La mégère apprivoisée

Just as an additional; comment to one of the earlier reviews - Channel 4 in England did show the original 1929 version of this film in the late 1980's. The print was in excellent shape and the lack of music did not greatly harm the film. Unfortunately although I taped it at the time I've since erased it and the public domain copy I bought later is the 1966 re-dubbed and cut version - which is not as good.

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.

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.

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.

This very maligned film may not be great Shakespeare, but it is good fun. Mary Pickford's biographer Scott Eyman points out that this film has a reasonable ancestry, being based on David Garrick's performing edition of the play. Be that as itr may, Doug and Mary give us less than half of the text, and throughout the film they play it safe by alternating between silent pantomime and heavy theatrical declamation. Playing it safe? In 1929 it was still not clear whether or not sound was a passing fad.

Of the two stars, Doug is clearly the better. Director Sam Taylor moulds the roles around the performer, and not the other way around, which was unwise but understandable. The Fairbanks image suits Petruchio better than Pickford's suits Kate. (At her best Pickford is magnificent, at her worst embarrassing. She herself called it one of her worst performances, and there is no reason to doubt her.)

For an early talkie it has remarkable fluidity, though it is only the 1966 re-edited version that is available today. (When I approached the Mary Pickford Company in 1992 to see if I could arrange a screening of the 1929 release print - which was longer and had a different score - I was politely but firmly told to go away!)

Two points of interest. This film was emphatically not the box office flop that many writers have claimed; it returned a healthy profit on its first release. And the credit line "by William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor" is pure myth. It appears not in the script, the 1966 nor in the 1929 (I have it on reliable authority) prints of the film. Where do these things get started?