About Olivier's Henry V Throughout its history Henry V has been used as a weapon of propaganda at times of national crisis. In 1944, when Britain was at war with Germany, the actor Laurence Olivier was commissioned by the Government of Winston Churchill to make a film of the play. The film was designed to act as an inspiration to a nation about to embark on what turned out to be the final phase of the war: the invasion of France. Britain had already experienced the Battle of Britain, a battle fought in the air but grounded in Churchillian rhetoric that borrowed heavily on Shakespeare for its appeal. The “few” of the Battle of Britain in 1940 were compared to the “few” who accompanied Henry to defeat his country’s enemies. If ever men were needed to follow their leader(s) “once more unto the breach” it was on the Normandy beaches in September 1944 when the invasion of Europe began. Olivier was already a household name in Britain, known both as a stage and as a film actor. He had the stature to fit the part of Henry but he was also clever enough to know that those extraordinary times demanded a particular interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. What Shakespeare wrote is a complex picture of a young man possessed of as many vices as virtues, struggling to learn the craft of statehood. As Shakespeare wrote it, Henry’s personal journey through the play reveals a man full of self doubt, capable of betraying his old friends if the occasion serves, able to be magnanimous in victory but also capable of war crimes: the killing of the French prisoners. Filmed in neutral Ireland with the armies of France and England played by Irish soldiers, the final film shows an arguably one-dimensional figure, in control of his own rhetoric and displaying no doubts about either the legitimacy of his cause or his means of fighting for it. Olivier literally cut those parts of Shakespeare’s text that displayed the more rounded and arguably more human side of the King in favour of presenting a heroic figure possessed with almost mythical powers to inspire and lead his countrymen to victory. |  | |