Yeah, THE ENTERTAINER is definitely the film I would choose as his greatest film performance. HENRY V is a great film of Shakespeare, in which he gives a fine performance.
Something else that I feel has hurt his rep is Branagh so self-consciously modeling his career on Olivier’s, that KB’s descent into Marvel movies and so-so Christie adaptations feels like history repeated the second time as farce.
Great stuff. My own pedestrian view has always been that he’s at his best when he’s disengaged for whatever reason — he didn’t want to be in “Rebecca,” and that disinterest informs the performance fantastically; his Oscar nomination for Marathon Man clearly has something to do with his quiet, distracted take on Szell (as opposed to the eye-popping awfulness he projects in stuff like “The Boys From Brazil” at about the same time). I still think he turns every filmed Shakespeare performance into Dr. Smith from “Lost in Space” — it’s all pretty awful.
Marvelous, just marvelous. What a pleasure to read.
Yeah, THE ENTERTAINER is definitely the film I would choose as his greatest film performance. HENRY V is a great film of Shakespeare, in which he gives a fine performance.
Something else that I feel has hurt his rep is Branagh so self-consciously modeling his career on Olivier’s, that KB’s descent into Marvel movies and so-so Christie adaptations feels like history repeated the second time as farce.
Great stuff. My own pedestrian view has always been that he’s at his best when he’s disengaged for whatever reason — he didn’t want to be in “Rebecca,” and that disinterest informs the performance fantastically; his Oscar nomination for Marathon Man clearly has something to do with his quiet, distracted take on Szell (as opposed to the eye-popping awfulness he projects in stuff like “The Boys From Brazil” at about the same time). I still think he turns every filmed Shakespeare performance into Dr. Smith from “Lost in Space” — it’s all pretty awful.