What I’m reviewing at present is William Shakespeare’s four-hour King Lear, presented as a seventy-three minute 1953 television special. If that doesn’t interest you in the slightest, I empathize. There’s the back button.
If you’re still here, I’ll let you in on the star of this Historic Omnibus Production from the Archive of American Television. It’s Orson Welles, in an awesome beard and a crown, with a badass cane and a royal bearskin coat, and he sits on his throne for nearly half the runtime, his thundering guffaws echoing as mighty quakes throughout your living room.
To clarify the matter of the runtime, all of the sequences actually pertaining to King Lear have been retained, and presented without act headings or other structural breakdowns. The entire subplot, which makes up the majority of the original text, has been eradicated.
Keep in mind whilst passing judgment, that this was a big, big thing. Disregarding that this was Welles’ first American television appearance, Omnibus was a popular show in the early fifties, but featured mostly short subjects. King Lear was a 90-minute special with hardly any time devoted to advertisements, and barely any time at all given to its eloquent introduction by Omnibus and Masterpiece Theater host, Alistair Cooke. For over an hour we’ve got Orson Welles on screen, screaming at knaves and women alike. Whether or not you can make sense of the words he’s reciting is negligible in comparison to how furious he always appears. Only four years after his mesmerizing turn in The Third Man and just over a decade removed from Citizen Kane, Welles’ Lear exerts much of the frustration Welles would never escape.
Technically, director Peter Brook’s depiction of the truncated play is impressive even today. Keep in mind, you’re taking one of William Shakespeare’s most revered works, cutting it to a fifth of its length, filming it for American 50s television with little more than a single camera and a rain machine, and you’ve still got something watchable. From its opening moments it should be clear to an audience even today that Brook wanted something at least adequately worthwhile, utilizing warped lenses and impressive set design to brilliant effect. There’s a sincerity to the production far beyond what you might expect, but nothing will be as captivating to the modern viewer as the hellish agony Orson Welles emits in every frame past the ten minute mark. Whether or not Welles believed the production (or any production for that matter) could live on past its debut, is open to consideration. But for a complete and total rape of a monument, tossing literary context and subtext into the wastebasket from the first frame, you could do far worse.
DVD Picture and Sound:
While E1 Entertainment is to be commended for their clearly painstaking restorative effort, it has to be taken into consideration just what kind of production this is. The film elements here are far, far better preserved than I ever could have expected, but there are numerous visual cop-outs. The glitches in the master resemble VHS tracking effects, but they thankfully appear only sporadically. The bigger issue is that the mono audio track will be rather hard to make out on lesser speakers, which is certainly due to the original recording. However, this being Shakespearian text, it presents a serious issue, and caution should be exercised when considering a purchase.
DVD Bonus Features
King Lear, in a word, is loaded. The first extra you’ll find is an exhaustive sixteen page booklet on the history of the production. I really love when they do that.
On the disc itself is a behind-the-scenes special on the production of King Lear, broadcast live on CBS, October 11th, 1953, a week prior to the feature at hand. Following that is a discussion on the Omnibus program from November of 1953, an additional live Omnibus short from the following year, and one from 1954, featuring scenes from their production of Hamlet.
For value’s sake, you simply aren’t going to do better in a release of this type. This is clearly a labor of love and preservation, outfitted by a staggering array of additional features well eclipsing King Lear’s runtime. That being said, this is, in fact, a seventy-three minute version of King Lear, though I’d suspect you wouldn’t mind that if you made it past this article’s opening paragraph.
"King Lear: The Historic Omnibus Production" is on sale February 9, 2010 and is rated NR. Drama. Directed by Peter Brook. Written by William Shakespeare. Starring Orson Welles.
