A Film Canon

This ingenious adaptation opens with an Elizabethan staging of Henry V in the Globe Theatre, elegantly segueing into a more expansive, albeit still palpably stagebound, universe. Not only does this allow Olivier to temper the slower, earlier scenes with historical minutiae, and dramatically extend the charismatic omniscience of the Chorus (Leslie Banks), but it imbues the theatre - and theatricality itself - with the eroticism and exoticism that it must have possessed to an Elizabethan audience, as well as comparing it to the impact of cinema upon contemporary spectatorship, conflating past and present in a manner that is particularly amenable to the film's propagandistic undertones, as is the play's own position as the cathartic conclusion to a patriotically anxious tetralogy. To this end, Olivier effectively identifies the Elizabethan imagination with Technicolour - or, alternatively, recognises the latter's inherent irrealism, or theatricality - as evinced in the sharp, bright costumes, the ethereality with which various spaces are coloured and elaborated - particularly the Court of France - and, above all, the use of it in situations that had only previously been imagined, most dramatically the difficult lighting conditions of the extended night sequence prior to the Battle of Agincourt. As with Lean's adaptations of Dickens, this increased fluidity and economy allows Olivier to occasionally improve upon - or perhaps, more accurately, fulfil - his original, gesturing towards a nexus between speech and thought unavailable on the stage, if present in the text, and evident in a series of studied close-ups that anticipate the internal monologues of Hamlet, as well as, more generally, a tendency towards quietness and introspection that informs the transplantation of the iconic "If the cause be not good" from jaded soldier to innocent boy, and a more subdued, thoughtful presentation of the French, in keeping with the contemporary situation.