Richard III (1995) Ready to be reclaimed as a masterpiece (Review)

Ever since the Golden Age of Hollywood, Shakespeare adaptations have struggled to win a box-office take to match their prestige.  The shining exception to the rule came during the 1990s, a period in which the Bard was so bankable that by the end of the decade Julie Taymor could get a green light for such an unlikely proposition as an all-star adaptation of Titus Andronicus.  The reason for this exuberance lies in two films from the middle of the decade, offering contrasting strategies for selling Shakespeare to a multiplex audience.  The first was Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, with its sunny Mediterranean scenery, international star cast and canny selection of material: the romantic mid-period comedies were raided to present old Bill as the Elizabethan Nora Ephron.  The second was Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, fast-cut with an MTV-ready soundtrack and a young, sexy cast, aggressively modern enough to make field trips of schoolchildren actively want to see it.

Richard Loncraine’s 1995 Richard III, reissued here on Blu-Ray with a slew of new retrospective extras by the BFI, has the best of both these approaches.  Like the Branagh films, it has Oscar-nominated art and costume direction and a cast stacked enough to make sure each group shot contains at least three excellent actors playing off each other.  Like Luhrmann’s film, it is fast-paced, experimental in its setting (rather than the aftermath of the Wars of the Roses, it takes place in a parallel 1930s Britain undergoing a military coup) and takes every opportunity to up the sex, drugs and violence count.  Rivers’s death is an outrageous set-piece apparently derived from the original Friday the 13th, Kristin Scott Thomas’s Lady Anne shoots up heroin to numb the pain of sleeping with her husband’s murderer and the Battle of Bosworth field is a spectacular vision of chaos ending in Richard, stuck in a broken-down jeep amidst flames and the bullet-ridden corpses of his soldiers, howling “My kingdom for a horse!”

This merry excess might have hamstrung the film at the box office; it failed to earn its money back, presumably because it was one of the few Shakespeare adaptations of its time not to have a schoolchild-friendly certificate.  It’s certainly not because of the film’s quality.  Just as it synthesized the best of 1990s trends in Shakespeare adaptation, the film has two authors with massively different but complementary attitudes.  For Ian McKellen, its star and co-writer, it was the result of years of work, taking the basic idea of Richard III as a fascist dictator from a stage production he headlined back in 1990.  McKellen was also an expert on the text, whereas on the disc’s extras Loncraine cheerfully admits to knowing nothing about Shakespeare.  He was clever enough to use his lack of knowledge as a virtue, though, constantly reshaping McKellen’s screenplay to streamline it and make it more accessible to a general audience.  The result treats its source with respect, but never blind reverence.

Richard III was always one of the most accessible history plays – it’s not in two or three parts, it has a simple and clear dramatic arc, and Shakespeare jettisons historical fact to make his anti-hero basically a randier version of Macbeth.  Even so, McKellen and Loncraine’s script treats their source with a boldness original-text adaptations hadn’t attempted since Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight.  It begins by pulling Richard’s murder of Henry and Edward from the end of Henry VI Part III and using it essentially as a Bond-style pre-credits action scene.  The film’s ambition to take Shakespeare out of the classroom and the library is allegorised in unforgettably brash manner as Richard’s tank pummels through Edward’s bookshelf in slow motion, ending with the killer pulling a gas mask from his face and revealing Daniel Parker’s remarkably realistic make-up design for the King.  McKellen’s Richard is not only hunch-backed but paralysed on one side of his body, perhaps the result of a war wound.  He is vain and self-conscious about his injuries, snarling like a rabid animal when someone innocently moves to help him stand.  In public, he hides his withered hand, but when the time comes for him to display it, “a blasted sapling wither’d up”, he waves it in his underlings’ faces as though it was a gun.

McKellen’s performance is, frankly, unforgettable, a greatest hits compilation of fascist personality flaws including Hitler’s hair-trigger temper, Mussolini’s womanizing and Mosley’s slimy charm.  Among the rest of the cast, there isn’t a false note; Scott Thomas steals several scenes without a line of dialogue, Adrian Dunbar is fantastically creepy as Richard’s killer of choice Tyrell, Maggie Smith’s Duchess of York displays genuine, frightening hatred beneath her familiar waspishness, and Dominic West gets a terrific screen debut as the Earl of Richmond.  In one of Loncraine’s most giddily exciting shots, he rides into battle manning a machine gun on the back of a jeep, pouring bullets into Richard’s troops without so much as blinking.

Even the American cast members, so often the Achilles heel of Branagh’s films (think Keanu Reeves in Much Ado), are well-integrated.  On the commentary McKellen notes that Elizabeth and Rivers feel like uncomfortable outsiders in the play, so casting them as Americans in 1930s Britain makes a certain sense.  It also allows the production team to indulge in more references to the real-world history of fascism; Annette Bening’s Elizabeth is styled to recall Wallis Simpson, while Robert Downey Jr.’s vacuous aeroplane-obsessed playboy Rivers might be a wicked caricature of Charles Lindbergh.  If Downey Jr. sometimes seems a little uncomfortable with the dialogue – not necessarily the iambic pentameter, most likely just the necessity of talking at less than 120 words per minute – he does bring a certain graceful, physical comedy to Rivers’s drunken loucheness.  Bening, for her part, is magnetically fierce and passionate, and is clearly having a whale of a time in Shuna Harwood’s BAFTA-winning wartime costumes.

The mix of nostalgic Blitz-era style and music, physical infirmity and political provocation recall another great British playwright; Dennis Potter, who Loncraine worked with on 1980’s classic TV play Blade on the Feather, as well as an ill-advised cinema remake of Potter’s infamous Brimstone and Treacle.  Brimstone and Treacle was watered down by producers out of a fear that an international audience wouldn’t get Potter’s cultural references, a mistake Loncraine was determined not to repeat with Richard III.  From its plausible pseudo-historical detail to its determined, angry bleakness, it represents exactly the film Loncraine and McKellen set out to make, despite Sam Goldwyn Jr.’s warning that the public only wanted “Pollyanna Shakespeare”.  Much darker than Branagh’s Shakespeare films, and less youth-oriented than Luhrmann’s, it sadly bore out Goldwyn’s prediction on its initial release.  Twenty-one years on, though, it has aged more gracefully than both its main competitors’ work, and can stand tall as one of the most daring and viscerally thrilling Shakespeare adaptations ever made.  It should be reclaimed as a masterpiece.

Thanks for reading our review of Richard III

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