With Grand Theft Hamlet doing brisk business in cinemas and scooping the odd award, Cinema Paradiso goes in search of Shakespeare plays in unlikely settings.
It started as a way to pass the time during lockdown. But actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen soon realised they had hit upon a golden idea when they stumbled across the Vinewood Bowl amphitheatre on the outskirts of Los Santos, while playing Grand Theft Auto. Initially, the notion of mounting a production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet on the outdoor stage seemed like a bit of fun. But, as Crane and film-maker partner Pinny Grylls reveal in the animated documentary, Grand Theft Hamlet, the online gaming arena had so much staging potential that the project took over the men's lives and those of the random players who had been cast during auditions that had periodically been interrupted by gun-wielding intruders.
Currently in cinemas and being festooned during award season, Grand Theft Hamlet is one of many movies that have found novel settings for the Bard's timeless verses. Others, however, have dispensed with the couplets and retold the outline stories in everyday speech. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some plays have been re-imagined more often than others. But few films have made more wickedly innovative use of the various tragedies, comedies, and history plays than Douglas Hickox's Theatre of Blood (1973).
Vincent Price headlines this macabre masterpiece, as Edward Kendal Sheridan Lionheart, the Shakespearean thespian whose anguish at being overlooked by the Theatre Critics Guild that he draws on the plays to exact his highly theatrical revenge. One reviewer is stabbed in the manner of Julius Caesar, while another suffers the impaling fate of Hector in Troilus and Cressida. A third follows Cloten in Cymbeline by being decapitated in his sleep, while the next loses a pound of flesh à la The Merchant of Venice. After another drowns in a vat of wine in imitation of the Duke of Clarence in Richard III, his colleague is coerced into killing his wife in a fit of Othello-like jealousy. A female critic suffers the electronic equivalent to Joan of Arc's pyre in Henry VI, Part 1, while the last is forced to eat his cherished pets in a pie, along the lines of Queen Tamora's ordeal in Titus Andronicus. Despite skirmishes deriving from Romeo and Juliet and King Lear, one guild member lives to critique another day. We're sure he kept his eye out for this ghoulish gem and we recommend it to brighten up any evening during the bleak midwinter.
A Touch of the Historicals
The furthest Shakespeare takes us back in time is to the Peloponnesian War and Timon of Athens was reworked by Yugoslavian director Tomislav Radiæ as Timon (1973), in which an actor in a touring production of the play starts to get ideas above his station. This trait was shared by Julius Caesar, whose Ides of March demise has inspired pictures as different as Gerald Thomas's Carry On Cleo (1964) and Srijit Mukherji's Zulfiqar (2016), in which a gangster's best friend conspires in his murder.
Having previously reworked Othello as Kaliyattam (1997), Jayaraaj put a Malayalam spin on Antony and Cleopatra in Kannaki (2002). These films have not come to disc in the UK, as is the case with Bornila Chatterjee's The Hungry (2017), which transferred the action of Titus Andronicus to an Indian setting. But Cinema Paradiso users can see how the inmates of Rome's notorious Rebibbia Prison discovered the connections between Shakespeare's text and their own crimes in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Caesar Must Die (2012), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
Shakespeare was a keen student of English history and he would have been intrigued by how King John was combined with his own Richard III and an Urdu play by Agha Hashar Kashmiri to create Said-e-Havas (1936), which was directed by Sohrab Modi a year after he had re-purposed Hamlet as Khoon Ka Khoon. Orson Welles would also have approved of Modi's mash-up method of screenwriting, as his rousing costume piece, Chimes At Midnight (1966) samples scenes from Richard II, both parts of Henry IV, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
The Henriad also impinges upon Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991), which borrows from Parts One and Two of Henry IV in following the misadventures of narcoleptic street hustler Mike Waters (River Phoenix) and rebellious mayor's son, Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves), as they travel from Portland, Oregon to an Italian cottage in an effort to find the former's estranged mother. Phoenix won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice for what would be one of his final performances, as he was to die at the tragically early age of 23 in 1993.
This wasn't the first time that Hollywood had reshaped Shakespeare, as Rowland V. Lee's Tower of London (1939) took its cues from Richard III, as Richard, Duke of Gloucester (Basil Rathbone) drowns his brother, Clarence (Vincent Price), in a butt of malmsey wine. Price would become the villain when Roger Corman descended upon 1483 in Tower of London (1962), which was filmed in Britain and boasted Francis Ford Coppola as a dialogue director.
Al Pacino explored ways of staging this play about a hunchbacked tyrant in his documentary, Looking For Richard (1996). No doubt he would now consider James Gavin Bedford's King Rikki (2002) and Scott M. Anderson's Richard III (2007), which each centres on winters of discontent in Los Angeles. In the former, it's the east side district of Ánglio, where Rikky Ortega is seeking to seize the lucrative crystal meth business from the hated Rojas, while the former England Studios is up for grabs in the latter, as the gangland clans of York and Lancaster connive and kill in a bloody bid to gain control. What a shame this pair have never been released on disc in the former Plantagenet realm.
