Monday, January 9, 2012

Colin Firth as Romeo and Rupert Everett as Juliet . . . in St. Trinian's II: The Legend of Fritton's Gold

St. Trinian's II: The Legend of Fritton's Gold. Dir. Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson. Perf. Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, David Tennant, Talulah Riley, Tamsin Egerton, Zawe Ashton, and Toby Jones. 2009. DVD.
The film also has David Tennant as miscellaneous evil villain.

Some time ago, I watched St. Trinian's, hoping to find some Shakespeare allusions. It had a grand total of one. For you Shakespeare needs, St. Trinian's II is where the action is.

In this film—one of a number set in an imagined Worst English Prep. School for Girls Ever—we learn that the headmistress' most esteemed ancestor was a pirate sailing the high seas in 1589. Moreover, the ancestor left behind clues to an ancient treasure.

I'll try to avoid too many spoilers, but the search leads to the Globe theater. In order to prevent the evil villain from seizing the treasure, Miss Fritton (the headmistress, played by Rupert Everett) and Geoffrey Thwaites (her on-again-off-again boyfriend, played by Colin Firth) must distract everyone and stall for time by enacting Romeo and Juliet while the girls of St. Trinian's explore a secret room they've discovered below the Globe:


I don't know why the film hasn't yet been released to North American audiences in a Region 1 DVD. The cast list is star-studded, and the film, though not a triumph by any stretch of the imagination, is entertaining.

Perhaps audiences in North American aren't quite ready for the revelation that Shakespeare was Pirate Fritton:


The resemblance really is uncanny.
Links: The Film at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

Editor's Note: If a video clip on this blog has subtitles, it's a pretty safe bet that I watched the film in question at three times the speed with the captioning on, hoping to save time for other endeavors.

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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