1-3. Throne
Of Blood
(1957), The Bad Sleep Well (1960), Ran (1985)
Throughout
his career, the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa brought East and West together by
fusing their storytelling, cultural, and filmic traditions. Never was that in
greater evidence than in his three loose adaptations of Shakespeare's plays,
which constructed wholly original and visionary worlds around the sturdy
dramatic backbone of the Bard's work. Transposing the basic storyline of Macbeth to medieval Japan, and staging it
in the classic Kabuki tradition, Kurosawa's Throne Of Blood sends two warriors into a dark,
foggy forest to hear an old woman's horrific prophesy, which naturally bears
out in tragic fashion. The Bad Sleep Well cleverly reimagines Hamlet within the world of
modern corporate intrigue, casting Toshiro Mifune as a young man seeking
revenge for his father's death within the confines of a corrupt Japanese
company. Not all of the characters correspond to Shakespeare's play, but the
core values of Hamlet's character—his thirst for vengeance and justice,
and his crippling inaction in finding it—are in place. Kurosawa's
career-capping 1985 classic Ran was originally conceived as a historical epic based on the
folk stories of Mori Motonari, but as the years passed, the director found so
many similarities to Shakespeare's King Lear that he actively incorporated it.
Both Ran and King
Lear concern an
aging warlord who splits his kingdom among his three children, creating a fractious
and ultimately tragic situation. Though Kurosawa identifies strongly with the
Lear character, he breaks from Shakespeare in suggesting that the cruelty by
which he built and ruled his kingdom is coming back to haunt him.
4. 10
Things I Hate About You (1999)
On the
surface, the plot of 10 Things I Hate About You hews pretty closely to that of
Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew: in order to win the hand of the sweet, lovely Bianca, her
two potential suitors must first find a boyfriend for her older sister, the
strong-willed, quick-witted Kat, by any means necessary. But certain things are
bound to be lost when turning The Taming Of The Shrew into a late-'90s high school
romantic comedy featuring the musical stylings of Save Ferris—like, say,
the idea of marrying someone for the dowry, not to mention the idea of "taming"
one's wife. In 10 Things I Hate About You, the "dowry" becomes a $300 payment Andrew Keegan
gives to Heath Ledger to date Julia Stiles, so he can then date her younger
sister (Larisa Oleynik). But Ledger doesn't "tame" Stiles, like his
Shakespearian counterpart, Petruchio, did. Starving, controlling, breaking, and
emotionally abusing a girl into being your girlfriend is generally frowned upon
these days. Instead Ledger serenades her on the football field, takes her to
play paintball, talks and listens to her, drives her home when she's really
wasted, buys her a guitar with his bribe money, and in the process falls in
love with her as she falls for him. In the end, it's more Wooing Of The
Wary, Feisty Girl
rather than Taming Of The Shrew.
5. Hamlet (2000)
Like The
Bad Sleep Well and
Aki Kourismaki's 1987 film Hamlet Does Business, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet updates Shakespeare in a corporate
environment, but unlike those two, it doesn't dispose of the text. Much of it
is a mess, with Shakespeare's story awkwardly conceived to accommodate the
boardroom treachery of a New York outfit called Denmark Corp. And the
self-conscious American cast mangles too many of the playwright's words. Yet there
are ingenious touches as well, including a scene where Hamlet's father
materializes in front of a Pepsi One machine, another where Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern discuss their devious plot with Claudius over conference call, and
a staggeringly brilliant conceit to stage the "To be or not to be…" soliloquy
in the middle of a Blockbuster Video store.
6. Forbidden
Planet (1956)
"Shakespeare…
in space!" is a ridiculous sell-line for a film, but Forbidden Planet made the most of its premise, by
becoming a science-fiction classic—and made very little of its source
material, by failing to acknowledge Shakespeare's inspiration in the credits.
In Shakespeare's play The Tempest, a magician and his nubile daughter live in exile on an
island, attended only by the captive "airy spirit" Ariel and the monstrous,
hateful witch's son Caliban, until the magician raises a storm to shipwreck the
men who exiled him, and bring them to his island as well. In Forbidden
Planet, the island
becomes the world Altair IV, the "magician" is a scientist (Walter Pidgeon)
with access to phenomenally powerful alien technologies, and the shipwreck
survivors are a starship's crew, come seeking survivors from Pidgeon's ship.
Strictly speaking, the helpful servant Robbie The Robot is meant to be Ariel
and the unseen monster that killed Pidgeon's crew is meant to be Caliban. But
the monster works as Ariel as well, given that it's an invisible, seemingly
magical force that flits around acting out Pidgeon's desires. Anne Francis'
role as his daughter comes straight out of the play, though—while Forbidden
Planet is more
about eye-popping effects and eerie, groundbreaking electronic music than about
all the complexities and multitudinous plotlines of Shakespeare's play, her
coming-of-age story as a woman suddenly meeting her first men after a lifetime
alone with her father remains intact.