Give Sorrow Words
As Grand Theft Hamlet demonstrates, the tragedy of the Gloomy Dane does not have to be staged at Elsinore. Fittingly, Carl Theodor Dreyer discovered this in Once Upon a Time (1922), a silent fairytale in which Hamlet disguises himself to win the heart of the Princess of Illyria. It doesn't end well, but tragedies rarely do, even when they are given a modern-day setting.
California is the scene for Edgar G. Ulmer's Strange Illusion (1945), as the teenage son of the late Lieutenant Governor is dismayed by his mother's swift marriage to his father's rival. This B noir should really be on disc, as should Claude Chabrol's Ophélia (1963), which reveals how the increasingly disturbed Yvan Lesurf (André Jocelyn) coerces groundskeeper's daughter Lucie Lagrange (Juliette Mayniel) into becoming his Ophelia after he starts seeing similarities with Hamlet following the marriage of his mother (Alida Valli) to his uncle (Claude Cerval).
Enzo G. Castellari recasts the story as a Spaghetti Western in Johnny Hamlet (aka The Wild and the Dirty, 1968), which is set in antebellum Texas and involves a Confederate war veteran and a Mexican rancher. Fellow Italian Carmelo Bene focusses on a director who starts believing he's the prince in One Hamlet Less (1973), while Metin Erksan's The Angel of Vengeance: The Female Hamlet (1977) is a cult classic that has Turkish drama student Hamlet (Fatma Girik) question the marriage of her mother (Sevda Ferdag) to her uncle (Reha Yurdakul) after she's visited by her father's ghost.
Girik establishes guilt using Shakespeare's play-within-the-play, 'The Murder of Gonzago'. By contrast, a bad film lands Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas in trouble in Strange Brew (1983) and they are forced to seek refuge at the brewery where Max Von Sydow is plotting world domination by putting mind-controlling drugs into his Elsinore beer. We did say some of the connections were tenuous, with a rubber duck empire being up for grabs in Aki Kaurismäki's Hamlet Goes Business, as the heir to a thriving corporation (Pirka-Pekka Petelius) suspects that his uncle is up to no good.
Shot in black and white, this deadpan dramedy takes as many liberties as Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), which stars Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the minor courtiers watching on as friend Iain Glen begins behaving oddly after returning to Elsinore from university and invites Richard Dreyfus and his travelling players to perform for the usurpative new king. Disney would re-imagine the storyline for The Lion King 3: Hakuna Matata (2004), which casts Pumbaa and Timon as the hapless onlookers. Shakespeare's play was the source for Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff's The Lion King (1994), however, which earned Elton John and Tim Rice an Oscar for 'Can You Feel the Love Tonight?' It was photorealistically remade as Jon Favreau's The Lion King (2019), which spawned Barry Jenkins's origin saga, Mufasa: The Lion King (2024), which has been scored by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
The Danish play has made guest appearances in films as different as James Cameron's The Last Action Hero (1993), Penny Marshall's Renaissance Man (1994), Kenneth Branagh's In the Bleak Midwinter (1995), and Andrew Fleming's Hamlet 2 (2008). But one of the more ingenious retellings was Stacy Title's Let the Devil Wear Black (1999), which arrived in cinemas around the same time as Michael Almereyda's Hamlet, starring Ethan Hawke. Imparting a thriller spin, the action turns around thirtysomething drifter Jonathan Penner, who returns home to Los Angeles in time to cast doubt over the haste of recently widowed mother Jacqueline Bisset's marriage to his ambitious uncle, Jamey Sheridan.
Things are even more messed up in Feng Xiaogang's The Banquet (2006), as Crown Prince Wu Luan (Daniel Wu) has to cope with his uncle both stealing his father's throne and coercing sweetheart Wan (Zhang Ziyi) into marrying him. The scene shifts to Iran for Varuzh Karim-Masihi's Doubt (2009), in which a grieving son is unconvinced by reports that his father has committed suicide and left the family business to his younger brother.
Respectively produced in Malayalam and Hindi, V.K. Prakash's Karmayogi (2012) and Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider (2014) put Indian slants on the storyline, which found its way back to Denmark for Claire McCarthy's Ophelia (2018), which shifted the focus on to the relationships between Ophelia (Daisy Ridley) and her father, Polonius (Dominic Mafham), and brother, Laertes (Tom Felton), as well as with Hamlet (George MacKay). But Robert Eggers bypassed the Bard and returned to Viking history for The Northman (2022), as Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) seeks to avenge his father and rescue his mother from the treacherous uncle who has murdered his way to the power.
