot. Kristin Scott-Thomas as Lady Anne is a close second to McKellen. She's also very attractive. Kate Steavonson-Payne has only a few lines but makes a succulent Princess Elizabeth. The exopthalmic Maggie Smith, as usual, sets the screen alight and Edward Hardwicke is the soul of morality as Dr. Watson -- I mean Stanley.
The story is familiar enough,. Richard, a deformed cripple, murders his way to the top. The first victim we learn about is Lady Anne's husband. McKellen has had him murdered and Scott-Thomas knows it. But he confronts her in the morgue where she is lamenting her late husband's fate over his body, which has two holes in its chest. Richard woos her on the spot. Yes, he says, he killed her husband -- but only because he loves her so much. He proffers a dagger and invites her to cut his throat. When she demurs, he claims he can do it himself, but she refuses the offer because of his "honey'd words." Not only that. She looks at him a little curiously and not much later falls under his spell. It always struck me that Lady Anne was kind of dumb.
The final battle takes place in a burned-out city, something like the Saigon of Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket." I was waiting to see how the hell they would work, "A horse! A horse! MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE!" into a battle that has tanks plunging through walls and jeeps with machine guns zooming around in a confusing manner and not a horse in sight. They did manage to work the famous line in, though. I won't say how.
The closing scene is surreal -- Richard is shot and plunges to his death in some kind of bonfire, laughing maniacally all the way, and then Al Jolson is singing "Top of the World." And I'm thinking: homage to Cagney?
Production design and related elements aside, what impressed me was how much of the play Olivier had left out and McKellen, who wrote it, has managed to squeeze in and how the text of the play itself was at least equally mangled.