LastingAware The greatest movie ever!

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Prismark10 In many ways this is a stage-bound adaptation and with Olivier in the lead role this is not a bad thing. After all he was one of the theatre greats of the twentieth century.In Richard III, Olivier constantly turns and talks to the audience with his devilish plans to ascend to the throne of England. Aided by his cousin the Duke of Buckingham (Ralph Richardson) he soon replaces King Edward IV (Cedric Hardwicke), rids himself of his other brother George (John Gielgud) and dispatches his young nephews to the tower and then brings their tender lives to a premature end.The deformed, despicable hunchback even seduces the widow of a man he murdered for his own purposes, Lady Anne (Claire Bloom).Once Richard ascends to the throne he finds that he has to do battle with a rival who also stakes a claim to the hollow crown.This is a chance to see Olivier, still in his pomp speaking the Bard's verse. Unfortunately the accompanying music is too bombastic and Olivier's death scene verges on the ham.

Hitchcoc Laurence Olivier's performance is without blemish. If there is a character more complex in all of literature, I don't know who it is (Hamlet might do for some). Richard is the deformed Duke of Gloucester who connives and murders his way to the throne. He is indeed a ruthless serpent, but he has become this way due to the types of assaults on his physical presence that he has endured. He is a child murderer and a manipulator. He works his will on women and somehow gets them to not abhor him. When he gets what he wants, he tosses people aside. Of course, there are prices to pay for this. The whole thing, however, is that we can't take our eyes off Olivier as he plays the tyrant to perfection. The scene at the end as he fights on Bosworth Field is striking. Of course, it takes more than one person to bring this off. An all-star cast and wonderful settings and, of course, the language is masterful.

arieliondotcom Shakespeare himself must rejoice whenever this version of his play/movie is shown. It boasts his own witty dialogue placed in the mouths of some of the greatest actors of our times to make it understood these several centuries later. It's in technicolor so you see the pomp & circumstance in glorious Technicolor (literally). You even get the humor dripping with bitter irony most of the time. The one flaw of the film was the decision of Olivier's make-up (or lack of it). It's clear from Shakespeare's description in Olivier's/Richard's first soliliquoy that Shakespeare wants him to be shown deformed & heavily so. He should look like Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But, perhaps because Olivier didn't want himself disfigured, the only hint we get is a limp. I think this does discredit to the author even though it plays to the prejudice that Hunchback fought against, that the deg formed are evil. Having said that, it's a wonderful movie & a classic that can be forgiven its one flaw of perfection.

Robert J. Maxwell I suppose there are different ways of presenting this play and different ways of interpreting the characters but I doubt that any will be an improvement over Olivier's attempt. He does a splendid job as lead and as director.And it's not an easy story to follow either. Oh, we know Richard the man pretty well. To call him Machiavellian is to do Machiavelli an injustice. Richard is more of a psychopath and would be easy to find under a longer and more elaborate name in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. My God, he's so unashamedly evil, cackling at the audience as he pulls off his stunts, that he's laughable. We kind of lose him towards the end -- those murders of the two kids in the Tower are unforgivable. It's one thing to bash a rival, however innocent, over the head and stick him in a barrel of wine to drown, but it's another to harm a child, kick a dog, or smoke in public.But although we can grasp Richard, it's a little hard to follow the story unless you know your English history. I was forced in high school to memorize the English kings and queens -- beginning with Ethelred the Black, or was it Ethelblack the Red -- and it didn't help a bit in following the plot in this play. Come to think of it, why were we forced into that in the first place. What good could such knowledge possibly be in Newark, New Jersey? Would it help you get a job in the Pabst Brewery? No. No, it wouldn't. It was the teacher's brilliant idea. I never liked her anyway. Even her name -- Miss Viola Wormwood.Anyway, it's kind of humiliating to think that the groundlings in Shakespeare's audience knew more about the rules of succession than most of us do today. We just have to take it on faith that Clarence and the rest had to be knocked off in order for Richard to pluck down that crown.There are a lot of other aspects of intrigue that got by me, and I imagine get by a lot of others. I suspect that in some way, at some level of consciousness, Olivier, who constructed this play with the precision of a horologist, must have realized this because there are times when he rattles off some lines of confusing dialog with such speed that they can hardly be grasped. It's as if he'd shrugged and decided to just let it go. We still get the sense of what's going on, if not the details. Actually, Olivier always pronounces his words evenly and with rapier-like staccato precision. It's interesting to compare his delivery with that of the more old-fashioned John Gielgud, who tends to use rrrringing tones and adds a dramatic vibrato to some of his more important pronouncements, as if aiming for the balcony. There are a couple of problems with the plot that originate with Shakespeare. For one thing, here is Richard -- not only a treacherous liar and murderer but a rude lump of foul deformity, yet he's able to seduce Lady Anne who, in this event, is the radiant Claire Bloom. Every man should be so ugly. And before the climactic battle on Bosworth Field, Richard lies sweating in his bed and is visited by the ghosts of his victims. The next day, sleepless and ruffled and uncertain, he reveals his troubles to some subordinate. I don't know where that came from. He's been a textbook-perfect psychopath and suddenly he suffers pangs of conscience? ("Conscience is for cowards.") It doesn't last long, though. He perks himself up without so much as a cup of morning coffee, swings up on his horse, wheels around, leans down and chuckles at the camera, "Richard is himself again." Doesn't matter. It's a great performance of a great play in a great movie.