Variations on King Lear have been less plentiful since K.V. Reddy's Telegu saga, Gunasundari Katha (1949). Having waited so long for Hungarian Bence Gyöngyössy's Gypsy Lore (1997), however, it was followed in the same year by Jocelyn Moorhouse's A Thousand Acres (1997), an adaptation of Jane Smiley's Shakespeare-inspired bestseller that sees Larry Cook (Jason Robards) come to regret dividing his lands between daughters Ginny (Jessica Lange), Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer), and Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Things don't work out well, either, for 19th-century cattle baron, John Lear (Patrick Stewart), in Ulli Edel's King of Texas (2002), as he disowns youngest daughter, Claudia (Julie Cox), only to discover that her sisters, Susannah (Marcia Gay Harden) and Rebecca (Lauren Holly), don't love him quite as much as they had professed.
Jo (Emma Catherwood) is the favourite to fall foul of a temper tantrum in Don Boyd's My Kingdom (2001), as Liverpool drug baron Sandeman (Richard Harris) is so crushed by the mugging death of his wife (Lynn Redgrave) that he entrusts his business to daughters Kath (Louise Lombard) and Tracy (Lorraine Pilkington), who are respectively married to the unscrupulous Dean (Paul McGann) and the vicious Jug (Jimi Mistry). Richard Harris is on towering form and it's a shame we can't bring you Bruce Dern's raging turn as an architect driven to distraction by his dysfunctional kids in Carl Bessai's The Lears (2017).
Sadly, no one can see Peter Pan creator, J.M. Barrie's sole outing as a film director, as The Real Thing At Last (1915), which he made with L.C. MacBean, has been lost. This lampoon of Macbeth was produced after silent pioneer D.W. Griffith had announced that he intended to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death with his own interpretation of 'The Scottish Play'. Ultimately, Griffith only produced the film for John Emerson, who cast Herbert Beerbohm Tree in the lead and recruited Erich von Stroheim as his assistant and Victor Fleming as his cameraman. Despite the involvement of such big names, Macbeth (1916) has been lost forever.
Chances of seeing Marmayogi (1951), K. Ramnoth's Hindi take on Macbeth, are also limited. But it's disappointing that Ken Hughes's Joe MacBeth (1955) is not on disc, as it's a British film with fine performances by Paul Douglas and Ruth Roman as the underworld schemer and his wife. Moreover, it's got Sidney James in the Banquo role.
Organised crime also provides the backdrop for William Reilly's Men of Respect (1990), which charts the rise through the ranks of hitman Mike Battaglia (John Turturro), after a spiritualist predicts a dramatic change in fortune. James Frain plays the man on the make on a council patch in the Ladywood district of Birmingham in Penny Woolcock's Macbeth on the Estate (1997), which was made for the BBC's Performance strand. But there's something more exotic about Alexander Abela's Makibefo (1999), which is set on the island of Madagascar and follows the rise to power of the Thane of Glamis after he encounters three witches. Filmed in the Malagasy language, this was followed by Souli (2004), which relocated Othello to a remote Madagascan fishing village, where the lives of five people are ruined by passion and jealousy.
Yet another variation on Macbeth to elude us is Billy Morrissette's Scotland, PA (2001), which sees a Pennsylvanian wife persuade her burger-flipping husband to rob the safe at his boss's upmarket restaurant. This is set in 1975, but Leonardo Henríquez's Sangrador (2003) takes us back to the turn of the 20th century to show how the leader of a band of Venezuelan hill thieves decides to seize power from the local bigwig.
In an ideal world. we could take you to New Delhi for Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool (2003), which chronicles the tussle between mafia don Abbaji (Pankaj Kapur) and his trusted oppo, Mian Maqbool (Irrfan Khan), after the latter is persuaded to challenge his authority by grasping mistress, Nimmi (Tabu). This was Bhardwaj's first brush with the Bard, as he would go on to base Omkara (2006) and the aforementioned Haider on Othello and Hamlet respectively. Despite their reputation, these films are not currently available, so there is even less chance of getting to see two more Macbeth makeovers, Jayaraaj's Veeram (2016) and Dileesh Pothan's Joji (2021), as they were made in the Malayalam language.
The Thai government was keen to ensure that nobody got to watch Ing Kanjanavanit's Shakespeare Must Die (2012), as this version of Macbeth was banned for containing 'content that causes divisiveness among the people of the nation'. In other words, the ruling élite disapproved. But some films simply don't get seen because screening opportunities are limited outside the festival circuit and distributors rarely take chances on items like Jesse Keller's monochrome horror, Thane of East County (2015), even though it intriguingly centres on a pair of actors who become a bit too obsessed with Shakespeare's bloodiest scenario.
Among the most problematic of the plays, The Merchant of Venice has not attracted much rethink activity since Peter Paul Felner's The Jew of Mestri (1923), a loose silent adaptation that was filmed in Venice with Henny Porten, Harry Liedtke, Werner Krauss, and Max Schreck (old Nosferatu himself). A notable recent effort, however, is Don Selwyn's The Maori Merchant of Venice (2002), which was filmed in the Maori language in a church in Auckland.
