Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Richard "Caliban" Burton?

The Tempest. Dir. George Schaefer. Perf. Maurice Evans, Richard Burton, Roddy McDowall, Tom Poston, Liam Redmond, and Lee Remick. 1960. Videocassette. Films for the Humanities, 1983.
I have been studying The Tempest this semester; this led to my discovery of Richard Burton as Caliban in a 1960 made-for-TV (Hallmark Hall of Fame) production of the play. It certainly isn't great, but it isn't always terrible, either.

Burton's Caliban looks like a cross between Aquaman after a late evening and Charlie the Tuna (mascot of the Chicken-of-the-Sea brand of canned tuna fish—Starkist) after meeting up with some rough, angry dolphins.

But the voice—that amazing voice. That's surely something!

Links: The Film at IMDB.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

 —The Tempest