7. My
Own Private Idaho (1991)
Inspired by
a screening of Orson Welles' Chimes At Midnight, Gus Van Sant decided to rework his
in-progress script for My Own Private Idaho—a movie about gay hustlers
(River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) in Portland—into a partial modern-day
take on Part 1 of Shakespeare's Henry IV. The changes mostly affect Reeves' side of the
story, with the actor garbling his way through the Prince Hal character while
William Richert's rotund vagrant stands in for Falstaff. The curious thing
about Van Sant's film is that it includes chunks of Shakespeare's dialogue
quoted alongside contemporary street talk, with little regard to how these
incongruous elements might work together. The result is a movie split
conspicuously in two.
8. Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are
Dead (1990)
By
the time the restlessly brilliant Tom Stoppard took a crack at it in 1966,
actors and directors had been trying to find a new angle on Hamlet for over 350 years.
Stoppard's approach was both astonishingly simple and devastatingly effective:
all he did was take two of the play's minor characters—Hamlet's college
friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, now in the employ of Queen Gertrude to
figure out what's ailing her son—and tell the entire story from their
extremely limited perspective. Or, as Richard Dreyfuss as The Player puts it in
the 1990 film version, "We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside
out. We do onstage the things that are supposed to happen off, which is a kind
of integrity, if you look upon every exit as an entrance somewhere else." This
simple shift in the play's dynamic allows Stoppard to create a witty and
profound meditation on identity, language, and the nature of fiction. The film version has its problems:
Stoppard directed it himself, and his technical abilities are glaringly
obvious. And while Dreyfus is plenty game in a role originally conceived for
Sean Connery, he's alternately over the top and out of place. But it retains
the play's scintillating, hilarious dialogue (and adds a few funny new bits,
including Rosencrantz's inadvertent physics experiments) and features two
perfectly realized performances in the title roles by Gary Oldman and Tim Roth.
(Or is it Tim Roth and Gary Oldman?)
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9. Prospero's Books (1991)
Much
like Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, Prospero's Books takes a Shakespeare
play (in this case, The Tempest) and turns it inside out by focusing on an
aspect barely noticed in the original work. But because the director is
merciless formalist Peter Greenaway—in his sole attempt at taking on the
Bard—the focus is even more obscure and the result is even more bizarre.
In the original play, Prospero brings with him on his island exile a library of
books that grant him magical powers. It's the contents of these books on which
Greenaway chooses to focus, in what expands into a beautifully complex and
layered multimedia presentation involving computer-generated imagery, dance,
painting, and film. No voice is heard throughout the entire movie save that of
John Gielgud, portraying Prospero in one of the finest performances of his
storied career. (Gielgud, who had wanted to make a definitive version of The
Tempest
for decades, helped to finance the film.) Among its many virtues: Prospero's
Books
is a dream come true for those who think that what Shakesepeare's plays most
lack are dozens and dozens of shots of male genitalia.
10. Romeo
+ Juliet (1996)
Moulin
Rouge director Baz Luhrmann was conscientious about largely keeping
Shakespeare's language intact in his present-day adaptation of Romeo And
Juliet; he just packs in contextual
modernizations to make the lines make sense. For instance, the opening
narration ("Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay
our scene…") comes in the form of a news broadcast. And a line of shotguns and
handguns bear brand names like "Sword," so a character can still cry, "Give me
my longsword, ho!" but then snatch up something less antiquated than a pointy
piece of steel. Luhrmann's nervy, glammy version of the play seems fueled by
Ecstasy and adrenaline; his characters speed-swim through a backdrop of
fast-cut montages and dreamy, druggy setpieces. The acting is often huge and
over the top, and the tone flails around wildly, but who's to say it wasn't the
same in Shakespeare's day, when half of any given play was aimed directly at
the groundlings?
11. Tromeo
& Juliet
(1996)
Shakespeare adaptations don't get
much looser or more irreverent than the 1996 gross-out comedy Tromeo &
Juliet, which puts
a Troma spin on the Bard's endlessly recycled tale of the quintessential
star-crossed lovers. This time out, Juliet is bisexual and sexually voracious,
Romeo is addicted to Shakespeare-themed porn, and the third act involves such
newfangled contrivances as Juliet morphing into a hermaphrodite cow. The
tagline—"Body Piercing, Kinky Sex, Dismemberment. The Things That Made
Shakespeare Great"—says it all. Nevertheless, by the standards of the
studio that brought us The Toxic Avenger, this still qualifies as a class act.