Stage productions of Othello have featured all-Maorii casts, but no one has yet brought a translated version to the screen. Ronald Colman won the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in one of the earliest Hollywood reworkings of the 1604 play, George Cukor's A Double Life (1947), which sees actor Anthony John reluctantly agree to reunite with his ex-wife, Brita (Signe Hasso), for a Broadway revival. Delmer Daves took the study of murderous jealousy out West in Jubal (1956), which was billed as 'Othello on the Range'. Rod Steiger excels as Pinky Pinkum, the ranch foreman who resents the way newcomer Jubal Troop (Glenn Ford) gets on with sheepman Shep Horgan (Ernest Borgnine) and his wife, Mae (Valerie French).
Patrick McGoohan clearly relished playing trouble-making drummer Johnny Cousin, as he turns jazz band leader Aurelius Rex (Paul Harris) against wife Delia (Marti Stevens) in
Basil Dearden's All Night Long (1962). Twelve years later, he decided to recycle the story for his sole directorial outing, Catch My Soul (1974), which starred Richie Havens as the musician whose mind is poisoned against wife Desdemona (Season Hubley) by his supposed friend, Iago (Lance McGault).
As usual, Indian film-makers have cast a fresh eye over Shakespeare's text, with Jayaraaj's Kaliyattam (1997) being filmed in Malayalam. Following Vishal Bhardwaj's Hindi version, Omkara (2006), Ranjan Ghosh's Hrid Majharey (2014) was shot in Bengali and focused on a mathematician at St Xavier's College, Kolkata, who ignores a soothsayer's warning about falling in love. The same language was used for Arna Mukhopadhyay's Atthoi (2024), which used the play to examine India's caste system.
These played to large audiences on the sub-continent, while Mark Tan's Jarum Halus (2008) was a hit in Malaysia. But they are nowhere near as well known as Tim Blake Nelson's O (2001), one of a raft of Hollywood movies around the turn of the millennium that sought to repackage Shakespeare's plays as teenpix. Deftly examining racism in American society, the action centres on the growing resentment that Hugo (Josh Hartnett) feels towards high-school basketball ace, Odin (Mekhi Phifer), as he feels slighted by both his coach/father (Martin Sheen) and by his secret crush, Desi (Julia Stiles), who only has eyes for O.
A similar tale unfolds at the University of Venice in Volfango De Biasi's Iago (2009), while fin-de-siècle Paris provides the setting for Roschdy Zem's Chocolat (2016), a fact-based story about a Black clown (Omar Sy) who overcame prejudice to become the toast of France before fading into obscurity after trying to attract a new audience by playing Othello.
No Shakespeare tragedy has been refitted more often than Romeo and Juliet. This tale of star-crossed lovers, however, actually affords film-makers less leeway than some of the other plays, as the focus invariably falls on a young couple from rival clans or cadres. One of the more innovative versions was André Cayatte's Les amants de Vérone (1949), which was adapted by screenwriter Jacques Prévert to centre on the forbidden romance between glass blower Angelo (Serge Reggiani) and Giorgia (Anouk Aimée), the daughter of a Fascist magistrate.
A Buenos Aires apartment belonging to a marine provides the setting for Enrique Carreras's Romeo y Julita (1953). But it's marine life that drives a wedge between the Florida sponge-fishing families of Robert Wagner and Terry Moore in Robert D. Webb's Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, which was only the third film to be made in CinemaScope after Henry Koster's The Robe and Jean Negulesco's How to Marry a Millionaire (all 1953).
Cinema Paradiso users are urged to see Jiøí Weiss's Romeo, Juliet and Darkness (1960), which is set in Prague in 1942 and explores the burgeoning relationship between Pavel (Ivan Mistrik) and Hanka (Daniela Smutná), the Jewish woman he is hiding in the attic of his apartment block during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. The following year, Peter Ustinov gave the familiar story a Cold War twist in Romanoff and Juliet, which brings together the offspring of the US and Soviet ambassadors, Juliet Moulsworth (Sandra Dee) and Igor Romanoff (John Gavin), at a formal reception.
This amusing variation was overshadowed by 1961's other R&J rehash, however, as Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins's West Side Story (1961) won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Check out Cinema Paradiso's What to Watch Next article to learn more about the musical's Broadway origins and how Maria (Natalie Wood) and Tony (Richard Beymer) fit into a New York gangland rumble between the Sharks and the Jets. Steven Spielberg remade West Side Story in 2021, with Ariana DeBose emulating Rita Moreno by winning Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Anita.
Sadly, a number of Romeo and Juliet revisions are out of reach, including Gianni Puccini's Spaghetti Western, Fury of Johnny Kid (1967), and Mariano Laurenti's comedy, Ma che musica maestro (1971), which centres on the rivalry between two Italian villages, Santa Veronica Bassa and Santa Veronica Alta, A Tamil man and a Telegu woman are unable to resist their passion in Ravi Yadav's Maro Charitra (1971), which was remade in Hindi in K. Balachander's Ek Duuje Ke Liye (1981) before Yadav returned to Visakhapatnam for a 2010 retool of Maro Charitra.
