La mégère apprivoisée

This is a wonderfully entertaining movie. I'm a fan of Shakespeare, having seen live performances of all the plays, including a dozen different Shrews, my favorite of his comedies. This movie is not a full or faithful version of Shakespeare's play, but objecting to the film for either of these reasons is silly because the producers, Fairbanks and Pickford, intended it as a star vehicle for themselves, which it succeeds in being. Petruchio fits perfectly the Fairbanks persona and Kate is well within Pickford's abilities. Also, Pickford is gorgeous and I loved her costumes and all the closeups of her pouting and fuming and winking knowingly. Apparently she thought this was her worst performance, but this viewer thinks she did just fine.

As to the unfaithfulness to the text, the film has Kate overhearing Petruchio's plan to tame her and she then turns the tables on him. Though not Shakespeare, this works in the film. As to faults, I did think Grumio's sneezing fit overlong and the frequent closeups of his reactions throughout the film were annoying. I suppose his part was built up to provide additional comedy, which was unnecessary. Aside from Petruchio's tedious apple core munching, which was Fairbank's idea, much of Shakespeare's wittiest dialog and jokes are intact and just as funny today as they were 400 years ago.

While it's far from perfect either as a movie or as an adaptation of Shakespeare, this version of "The Taming of the Shrew" is enjoyable as light entertainment. It also offers a rare chance for silent film fans to see Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks together, in a sound feature no less. Fairbanks has a role much more suited to him than does Pickford, but it's still good to see them together.

Petruchio really is quite a suitable role for Fairbanks, and his buoyant confidence works well. His portrayal seems to be pretty close to the kind of character that Shakespeare intended. The role of Katherine doesn't give Pickford a chance to use her greatest strengths. She does project good energy, and has plenty of charm when it is called for, but at times her portrayal doesn't seem to fit the original conception of the character, and the role definitely did not give Mary the chance to display her wide range of talents with more subtle material.

The story is a rather loose, jaunty adaptation of the original, and there would be little point in making detailed comparisons. As a movie, most of it works all right aside from the occasional instances of awkwardly-paced dialogue and the like that are characteristic of so many films of the early sound era. Fairbanks does help make some of these moments less noticeable with his obvious good humor. There are certainly a number of obvious ways in which it could have been better, and it's fair to point them out. Yet it still has enough of the classic story, plus enough of its own energy, to make it worth seeing as long as you know what to expect.

The theatre provided a lot of material for early sound theatre, so it was a matter of course that fairly soon someone would use the new talkie medium to take on Shakespeare. But which of his plays would be the first to be adapted? One of the famous tragedies – Hamlet, MacBeth, Romeo and Juliet? No. It was lightweight comedy The Taming of the Shrew, a play which unfortunately sees the bard at his most misogynistic.

The movie was a vehicle for real-life husband and wife Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, he in his first talkie, she in her second. Given the state that their marriage had degenerated into by this point, the storminess between the two of them probably wasn't that far from the truth. They both act well it has to be said, hamming it up magnificently in a manner drawing upon their experience both in stage and silent cinema, and which you can only really get away with in the context of this play's comical theatricality.

The director is Sam Taylor, a man with a background in comedy, who helmed the finest Harold Lloyd movies during the silent era. The Taming of the Shrew sees him returning to his roots, staging the verbal comedy as broad slapstick. Taylor is a master of the pull-back-and-reveal gag, making us think one thing then punch-lining us with another. In adapting the play, he pares down Shakespeare's dialogue, and reduces it for the most part to a poetic backdrop, allowing the comic vignettes to tell the story. This is quite something, because this style of physical comedy more or less died out when the talkies came along, but here Sam Taylor is showing a way it could have continued.

But what is also intriguingly good about this version of The Taming of the Shrew is its sly subversion of Shakespeare's misogyny. The bard's lines remain what they are, but the action in between them is enough to tweak their message. Pickford is brilliantly sarcastic for Katherine's final speech, and as Fairbanks sits beside her with a large bandage on his head, it becomes clear who's taming whom.

