The Taming of the Shrew
1929: Sam Taylor
In 1929, Sam Taylor directed the legendary Hollywood couple Douglas Fairbanks and his wife Mary Pickford in their only production together. Their The Taming of the Shrew was one of the first wave of talking pictures, and was reasonably well-received at the time; since then its reputation has been in almost continuous decline, and is now regarded as a fairly bad effort. I have to concur with the later assessment.
As a treatment of the play, to begin with, it is absurdly spare, cut down to a length of about one hour. The makers of the film have inserted large wordless passages for one thing or another (some of them finding no warrant in the text) and added completely new text in other places, with no attempt to square it with Shakespeare’s. There’s a representation of the wedding, for example, where Petruchio stands about, a boot strapped to his head, eating an apple, while the priest drones on about founding a marriage on a principle of happiness. That this is not Shakespeare’s text would be obvious to anyone familiar with him, I think, but it’s particularly noteworthy in that Shakespeare does not dramatize the wedding at all — all of it is represented in second-hand report. In the process, therefore, there is at most maybe ten to fifteen minutes of Shakespeare’s dialogue. It should go without saying that that is not really enough to represent the whole play.
Elsewhere, Shakespeare’s text appears in fits and starts, often slightly rephrased, but always abundantly cut and dumbed down. Conversations are framed by action scenes of one sort or another, and shots of Katherine scowling. She delivers most of her lines very much in the manner of an indignant Shirley Temple, and with about the same vocal timbre. Petruchio himself bellows here and hollers there, and shows next to no variation in his delivery from one thing to another. He spends his wedding night playing solitaire and talking to his dog. The resolution of the plot is completely derailed as Katherine suddenly just decides to smile and be agreeable about everything. This works for a while; then he bullies her some more, they get into a shoving match, and she hits him in the head with a stool. Apparently this is the romantic balm to heal all wounds, and they are reconciled and Katherine becomes docile and ridiculous.
This production is interesting as one data-point among several, showing how Shakespeare was received and handled in different periods, forming part of a broader history of taste. For anything else, though, it’s fairly useless.
Baptista: Edwin Maxwell
Bianca: Dorothy Jordan
Gremio: Joseph Cawthorn
Grumio: Clyde Cook
Hortensio: Geoffrey Wardwell
Katherine: Mary Pickford
Petruchio: Douglas Fairbanks
Servant : Charles Stevens
Watch The Taming of the Shrew on streaming video from Amazon