Masami Hata's anime, The Sea Prince and the Fire Child (1981), took the tale into the realm of gods and goddesses. But Martha Coolidge plumped for the San Fernando Valley for the charmingly unlikely high school flirtation between a punk named Randy (Nicolas Cage) and the prim Julie (Deborah Foreman) in Valley Girl (1983). A contrasting 80s time capsule is on offer in Abel Ferrara's China Girl (1987), as Tony (Richard Panebianco) and Tye (Sari Chang) get caught in the crossfire between warring gangs from Little Italy and Chinatown in New York's Lower East Side.
Perhaps the most bizarre variation on the theme is provided by Armondo Linus Acosta's Romeo.Juliet (1990), a tantalisingly difficult to see in-concert film that revisits the story in the company of dragged-up bag lady John Hurt and a cast of Venetian cats who are voiced by the likes of Vanessa Redgrave, Robert Powell, and Francesca Annis. Surely, this should have been called ''Romiaow and Juliet'?
A Swedish white supremacist and a refugee from Peru fall for each other in Daniel Fridell's November 30 (1995). But the transgressive ante is ramped up even further in Lloyd Kaufman's Tromeo and Juliet (1996), which is narrated by Motorhead frontman, Lemmy, and illustrates the cross-tracks fling between Tromeo Que (Will Keenan) and Juliet Capulet (Jane Jenson) with plenty of kinky sex and grossout violence. Released the same year, Joseph Bologna's Love Is All There Is offers a tastier option, as the Sicilian Cappamezza catering clan clash on City Island with the Florentine fine-dining Malacicis over how Italian cuisine should be served. But things boil over when Sadie and Mike (Lainie Kazan and Joseph Bologna) discover that son Rosario (Nathaniel Marston) has been dallying with Gina (Angelina Jolie), the daughter of bitter foes, Piero and Maria (Paul Sorvino and Barbara Carrera).
Parodying Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), Chee Kong Cheah's Chicken Rice War (2000) similarly centres on rival Singaporean eateries, while a lesbian seems likely to lose her friends when she starts dating a man in Kyle Schickner's queer lampoon, Rose By Any Other Name... (1997). While this has rather fallen through the cracks, there's no problem in getting hold of Darrell Rooney's The Lion King II: Simba's Pride (1998), which follows its predecessor in rethinking Shakespeare in an African context, as Simba and Nala's daughter, Kiara, forms an attachment to Kovu, who is part of the Outsiders pride that has remained loyal to Scar.
Oakland, California witnesses a turf war between a Chinese triad and an African American gang in Andrzej Bartkowiak's Romeo Must Die (2000), which paired Hong Kong martial arts superstar Jet Li with singer Aaliyah in the only film released during her lifetime before she was tragically killed in a plane crash. Mexico City hosts Fernando Sariñana's Amar te duele (2002), while São Paulo proves home to the rival football teams of Palmeiras and Corinthians, who threaten to come between the lovers in Bruno Barreto's Romeo and Juliet Get Married (2005). We're then off to Québec for Yves Desgagnés's Roméo et Juliette (2006) to see how Jeanne Moreau attempts to mediate between the Lamontagne and the Véronneau families.
A Gujurati business student and a Somerset rag trader come together in Jeremy Wooding's Bollywood Queen (2003), as Geena (Preeya Kalidas) and Jay (James McAvoy) meet in dramatic circumstances on a London street. Los Angeles brings Nate Parker and Lindsey Haun together in Charles T. Kanganis and Neil Bagg's Rome & Jewel (2008), while Cameron Van Hoy and Danielle Pollack were cast as the Israeli and the Palestinian who refuse to allow politics to come between them in Alain Zaloum's David & Fatima (2008), which featured the final screen performance of Tony Curtis.
Cadets Seth Numrich and Matt Doyle prove helpless to resist their mutual attraction at the all-male McKinley Military Academy in Alan Brown's Private Romeo (2011). But there's nothing contentious about the year's other tweaking with the formula, as we head to Stratford-upon-Avon for Kelly Asbury's Gnomeo and Juliet (2011), which takes place in the adjoining plots of a pair of tetchy neighbours whose garden ornaments continue their feud. James McAvoy and Emily Blunt voice the lovers, with Maggie Smith and Michael Caine playing his mother and her father. Elton John and Lady Gaga's song, 'Hello Hello', landed a Golden Globe nomination.
Snatches of Shakespeare's original text made it into Carlo Carlei's Romeo and Juliet. But a novel by Isaac Marion had as much influence as the Bard on Jonathan Levine's Warm Bodies (both 2013), which even brings Julie (Teresa Palmer) and flesh-eating zombie, R (Nicholas Hoult) together for a balcony scene. One presumes Bella Swan and Edward Cullen were invited to the wedding. Also released in 2013 was Manish Tiwary's Issaq (2013), which centred on rival crime families in Varanasi, and Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013), another Hindi tale that told of competing arms dealers. One of the few films in this section to have been directed by a woman, Aparna Sen's Arshinagar (2015) offers a Bengali take on the Romeo and Juliet narrative, but throws in some gangland intrigue and some potent ideas on the nature of religion between the song-and-dance numbers.
