TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Gutsycurene Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Peter Piper This play was first staged in the early 1600s and inevitably it has lost something in transportation through time and space to a BBCTV studio. The atmosphere doesn't feel right even though the costumes and sets are not bad. As for the plot, King Cymbeline (Richard Johnson) is not a happy bunny when his daughter Imogen (Helen Mirren) marries beneath her station. He banishes the husband from the kingdom and puts Imogen under the wing of her treacherous stepmother (Claire Bloom). From there the story takes many twists and turns. Robert Lindsay puts in a fine performance as a baddie, and it's nice to see Michael Gough, Patricia Hayes, Marius Goring and Michael Hordern popping up here and there. The play is not one of Shakespeare's greatest hits though, and this 1980s TV version only just held my attention; it seemed dull in parts.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU This rare play is fascinating and surprising. It is first of all political, highly political. The queen, or rather wife of the king of Britain in Roman times, is a plotter who tries to get the crown for her own son. The king has lost his two own sons and the queen has to get rid of his daughter. She plots and plots but to no avail apparently since she will die and her own son will be killed by one of the lost but surviving sons of the king. But things being complex the queen leads the king to refuse to pay the tribute to the Romans so that, she hopes, the Romans will come and get the king. Unluckily the two sons and the man who has raised them and the husband of the king's daughter who the king had banished save the day and defeat the Romans. So much for politics.That's were Shakespeare turns magic. Till the very last instant in the last scene everyone is under the threat of being killed for some crime he has or he is accused of having committed. And the various death sentences that are hovering over the heads of them all fall like leaves in the autumn, but fall flat on the ground. Shakespeare uses contrived explanations that are so marvelous that no one can refuse to believe them and then we have a father who meets his two supposedly dead sons, is reunited with his supposedly lost daughter, is confronted to his son in law who he had banished and yet helped defeat the Romans, is brought face to face to a soldier he had banished a long time ago and who had taken care of his two sons. And he finally ends up the day by granting pardon to every one prisoner. That's a charming happy ending but constructed so swiftly and wisely that we doubt it will really end without any more killing till the last word about a general pardon is uttered. Then a soothsayer can come in and explain some mysterious prediction the son in law had managed to receive from Jupiter himself and all is well that ends well.Yet the play is a lot more interesting than that after all. It contains some patterns that are so Shakespearian. Two brothers are quite a common pattern in many plays. A difficult or impossible marriage, that's common too, in a way a primordial feature in many comedies. An old king that has become bitter and a wife that is manipulating him into unwise political decisions and human crimes is there to remind us of Lady Macbeth. A son in law who is receiving some poison in the ear when he listens to some report or rumor about his wife is there too reminding us of Hamlet. The exiled people living in the wild, or nearly so, can make us think of King Lear and his period outside in the wild nature. The disembarking Romans are not far from King Lear again. And of course the daughter of the king disguised into a page is so common that no one could miss it. We could actually be surprised that there be only one disguised girl.This production has another charm. It is systematically played in Renaissance costumes and the setting is Dutch or Flemish looking. That's in fact a charm added to the play because it enables it to move from the Roman paraphernalia on one side and the rustic if not barbaric attire and accoutrement on the other side. It makes recognizing who is who a little bit difficult but it gives the play a real universal fragrance. The BBC was already getting globalized in 1983 when they decided (in 1978) to produce the complete plays by Shakespeare. And that project was a unique decision in a time when DVDs did not exist yet, and the Internet was still a secret military tool in some laboratories and universities in America. It is a good thing they did it and many other public television networks in the world could do the same thing for their classics: all Molière, all Racine, all Corneille, all Goethe, all Schiller, and I guess we could move then to more modern projects. I won't speak of operas because that is being done, little by little somewhere in the world: all Handel, all Mozart, all Wagner, all Richard Strauss, etc, without speaking of the Italians, Verdi, Rossini, and so many others. It is a fine treat to get into 32 plays by Shakespeare.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID

