The Merchant of Venice
1973: John Sichel

As a piece of the Olivier Shakespeare oeuvre, this is worth seeing, and I am surprised that it’s so relatively difficult to find. I nevertheless think it has some conspicuous flaws.

The cast is fairly astounding: Olivier was widely regarded as the foremost Shakespearean of his day (though as sensibilities change, assessments of his performances have been moderated somewhat); Joan Plowright (married to Olivier) was still making movies in a more matronly mode till about 2010, but was quite imposing in her way at the time; still, perhaps she was too old for the newlywed Portia. Viewers may remember Jeremy Brett as either the vapid Freddy Eynsford-Hill from My Fair Lady, or as the diametrically opposed and acerbic Sherlock Holmes in the long-running BBC series. He also played Macbeth in the Seidelman version of 1981.

The setting is unaccountably Victorian — a kind of Dickensian version of Shakespeare. The blurb on one DVD package advises us that this nineteenth-century setting makes the story more relevant to us. I am not sure why or how it does so. It's probably trivially true that I would feel a little more at home in nineteenth-century England than in sixteenth-century Venice, but only by a little. All in all, it doesn’t seem to impede the flow of the story too badly, unless one thinks about the problem of seeing someone on the Rialto (a bridge in Venice) while in London.

For me the question is more about which setting highlights the underlying thematics of the play more successfully. I think putting Shylock in an age when Benjamin Disraeli could be the Prime Minister of England perhaps makes his alienation less credible than it is in its original context. In the seventeenth century in Venice, Jews were a people genuinely set apart, forced to live in a certain part of town, and so on. In nineteenth-century London, Jews were at least partly assimilated into the dominant society. That cultural boundary, as much as any underlying concern for actual belief, is a part of what creates Shylock's special status.

The chief issue I have with the film is its cutting or its editing, which tends to downplay or simply cut anything that could put Shylock into a bad light. As a result, he becomes more simply the victim here than the fusion of victim and villain Shakespeare has offered us in this complex and difficult play. Where Shakespeare offers ambiguity, it is, I would insist, something to be cultivated and highlighted, not excised or flattened. As written, the play is not about why Jews are bad or why Jews are good. It's about one particular Jew, who, in contrast to the others (including Tubal, another Jew) is vengeful and petty.

Buy The Merchant of Venice from Amazon.

Buy The Merchant of Venice from Amazon in region 2 format.