Kurosawa Corner
While we're still in the vicinity of Shakespeare'e tragedies, we should pause to reflect on a trilogy of adaptations produced by the Japanese maestro, Akira Kurosawa. He had long been an admirer of the Scottish Play and had postponed his own version after hearing of Orson Welles's Macbeth (1948). Weaving Noh elements into the mise-en-scène, Kurosawa made no mention of Shakespeare in the credits. But the debt owed by Throne of Blood (1957) is pretty evident, right down to Burnham Wood and Dunsinane being linked to Spider's Web Forest and its commanding bastion.
Returning from leading a victorious campaign on behalf of Lord Kuniharu Tsuzuki (Takamaru Sasaki), Taketoki Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) is informed by an evil spirit that he will be promoted to become Lord of the Northern Garrison. When he breaks the news to his wife, Lady Asaji (Isuzu Yamada), she urges him to hasten the second part of the prophecy by murdering Tsuzuki and taking the title of Lord of Spider's Web Castle.
While this interpretation is set in samura times, Kurosawa decided on a modern setting for his interpretation of Hamlet. Indeed, The Bad Sleep Well (1960) slots into a quartet of film noirs - alongside Drunken Angel (1948), Stray Dog (1949), and High and Low (1963) - that are all available to rent from Cinema Paradiso on DVDs curated by the BFI. Some scholars have questioned the connection between the Danish court and the headquarters of the Public Corporation. But, while Kurosawa doesn't stick strictly to Shakespeare's storyline, there are clear parallels as Kichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune) marries into the family of Vice President Iwabuchi (Masayuki Mori) in order to exact his revenge for his father's suicide from a seventh-storey window. With Kyko Kagawa's Yoriko and Tatsuya Mihashi's Tatsuo standing in for Ophelia and Laertes, this may be a freer version than aficionados might be used to, but its sinuous twists will keep you gripped.
And it's impossible not to be swept away by the visual grandeur and artistic ambition of Kurosawa's Ran (1985), which is rooted King Lear and the legend of the Chgoku daimy (or feudal ruler), Mri Motonari. One of the most expensive films in the history of Japanese cinema, this majestic epic earned Kurosawa his sole Oscar nomination for Best Director. The cinematography and production design were also cited, but only Emi Wada won the Academy Award for her costumes.
At the outset, 16th-century warlord Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai) decides to divide his lands among his three sons. While Takatora (Akira Tarao) is to assume control of the clan from the First Castle, Masatora (Jinpachi Nezu) and Naotora (Daisuke Ryo) are made lavish grants in return for manning the Second and Third Castles. However, Naotora declines his father's offer and goes into exile, while Hidetora soon discovers what it means to have thankless sons.
Surpassing even the brilliance of Kagemusha (1980), this ranks with such earlier jidai-geki masterpieces as Rashomon (1950), Seven Samurai (1954), and Yojimbo (1961). Having written the screenplay in 1975, Kurosawa claimed that he was Hidetora and some critics have suggested that the film is an allegory of the director's career. His wife died during the shooting, but he only halted the cameras for a day of mourning before resuming work. Cinema Paradiso members can rent the film on high-quality DVD, Blu-ray and 4K, with the latter offering the extra bonus of Chris Marker's acclaimed 'making of' documentary, A.K. (1985).
Let Old Wrinkles Come
Mirth and laughter abound in the plays of William Shakespeare, although his comedies have proved trickier to reinvent than his tragedies. That said, The Comedy of Errors is forever appearing in new guises in Bollywood. Manu Sen's Bhranti Bilas (1963) set the ball rolling and it was followed by Habib Faisal's Do Dooni Char (1968) and Gular's Angoor (1982), which has been rejigged in Punjabi for Smeep Kang's Double Di Trouble (2014) and in Hindi for Rohit Shetty's Cirkus (2022).
Tinkering with the formula, David Dhawan added elements from Michael Bay's Bad Boys (1995) to the Bard's romp to produce Bade Miyan Chote Miyan (1998). But it was back to basics for N. S. Shankar's Ulta Palta (1997), a Kannada-language variation that was remade by Relangi Narasimha in Telegu as Ulta Palta (1998) and by Ashok Kashyap in Tamil as Ambuttu Imbuttu Embuttu (2005). Not to be outdone, Kenny Basumatary came up with an Assamese angle in Local Kung Fu 2 (2017).
Despite being a smash on Broadway, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's musical, The Boys From Syracuse (1940) was entrusted to journeyman A. Edward Sutherland by Universal and it has rather been forgotten since receiving a couple of Oscar nominations. We think it's high time someone released this lively farce, which takes place in Asia Minor and follows Anthipholus (Allan Jones) and his servant Dromio (Joe Penner) to Ephesus in their effort to find identical twins who just happen to have the same names. It would make a droll double bill with
Jim Abrahams's Big Business (1988), which turns around the confusions surrounding Sadie (Bette Midler) and Rose Shelton (Lily Tomlin) and Rose (Tomlin) and Sadie Ratliff (Midler). who were mismatched at birth in the sleepy furniture-making town of Jupiter Hollow in West Virginia.
