The Taming of the Shrew

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks star in this bowdlerized version the the Shakespeare play. This was Fairbanks' full talkie debit and Pickford's followup to her talkie debut in Coquette, which won her an Oscar. Hollywood legend has it that this film was a huge flop--not true. While not a resounding success, it did make money. It was the marriage between the 2 superstars that was flopping. Their careers were also nearing their end as well: Pickford was to make only 3 more films; Fairbanks made 4. What hurts The Taming of the Shrew most is that there are long silent sequences, sequences where director Sam Taylor allows the stars to mug at each other rather than talk. But when the stars talk, the film is fine. Both are good actors (stage trained), but I guess they just didn't trust the new medium of sound. Geoffrey Wardwell is a handsome Hortensio, and Edwin Maxwell is good the the father. But Dorothy Jordan as Bianca has like 2 words to say and is in hardly any scenes. Jordan is best remembered as Marie Dressler's "daughter" in Min and Bill. I'm sure the DVD version I saw is the re-release from 1966 that had new music added and some judicious cutting. There are several instances when actors are mouthing words, but nothing is heard. Nevertheless this is a charming film with 2 of the biggest stars of the era and wonderful sets. The opening scene of the city street is excellent. This is the second film I'm seen where Mary Pickford wields a whip. The other was The Pride of the Clan (1917).

The theatre provided a lot of material for early sound theatre, so it was a matter of course that fairly soon someone would use the new talkie medium to take on Shakespeare. But which of his plays would be the first to be adapted? One of the famous tragedies – Hamlet, MacBeth, Romeo and Juliet? No. It was lightweight comedy The Taming of the Shrew, a play which unfortunately sees the bard at his most misogynistic.

The movie was a vehicle for real-life husband and wife Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, he in his first talkie, she in her second. Given the state that their marriage had degenerated into by this point, the storminess between the two of them probably wasn't that far from the truth. They both act well it has to be said, hamming it up magnificently in a manner drawing upon their experience both in stage and silent cinema, and which you can only really get away with in the context of this play's comical theatricality.

The director is Sam Taylor, a man with a background in comedy, who helmed the finest Harold Lloyd movies during the silent era. The Taming of the Shrew sees him returning to his roots, staging the verbal comedy as broad slapstick. Taylor is a master of the pull-back-and-reveal gag, making us think one thing then punch-lining us with another. In adapting the play, he pares down Shakespeare's dialogue, and reduces it for the most part to a poetic backdrop, allowing the comic vignettes to tell the story. This is quite something, because this style of physical comedy more or less died out when the talkies came along, but here Sam Taylor is showing a way it could have continued.

But what is also intriguingly good about this version of The Taming of the Shrew is its sly subversion of Shakespeare's misogyny. The bard's lines remain what they are, but the action in between them is enough to tweak their message. Pickford is brilliantly sarcastic for Katherine's final speech, and as Fairbanks sits beside her with a large bandage on his head, it becomes clear who's taming whom.

This early sound movie blows a hole in the theory that all sound films from this era were static, clumsy affairs due to the camera being imprisoned in a soundproof booth to avoid the sound of its machinery registering on the microphones. The camera is very fluid in this otherwise ordinary adaptation of Shakespeare's play.

Hollywood royalty Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford star as Kate and Petruchio, the warring couple who really love each other on the sly. Their marriage was a sham by the time this flick came out, and both their careers were on the wane, but they give reasonable enough performances, even though Fairbanks looks a few years too old for his part when the camera gets close. There's still a tendency to exaggerate their gestures and overact to responses to words being spoken, but they're no worse than any other stars making their first sound films.

It's clear that Hollywood back then had no more confidence in the intelligence of its audience than it does today: this is Shakespeare for the common man, with the pith of the Bard's prose removed in order to make the words readily understandable to all. Although the film is little more than an hour long, it does begin to drag during the last twenty minutes but, that aside, it's not a bad effort.

This film essentially begins with a young man named "Horentsio" (Geoffrey Wardwell) desiring to marry a woman by the name of "Bianca" (Dorothy Jordan) who is the daughter of a wealthy man named "Baptista" (Edwin Maxwell). The only problem is that Baptista refuses to give Bianca away in marriage until her older sister "Katherine" (Mary Pickford) is wed first. And therein lies the rub as nobody--and I mean absolutely nobody--wants to marry Katherine as she has an extreme temper and a generally bad disposition all around. However, as luck would have it, just when both Horentsio and Baptista think the situation is hopeless, along comes a superbly confident young man named "Petruchio" (Douglas Fairbanks) who is not only excited about the challenge but also thinks quite highly of the dowry which he will acquire should he marry Katherine. For her part, Katherine wants nothing to do with Petruchio and for that reason she intends to make things as difficult as possible for all concerned. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this film deviated quite substantially from the actual play by William Shakespeare. That being said, while I don't normally like Hollywood adaptations, I thought that this one turned out quite well--all things considered. I especially liked the over-the-top facial expressions by both Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks which were, no doubt, a product of the transition from silent films to those incorporating sound. Be that as it may, I enjoyed this movie and I have rated it accordingly. Above average.

Just as an additional; comment to one of the earlier reviews - Channel 4 in England did show the original 1929 version of this film in the late 1980's. The print was in excellent shape and the lack of music did not greatly harm the film. Unfortunately although I taped it at the time I've since erased it and the public domain copy I bought later is the 1966 re-dubbed and cut version - which is not as good.