On this date in 1415 the battle of Agincourt took place.
— Fake History Hunter (@fakehistoryhunt) October 25, 2025
A fascinating bit of history that also gave us Shakespeare's masterpiece 'Henry V' and several glorious films.
Here's the St. Crispin's Day speech from the 1944 film with the great Laurence Olivier: pic.twitter.com/JQ1EJ5mAnv
Click through to Jo's thread1 to see three film versions of Henry's speech. I wrote this about two of them a couple years ago on one of the defunct blogs:
Olivier is fine and all, but give me Branagh any day of the week. Yes, a different time, different audience expectations, and different intent:
The Olivier film was shot near the end of the Second World War and dedicated to memory of English military sacrifice, specifically to the "Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain the spirit of whose ancestors it has humbly attempted to recapture." A film explicitly and unapologetically of the moment of its production, its audience a war-weary Britain in need of an emotional boost, it understandably portrays Henry and his war as benignly patriotic, eliminating any moral or ethical ambiguity in the king and any sense of fractured will among his troops.
Gone are Henry's seemingly sadistic threats to the citizens of Harfleur (3.1). Gone is the traitor scene (2.2) -- replaced by expansive pageantry and a dumb show of Henry's pious devotion before the troops set off to storm the beaches of Normandy. Gone is the sense, in the play's opening scene, of faction among the English governing powers, replaced by clerical slapstick. Gone is the nuance built even into the play's most apparently jingoistic moments. Olivier stripped the danger from the bickering captains and the personality from the French lords, reducing both groups to caricatures.
What remains is a bluntly-realized Merrie Olde English past, exemplified by the film's spectacular opening model effect, a shining and splendid Shakespearean London straddling a pristine, glimmering Thames.
Branagh's 1989 film, on the other hand, was made for a film audience whose view of war had been conditioned by the failed adventure of Vietnam, honed by the many films that captured the disillusionment of the following generation, and given point by the British conflict with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982, a controversial and much-politicized military victory.
In Branagh's film, Henry's war proceeds from a trumped up pretext concocted in a shadowy antechamber by sinister, whispering bishops. Henry's first appearance, a larger-than-life stalking silhouette framed by fire, evokes nothing so much as Darth Vader, and even when he is revealed to be a boyish figure rather dwarfed by his throne, he maintains a cold intensity: his whispered, steely-eyed "May I with right and conscience make this claim?" comes out as false piety barely-disguising realpolitik tail-covering.
Unlike Olivier, Branagh preserved the traitor scene and allowed it to blot with suspicion the "full-fraught men, and best" in his service, a suspicion reflected in the sidelong glances of Exeter, Erpingham, and Westmorland. Branagh's army seemed never to be fully united; the bickering between Fluellen and Macmorris had real menace, and Williams (played by Michael Williams) managed to present a serious ethical conundrum, and a challenge to a duel, to Branagh's Henry (the challenge had been cut in the 1944 film).
Where Olivier's Agincourt was a brilliant and bloodless piece of Technicolor chivalric pageantry, Branagh's was a bitter, brutal slog in a huge mud puddle that reddened sickeningly by the end of the battle. Where the Olivier film glossed over the human cost of battle, the Branagh film dwelt upon it...
Still, I prefer the 1989 version over 1944. I mean, who can not love Brian Blessed? Derek Jacobi? And a young Christian Bale2?
Over the intervening years, I have also watched The Hollow Crown (2012), which is an excellent piece of work, but does not displace Branagh's for me. Regardless, an even more important war started on this date in 1983:
Child: Dad? What’s Grenada?
V/O: A child’s question. But not a question a child might ask. And one, that in the past, has only led to more childish questions.
Child: Did we win the war in Grenada, Daddy?
V/O: Why did we go there? How did we find it3? What did the Marines do the rest of that week?
Child: Is it really the smallest country in the world?
V/O: Time-Life Books presents: The Grenada Experience. The series designed to help you celebrate the greatest military triumph of our generation. 48 comprehensive volumes, one for every hour of this explosive period in American history. We’ll take you there, with the first troops to land. You’ll experience first-hand what it was like to ask directions from people with English accents. You’ll attend secret meetings at the White House, and meet the men who first realized that, somewhere in the world, there had to be a country we could lick. Call toll-free, and start putting the Grenada experience into focus. It’s important to gloat over Grenada. But gloating isn’t enough. Even bragging isn’t enough. It’s even more important to ask the question, “What is the big deal?” For ourselves, and for future generations.
Anyway, Happy Crispin Crispian Grenada Day to all who celebrate, especially all the cobblers.
1 - Also buy her book!
2 - I would have also included Emma Thompson and Dame Judi Dench generally, but they weren't at the battle.
3 - Well, we had a map.
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