Monday, October 1, 2018

The Film A Thousand Acres: An Adaptation of an Adaptation of King Lear

A Thousand Acres. Dir. Jocelyn Moorhouse. Perf. Jessica Lange, Jason Robards, and Michelle Pfeiffer. 1997. DVD. Walt Disney Video, 1998.
While we're on the subject—and since this is, after all, the Shakespeare and Film Microblog—there was a moderately-successful film version of A Thousand Acres as well.

I'd like to touch on two scenes. First, the "division of the kingdom" scene is as understated in the film as it is in the novel. From this small moment springs much of the rest of the tragedy:



Here's the equivalent of the end of Act II of Shakespeare's King Lear. The Iowa storm captures the fierceness of the elements—and Larry's (i.e., Lear's) anger and madness in venturing out in it.

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