Howard Schumann Though orthodox theory deems William Shakespeare's Cymbeline as one of his latest works, the play is so cumbersome in its plotting that, as suggested by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it is more likely to have been a redraft of an earlier anonymous work, An history of the cruelties of a Stepmother shown at the palace at Richmond in 1578. In Cymbeline, first printed in the First Folio of 1623, King Cymbeline's Queen (who is the prototype of the wicked stepmother) wishes to marry her uncouth son Cloten to Cymbeline's daughter Imogen, performed in the BBC's 1982 production by the great Helen Mirren. Imogen, however, has chosen the worthy Posthumus (Michael Pennington) who has been rejected by King Cymbeline (Richard Johnson) and the Queen (Claire Bloom) because of his status as a commoner.The main thrust of the story, however, has its sources in Boccaccio's Decameron, a 14th century tale that was also used as a source for All's Well That Ends Well. The story tells of a jealous husband who makes a bet on his wife's fidelity and is tricked into believing that she was unfaithful. Shakespeare takes this story set in Italy and transports it to Roman Great Britain at the beginning of the Christian era. Cymbeline is modeled after the real King Cunobelin but the Queen, her son Cloten, and Imogen are all inventions of the playwright. The real King, however, did have two sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, who play a prominent role in the play but again Shakespeare takes extravagant liberties with history. The dramatist has the King's sons abducted from the Court in early childhood and have been brought up ignorant of their ancestry for twenty years by Belarius, whom the King had banished from Court.The play has many parallels with the life of Edward de Vere, too numerous to mention, and can be used as a case study for those favoring the Oxfordian point of view but is beyond the scope of this review. The play contains one of the most beautiful of all of Shakespearean songs, "Fear no more the heat of the sun" sung in a duet by Guiderius and Arviragus.Fear no more the heat o' the sun, Nor the furious winter's rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages: Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.Cymbeline, like many other of this author's works, uses the device of a woman, Imogen, posing as a page boy, in order to pretend that she is dead. This would have been very tricky in the Elizabethan days since only boys were used to play girls. So we have the case of a boy pretending to be a girl who, in the play, pretends to be a boy which he in fact was in the first place.Another theme that is consistent with the dramatist is the overweening jealousy of a judgmental husband who wrongfully accuses a pure and innocent girl of infidelity, a jealousy encouraged by Iachimo (Robert Lindsay) who is reminiscent of Iago in Othello. This will make for interesting biographical material if the authorship question is ever sorted out. While Cymbeline receives a good performance by the BBC ensemble cast, Helen Mirren is unbelievable in the role of a page boy, the BBC making no effort whatsoever to disguise her. To have us believe that the King would not recognize his own daughter can only be described as ludicrous.

Tom May I really was far from gripped by this; I must admit that I was watching it in my faculty library, for study purposes - but that does not rule me out of having a fair opinion on this production's merits.This is one of the BBC Shakespeare Series, made in the late 1970s and early 1980s largely; 'twas a series that often lacked the necessary budgets to create any visual impact whatsoever. For instance, compare Orson Welles' filming of the Shrewsbury Battle to the pathetic, barely conveyed at all BBC sequence at the end of "Henry IV, Part I"... Really, these adaptations do not measure up (I admit I have not seen all of them, so I am not necessarily speaking about every one) to the many intriguing cinematic envisionings of Shakespeare, and indeed this "Cymbeline" simply does not make use of its television medium.The cast is solid, but uninspired; Helen Mirren, for example, very forgettable in the crucial lead female role. Many barely try to rise above the bare-minimum mediocrity of the production. Some of the costumes are 'nice' I guess - a conscious attempt to place the action in the early C17 - but Moshinsky's direction is pretty non-existent. The action is, however, presented without any zest, slant or variation; this basically seems far too much of a filmed stage-play, although it is of course supposed to be a 'television adaptation'. Some actors acquit themselves adroitly - the irreproachable Robert Lindsay perfect as the silvery jackanapes Iachimo - and most of an experienced, familiar cast are tidy, but fail to add much to their roles: Michael Gough ('Horror Hospital', 'Satan's Slave'), Marius Goring ('A Matter of Life and Death' indeed!), Graham Crowden ('The Company of Wolves', Old Jock in 'A Very Peculiar Practice' and a thumping hiss-the-melodrama-villain turn as Soldeed in "Dr Who"'s 'The Horns of Nimon'), John Kane, Hugh Thomas (inscrutably bespectacled here) and the grand old Michael Hordern in a cameo as Jupiter. Really, this is a competent but undeniably dull near-three hours to trudge through. One of the most curious of Shakespeare's plays is barely adapted; is it a history, a romance, a drama? A problem play...? The director is palpably at a loss as to define the material in his terms. It would take a rather more dynamic and thought through adaptation to bring something more out of the play. As it is, I was left un-enthused and unimpressed with this production, and by extension a play that seems a poor relation of the genuinely fascinating problem-comedies.