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks star in this bowdlerized version the the Shakespeare play. This was Fairbanks' full talkie debit and Pickford's followup to her talkie debut in Coquette, which won her an Oscar. Hollywood legend has it that this film was a huge flop--not true. While not a resounding success, it did make money. It was the marriage between the 2 superstars that was flopping. Their careers were also nearing their end as well: Pickford was to make only 3 more films; Fairbanks made 4. What hurts The Taming of the Shrew most is that there are long silent sequences, sequences where director Sam Taylor allows the stars to mug at each other rather than talk. But when the stars talk, the film is fine. Both are good actors (stage trained), but I guess they just didn't trust the new medium of sound. Geoffrey Wardwell is a handsome Hortensio, and Edwin Maxwell is good the the father. But Dorothy Jordan as Bianca has like 2 words to say and is in hardly any scenes. Jordan is best remembered as Marie Dressler's "daughter" in Min and Bill. I'm sure the DVD version I saw is the re-release from 1966 that had new music added and some judicious cutting. There are several instances when actors are mouthing words, but nothing is heard. Nevertheless this is a charming film with 2 of the biggest stars of the era and wonderful sets. The opening scene of the city street is excellent. This is the second film I'm seen where Mary Pickford wields a whip. The other was The Pride of the Clan (1917).

Early Hollywood's most famous couple, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, decided to collaborate on a film in an attempt to patch up their growing distant marriage. The play they chose to adapt to the screen, a Shakespearean one, wasn't probably the best choice in healing their tumultuous alliance. The loosely-adapted work, October 1929's "The Taming of the Shrew," focused on a fiery, mean-spirited woman wooed by a nobleman who attempts to calm her down. The movie was Fairbanks' first talking picture while it was Pickford's second. The critics were split as to how each passed the test making the transition to spoken dialogue films.

Variety was upbeat on "The Taming of the Shrew," commenting "While there is plenty of romance and dialog, slapstick and mud, there's no dirt, so that part of Pickford's career remains as clean as ever. Splendid settings in the Fairbanks massive production manner." Modern assessments of the film are less than praiseworthy, especially knowing in hindsight that both careers took a deep dive after the "Shrew." Says Leonard Maltin, the movie "was defeated by its lack of pacing and downright embarrassing performances, though it's undeniably fascinating to see Doug and Mary together in their only co-starring appearance." Years later, Pickford said it was her worst performance of her life. She did admit, however, that Fairbanks excelled as his portrayal of Petruchio.

"The Taming of the Shrew" was the first Shakespearian play brought to the screen as a talkie. The feature film was based more on the Richard Garrick's version of the farce, his 'Katherine and Petruchio.' The 1929 film incorporates about 20 percent of Shakespeare's written dialogue, and the movie's English, still Elizabethan, is updated somewhat to make it more understandable for the modern audiences.

Today's viewers to "The Taming of the Shrew" will take notice that Fairbanks' harsh treatment of Katherine is so over-the-top many felt back then the actor was taking out all his frustrations of the couple's personal relationship out on her. And Pickford's punchy attitude was equally demonstrative by her excessive yelling and physicality towards him, portions that were not written in the script. Pickford claims all the fault laid at the director, Sam Taylor's feet, a surprising allegation since both he and the actress got along swimmingly during their last collaboration, 1927's "My Best Girl."

As one reviewer noted, "The acting that had made Pickford and Fairbanks the 'King and Queen of Hollywood' rendered their performing style obsolete overnight. It's important to remember, of course, that the change brought about by sound had absolutely nothing to do with their deficiencies as performers, but only emphasizes the differences between silent and sound film. Watching a film like 'The Taming of the Shrew,' and comparing it to what they were both doing just months earlier, makes a strong case that the silent and sound film are really two entirely different things."