Cinema: The New Pictures, Mar. 12, 1956

Richard III (London Films; Lopert), the chronicle of England's last Plantagenet* king (1452-85), is one of the most powerful yet one of the clumsiest and least poetic plays that Shakespeare wrote. It is magnificently produced in this film translation by Sir Laurence Olivier, who not only directed the picture with taste and skill of a high order, but also "monkeyed around" with the Shakespeare script —cutting, transposing, and sometimes just plain changing—in a wickedly ingenious way. The cast Olivier has assembled is a Who's Who of the British theater—Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph...