For the Gilt of France (O Guilt Indeed!)

Coincidentally, I fired up Henry V last night because there were no WNBA games on, and I just noticed that on this date in 1415, Sir Thomas Grey was executed for his role in the Southampton Plot.  Seems like a good excuse to make a little blog post.

I've remarked before that I prefer Branagh's film to Olivier's, and the traitors scene is one reason why.  The former excised it and pretty much all icky feelings and whatnot, which is a damn shame:

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.

I guess given his different historical epocha, I'll cut Sir Lawrence some slack on his cinematic choices.  After all, if little faults proceeding on distemper shall not be winked at, how shall we stretch our eye when capital crimes, chewed, swallowed, and digested, appear before us?

Selah.