Despite the change of title, Maurice Elvey's Love in a Wood (1915) would appear to be nothing more than a modern-dress version of As You Like It. As it's been lost, however, it's hard to tell, although we can confirm that Betty Thomas's John Tucker Must Die (2006) takes its inspiration from The Merry Wives of Windsor. The setting may be Portland, Oregon, but the essential plotline remains, as the high school trio of Carrie (Arielle Kebbel), Heather (Ashanti), and Beth (Sophia Bush) recruit loner Kate (Brittany Snow) to exact revenge upon the eponymous basketball ace (Jesse Metcalfe) who has been dating them all at the same time.
There have been many adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with the Cinema Paradiso tally coming in at around a dozen, including the entries in Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992) and 'The BBC Television Shakespeare' (1978-85). An epic undertaking that should be much better known, the latter presented all 37 plays, including those that have not been refitted elsewhere: Pericles, Richard II, Henry V, Henry VIII, All's Well That Ends Well, and Love's Labour's Lost.
Back on a certain evening in mid-summer, we arrive at Tommy O'Haver's Get Over It (2001), a loose retelling that slips in scenes from Shakespeare's play just to make sure audiences got the connection. The comedy has been redrafted by preening drama teacher, Dr Desmond Forrest Oates (Martin Short) and Berke Landers (Ben Foster) hopes to win back ex-girlfriend Allison (Kirsten Dunst) by stepping up when the lead is accidentally indisposed. Following on from Klaus Knoesel's Rave Macbeth (2001) and showing how a green drug helps Xander (Andrew Keegan) and Mia (Sunny Mabrey) get together, Gil Cates, Jr.'s A Midsummer Night's Rave (2002) caught the imagination of younger audiences, even though it was largely dismissed by critics who accused it of creating a McShakespeare bowdlerisation that typified the millennial habit of McDonalising artefacts to make them more appealing to the younger generation.
Frustratingly, neither rave reworking is available on disc. But Cinema Paradiso users can rent Tom Gustafson's Were the World Mine (2008), which also featured in our Top 10 Modern Musicals article. With songs by Jessica Fogle, this expansion of the 2003 short, Fairies, sees gay loner Timothy (Tanner Cohen) stumble upon a potion for creating same-sex attraction while researching the role of Puck for a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Yet, while he hopes his discovery will aid his chances with rugby captain Jonathon (Nathaniel David Becker), Timothy also hatches a fiendish plan to get his own back on his bigotedly buttoned-up community.
Also riffing on the play are Angel de la Cruz and Manolo Gómez's Midsummer Dream (2005), Sharat Katariya's 10ml LOVE (2010), and Gary Rydstom's Strange Magic (2015). But we move on to Much Ado About Nothing for Will Gluck's Anyone But You (2023), which defied critical indifference to be a substantial box-office hit. The bickering Beatrice and Benedick of the original appear in the form of Bea (Sydney Sweeney) and Ben (Glen Powell), whose quaint first date ends so badly that they are mortified when they discover that their respective sisters, Halle (Hadley Robinson) and Claudia (Alexandra Shipp) are planning to get married.
Another comedy known for its flying insults is The Taming of the Shrew. Intertitles carried the argument in William Beaudine's version, Daring Youth (1924). But Cinema Paradiso members can hear the brickbats being hurled in Monty Banks's early talkie, You Made Me Love You (1933), as songwriter Tom Daly (Stanley Lupino) meets his match when the woman who has inspired his new hit turns out to be formidable marriage-phobic heiress, Pamela Berne (Thelma Todd).
Despite being enlivened by the timeless tunes of Cole Porter, George Sidney's Kiss Me, Kate (1953) isn't currently on disc (although we can offer a 2002 recording of a stage revival at the Victoria Palace Theatre). This is a shame, as Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson spark beautifully as squabbling acting divorcees Fred Graham and Lilli Vanessi. Having already traded barbs in John Ford's Rio Grande (1950), The Quiet Man (1952), and The Wings of Eagles (1957), John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara locked horns again in Andrew V. McLaglen's McLintock! (1963). There's a hint of Shakespeare about the scenario that sees Katharine return to George Washington McLintock's cattle ranch to demand a divorce so that she can claim her place in polite New York society. Duke and O'Hara would team again in Big Jake (1971), but that was the work of a couple of Finks (Rita and Harry Julien) rather than the Bard.
- T. Krishnaswami's Arivaali (1963) presents us with a Tamiling of the Shrew, while M. S. Rajashekar's Nanjundi Kalyana (1989) and Vallabhaneni Janardhan and Vijaya Bapineedu's Mahajananiki Maradalu Pilla (1990) respectively staged their action in Kannada and Telegu. But it's back to English for Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), which is one of the most fondly remembered teenifications of Shakespeare, who even makes an appearance in a picture stuck to the locker door of the bookish Mandella (Susan May Pratt). She is the best friend of Kat (Julia Stiles), an independent Seattle teenager whose refusal to start dating is preventing sister Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) from seeing the lovesick Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). So, he concocts a scheme to pay the enigmatic Patrick (Heath Ledger) into sweet-talking Kat.