12. Richard III (1995)
The
most common trick employed by Shakespeare's contemporary interpreters—simply
moving the setting forward a few centuries—can be interesting, but it can
also be awfully lazy. What makes Richard Loncraine's adaptation of Richard
III so
effective is that its 1930s setting, with Ian McKellen's Richard spearheading a
new British civil war on behalf of native Fascists, provides a perfect
framework for the internecine politics and often-baffling familial conflicts
between battling aristocratic houses that mark the play. It also gives the
director, who co-wrote the screenplay with McKellan, an excuse for some
gorgeous set and costume design: all swanky tuxedos and designer gowns, stark
Nazi-influenced iconography, interregnum military gear, and Shakespearian
sonnets converted into hot jazz crooning. Of course, just flipping the script,
setting-wise, wouldn't alone make this Richard III worthwhile, so the
filmmakers stack the deck by casting some real powerhouses. Maggie Smith, Jim
Broadbent, a charmingly dissipated Robert Downey Jr., and Nigel Hawthorne play
various warring royals, but none stand out more than McKellen himself, giving a
wild, Oswald Mosley-ish turn as one of the Bard's greatest villains.
13. O (2001)
How to make
Shakespeare's Othello resonant to the contemporary youth market? Set it in a modern-day high
school, obviously, in this case a nearly all-white private school in
Charleston, South Carolina. Then change all the names, so Othello becomes "Odin,"
Iago becomes "Hugo," and Desdemona becomes "Desi." And, of course, the dialogue
has to go too, and the story has to be retrofitted to accommodate the
hot-button issues of racism and interracial relationships, casting "Odin"
(Mekhi Phifer) as a straight-arrow student and basketball phenom whose
relationship with the headmaster's daughter "Desi" (Julia Stiles) draws the ire
of his jealous, scheming teammate "Hugo" (Josh Hartnett). In the wake of
Columbine, the film's violent finale kept it off screens for nearly three
years, but despite the bad timing, O proved a surprisingly resonant and clever updating of the
play. At a minimum, the casting of Hartnett as Iago finally put the actor's
blank, shadowy eyes to good use.
14. Men
Of Respect
(1991)
Macbeth had been given the gangster
treatment once before in the little-seen 1955 movie Joe MacBeth. The second time wasn't quite the
charm with Men Of Respect, writer William Reilly's sole directorial effort, but the
eccentric film is tough to forget. An unrestrained John Turturro plays Mike
Battaglia, a New York gangster who murders his way up the ladder with the
encouragement of Mrs. Battaglia (Turturro's real-life wife Katherine Borowitz).
The film's equivalent of the three witches watch a grotesque cooking show,
Steven Wright plays the drunken porter, Rod Steiger is the don in Turturro's
way and so on. Matching the updates to their inspirations sometimes provides
more entertainment than the movie itself, but it's worth a look for the
curious.
15. Scotland,
PA. (2001)
It must be
a little uncomfortable seeing your spouse turn into a villain, but ten years
after Men Of Respect, writer-director Billy Morrissette cast his wife, Maura Tierney, in the
Lady Macbeth part in Scotland, PA, a sitcomish version of the Scottish play set amongst fast
food employees in 1970s Pennsylvania. (Think That '70s Shakespeare.) Justifying murder to her
on-screen husband James LeGros, Tierney casts them as examples of "underachievers
who have to make up for lost time." But, like her predecessor, she finds
herself going crazy with guilt, even playing out a profane variation on Lady
Macbeth's famous mad scene in a local pharmacy as she seeks remedy for a burn that
no one else can see.
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16. She's
The Man
(2006)
10
Things I Hate About You co-writers Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith went to the
Shakespeare well again with this attempt to rework the cross-dressing comedy of Twelfth Night
into a high school setting. With soccer. It doesn't work, in large part thanks
to the never-the-least-bit-manly lead performance from Amada Bynes, whose
interpretation of masculinity involves a lot of crotch-grabbing, hip-hop slang,
and out-of-nowhere Southern twang.
17. Happy Campers (2001)
Heathers screenwriter Daniel Waters made the
leap from writing to directing with the little-seen, little-appreciated camp
comedy Happy Campers, an airy, Midsummer Night's Dream-inspired farce about the romantic entanglements of a
group of teen camp counselors who frolic about an enchanted forest after the
head counselor (Peter Stormare, playing a character named "Oberon") is struck
by lightning. James King charmingly plays the Puck surrogate, an imp named
Pixel, but it's Elliot Davis' intoxicating cinematography that sets the film
apart from the rest of the teen-sex comedy pack.
18. West
SideStory
(1961)
Since
family feuds ended with the Hatfields and McCoys, one of the more obvious ways
of updating the Romeo And Juliet model was by using urban and racial strife as a method for
keeping two star-crossed lovers apart. In the musical by Leonard Bernstein,
Arthur Laurents, and a young lyricist named Stephen Sondheim—adapted to
the screen with only a little awkwardness—the Montagues and Capulets are
the American and Puerto Rican street gangs the Jets and the Sharks, and
wouldn't you know it, a boy and a girl from each side fall in love. The
update works thanks to the clever use of New York's urban landscape—Maria
is on her balcony, but it's a New York fire escape in an alley—and the
songs, which you can still hear everywhere. Perhaps the concept of
finger-snapping, gym-shoe-wearing, Krupke-hating teens could have gone terribly
awry, but Shakespeare's timeless love story makes a natural transition into a
classic musical.