Gallery: As You Like It

It was my birthday when I first saw this movie, a serendipitous appearance on a small TV in my tiny room in the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan. This 1936 film version of As You Like It was made as a starring vehicle for Elisabeth Bergner, a prominent German actor who had played the part of Rosalind in Germany, and had just won an Academy Award in 1935. So after she fled Hitler's Germany for England, this project must have seemed a natural.

It wasn't. Her heavy accent could not make up for her energy, and the production was uneven, at best. The movie is notable for a treatment by J.M. Barrie, music by William Walton, and editing by the young David Lean--but mostly as the Shakespearian film debut of Laurence Olivier. He played Orlando, the male lead, to Bergner's Rosalind. He apparently didn't enjoy making the film, and couldn't relate to Bergner in the role. (She had seen him on stage and chosen him for his part.) He felt the only way to make his character credible was to play him as a little daft.

Still, he was the perfect Orlando in some ways. Physically, he looked like he could wrestle a bigger man, and also might have the sensitivity to write love poems. But his voice, perhaps his greatest asset and best known characteristic, now and again made the part indelibly his. When Orlando comes upon the good Duke's party in the forest of Arden, threatens them with his sword to obtain food, he is told that "Your gentleness shall force more than your force move us to gentleness...Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table." I can't help but hear Olivier's voice always in Orlando's reply: "Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you. I thought all things had been savage here..."

This hospitality is in fact the hallmark of civilized behavior among countless tribal peoples, and this scene is the first indication that the idea that the court is civilized while the forest is savage is wrong.

As for Olivier, although his earliest audition piece was the "Seven Ages" speech which shortly follows in this scene, as far as I can tell he never played in As You Like It on the stage.