Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Welles's King Lear (1953) is no longer a stranger, May 18, 2007
This is an interesting pairing of two public domain films featuring Orson Welles (1915-85):
(1) The stranger (1946) TT1:34:20, divided into 15 chapters
(2) King Lear (1953): TT1:29:20, divided into 14 chapters
However, there are no chapter menus. The DVD launches directly into the film selected. The claimed "digitally restored" is a misnomer. Yet for the low price, the quality is acceptable in its lack of sharpness, low contrast, and film blemishes.
There are better versions of The stranger (1946) available on DVD: (1) the 10/99 DVD by the Roan Group, which offers a pairing with Cause for alarm (1951) (see my review of this DVD on Amazon); (2) the forthcoming (10 July 2007) release by MGM ($20 list).
King Lear (1953), with Welles starring as Lear, is the rarity here. This was shown 18 Oct. 1953 (season 2, episode 3) on the cultural TV program Omnibus (11/52-4/61). The entire 90-minute show is presented (in 16 chapters) on the DVD, including ads and opening and closing commentary by the renowned Alistair Cooke (1908-2004). The actual Shakespearean play (minus end credits) runs about 1 hour, 15 minutes--from about 0:6:30 to 1:21:30.
The only other version of Welles's King Lear (1953) currently available on regions 0 or 1 DVDs is in The Orson Welles collection (2006), a 5-DVD set issued by Passport and also containing The stranger plus David and Goliath (1961), The trial (1962), and a disk of various extras. All five DVDs are also of iffy quality and, furthermore, are marred by having an annoying red logo in the lower right of each DVD. The King Lear version in Passport's edition is just the play (TT1:16), because the opening and closing parts of the Omnibus show were deleted.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
King Lear in its TV attire is amazing, March 17, 2008
Orson Welles had to live, or rather survive all his life or nearly. He managed to find in television the means to earn the income he needed to be able to remain ready to do some of the most beautiful films ever produced. This here King Lear is such a survival buoy in the hard life of a rejected genius. With no financial budget of any consequence, with so few actors and just as few extras, with nothing but a stage and little decoration, he manages to produce a rather touching rendition of King Lear. The play is reduced to its essential framework and 73 minutes but Orson Welles, as King Lear, is quite convincing in his suffering and in his madness. It was when television was still being incubated and nursed into being an original medium and at that time producers considered it as being another form of theater and were led to producing all kinds of classical plays for this little screen. That's how Shakespeare reached full generations of Americans. But Peter Brook and Orson Welles knew this small screen could not be the big one, and his production is quite adapted to it. The shooting is more centered on the characters, even on their faces and heads, and all superfluous props are avoided not to encumber the screen with distracting details. Even the acting is adapted to that small screen and Orson Welles avoid any kind of rash or brusque gesture that could not find any amplitude. That makes the play extremely emotional and it probably erases the real political meaning, the fight between the crown of England and that of France, already. The introduction of the time is funny with presenting King Lear as being a Celtic king. I would have believed we were not that far in history and were only dealing with the Anglo-Saxons, one or two centuries before William the Conqueror. The two advertisements from the two sponsors are admirable, and it is a very good thing to have kept the TV show in its original shape.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Half worthy, August 8, 2009
This budget issue has an inferior quality "Stranger" (much better on the official label issue); and the Peter Brook (very early) directed television production of "King Lear", heavily cut, is very interesting to serious Welles and Shakespeare admirers though under the circumstance it could only be so good. A black and white kinescope transfer, shot it seems live in one take as most 50s TV dramas were, that's no way to scale the heights a la Olivier's brilliant performance late in his career (a production that suffered a bit from budget restrictions too). Welles is a Teutonic, Old Testament Lear - close to one fierce angry note with a straight plunge off the cliff - but monochrome doesn't mean dull. It would have been very interesting to see him in a color production of his own direction with the time both on screen and in the shooting to explore nuance because he's got lots to bring to the role, but you see some of it here, a shadow of the stage production he did (where he broke his foot and spent most of the run reading stories from a wheelchair). It would be nice if we had as much of Olivier's triumphant MacBeth, which he was never allowed to film.
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