Equally successful in drawing the chauvinist sting from the storyline is Gary Hardwick's Deliver Us From Eva (2003), which is an unfortunate miss on disc, as the sisters of the meddling Eva (Gabrielle Union) hire Ray (LL Cool J) to provide a distraction from their own love lives. Curiously, no one has attempted an LGBTQIA+ variation on The Taming of the Shrew, which was memorably filmed by Franco Zeffirelli, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, in 1967. Someone needs to get thinking.
Cinema Paradiso carries several interpretations of The Tempest, including those directed by Derek Jarman in 1979, William Woodman in 1983, and Julie Taymor in 2010. But the various re-imaginings of Shakespeare's final play are perhaps even more intriguing. Among the best is William A. Wellman's Yellow Sky (1948), which sets the action in Death Valley in 1867 and shows how James 'Stretch' Dawson (Gregory Peck) turns against fellow outlaw, Dude (Richard Widmark), to help an old timer (James Barton) protect his gold and his tomboy granddaughter, Mike (Anne Baxter). So effective was this treatment that it was recast as a Veld Western, with Vincent Price as the grandfather, when Robert S. Webb set the action in South Africa in The Jackals (1967).
Fred M. Wilcox took the tale into space in the 23rd century for the cult classic, Forbidden Planet (1956), which accompanies the crew of the spaceship C-57D to Altair IV in order to discover the fate of an expedition that had included Dr Edward Moebius (Walter Pidgeon), who has established himself a fiefdom with the help of Robbie the Robot and his daughter, Atla (Anne Francis). However, she becomes fascinated by Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) when he leads a landing party.
A paradise island awaits those shipwrecked in Swede Per Åhlin's cartoon reworking, The Journey to Melonia (1988). But animation was just one of the techniques employed by Peter Greenaway in creating Prospero's Books (1991). A pioneering experiment in digital image manipulation, this visually dazzling variation also draws on mime, dance, and opera to show how an exiled magician (John Gielgud) seeks to prevent daughter Miranda (Isabelle Pasco) from falling for an interloper named Ferdinand (Mark Rylance). Gielgud was so keen to film a play he had performed four times on stage that he had asked Alain Resnais, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Orson Welles to direct him at various times.
Despite its audiovisual audacity, Prospero's Books failed to receive any Oscar nominations. But Alex Garland's Ex Machina (2015) won for its visual effects and was nominated for a screenplay that mined The Tempest for its story about Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), a programmer at Blue Book, who is invited to his villa by CEO Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac) to assess the intelligence of Ava (Alicia Vikander), an AI android that he has been working on. By contrast, AI is a pharmaceutical bigwig in Shakespeare's Shitstorm (2020), a Tromatisation filled with grossout gags, bad puns, and musical inserts that sees director Lloyd Kaufman double up as both the troubled Prospero Duke and his pesky sister, Antoinette.
One might have thought this would be available on disc, as Troma still has a sizeable cult following. It's more understandable, however, that no one has released Bu Wancang's A Spray of Plum Blossoms (1931), even though this variation on The Two Gentlemen of Verona stars the great Chinese actress, Ruan Lingyu. It might also have been hoped that some enterprising label would have picked up Lisa Gottlieb's Just One of the Guys (1985), as it's one of the decade's sharpest high school romcoms and Joyce Hyser is so good as Terri Griffith, the aspiring Arizona journalist student who disguises herself as a boy and enrols at a rival school in order to get a fairer crack of the whip.
Andrea Carson (Alana Austin) resorts to similar tactics in a bid to race her bike in Steve Boyum's Motocrossed (2001), a Disneyfication of the play that Tim Supple reworked with an Anglo-Indian cast in Twelfth Night, or What You Will (2003). But we can bring you Andy Fickman's She's the Man (2006), a fitting picture on which to end this survey of Shakespeare in disguise, as Amanda Bynes is so winning as Viola Hastings, who is so determined to play football that she poses as her twin brother to take his place at Illyria Prep. As 'Sebastian', she promptly impresses Coach Dinklage (Vinnie Jones). But she also falls for Duke Orsino (Channing Tatum), who deeply resents the fact that his roommate has stolen the heart of his dream girl, Olivia Lennox (Laura Ramsey). And that's when the real Sebastian (James Kirk) turns up...
He could spin a yarn could that lad from Stratford. Just listen to the stuff he comes up with in the guise of David Mitchell in the Ben Elton sitcom, Upstart Crow (2016-18), which also lifts details from the plays and places them in amusingly novel situations. The people behind the BBC adaptation of Horrible Histories (2009-21) had done much the same thing in Richard Bracewell's Bill (2015). This stars Mathew Baynton as the aspiring playwright and proves conclusively that when it comes to rethinking Shakespeare, there are no holds barred.
