Shakespeare on Screen

The best of the Bard on the silver screen! Cinema's love affair with Shakespeare began almost with the start of moving pictures and has continued passionately and unabated to this day. From the most faithful adaptations (Kenneth Branagh's uncut Hamlet) to versions musical (West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate), modernized (Ian MacKellen's WWII Richard III, Baz Luhrman's hallucinogenic William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), and otherwise transformed (Forbidden Planet, a low-budget yet compelling sci-fi retelling of The Tempest), see how the greatest of plays became the finest of films. Among the brilliant artists whose work receives special homage here are Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and Branagh--who did double-duty as Shakespearean actors and directors--as well as Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, and John Gielgud. With numerous stills and quotations.