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It begins with shots of 17th-Century London and Shakespeare's Globe Theater, where Henry V is being played. The florid acting of Olivier and his prelates (see cut) and the Elizabethan audience's vociferous reactions are worth volumes of Shakespearean footnotes. For the invasion, the camera, beautifully assisted by the Chorus (Leslie Banks), dissolves in space through a marine backdrop to discover a massive set such as Shakespeare never dreamed of — and dissolves backward in time to the year 1415. Delicately as a photo graphic print in a chemical bath, there emerges the basic style of Shakespearean cinema.
Voice and gesture exchange Shakespeare's munificence for subtlety, but re main subtly stylized. Faces, by casting, by close-up and reaction, give Shakespeare's lines a limpid, intimate richness of interpretation which has never been available to the stage. One of the prime joys of the picture is the springwater freshness and immediacy of the lines, the lack of antiquarian culture-clogging. Especially as spoken by Olivier, the lines constantly combine the power of prose and the glory of poetry. Photographic per spectives are shallow, as in medieval paint ing. Most depths end in two-dimensional backdrops. Often as not, the brilliant Technicolor is deliberately anti-natural istic. Voice, word, gesture, human beings, their bearing and costumes retain their dramatic salience and sovereignty. The result is a new cinema style.
Falstaff's death scene, for which the speeches were lifted bodily from Henry IV, Part 2, is boldly invented. The shrunken, heartbroken old companion of Henry's escapades (George Robey, famed British low comedian) hears again, obsessively, the terrible speech ("A man ... so old and so profane. . . .") in which the King casts him off. In this new context, for the first time perhaps, the piercing line, "The king has kill'd his heart," is given its full power. In the transition scene which takes the audience from Falstaff's death to the invasion of France, the Chorus makes a final appearance alone against the night sky, then recedes and fades as the movie takes over from him. In a flash of imagination, Britain's armada is disclosed through mist as the Chorus, already invisible, says: Follow, follow. ...
The French court, in fragility, elegance, spaciousness and color, is probably the most enchanting single set ever to appear on the screen. Almost every shot of the French court is like a pre-Renaissance painting. The French King (Harcourt Williams), is weak-minded and piteous as he was in history, if not in Shakespeare. There is one beautiful emblematic shot of his balding, pinkish pate, circled with the ironic gold of royalty.
The French Princess (Renee Asherson) has the backward-bending grace of a medieval statuette of the Virgin. Her reedy, birdlike exchange of French-English with her equally delightful duenna, Alice (Ivy St. Helier), is a vaudeville act exquisitely paced and played beyond anything that Shakespeare can have imagined. Her closing scene with Henry—balanced about equally between Olivier's extraordinarily deft delivery of his lines and her extraordinary deft pantomimic -pointing of them —is a charming love scene.