The Taming of the Shrew

While it's far from perfect either as a movie or as an adaptation of Shakespeare, this version of "The Taming of the Shrew" is enjoyable as light entertainment. It also offers a rare chance for silent film fans to see Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks together, in a sound feature no less. Fairbanks has a role much more suited to him than does Pickford, but it's still good to see them together.

Petruchio really is quite a suitable role for Fairbanks, and his buoyant confidence works well. His portrayal seems to be pretty close to the kind of character that Shakespeare intended. The role of Katherine doesn't give Pickford a chance to use her greatest strengths. She does project good energy, and has plenty of charm when it is called for, but at times her portrayal doesn't seem to fit the original conception of the character, and the role definitely did not give Mary the chance to display her wide range of talents with more subtle material.

The story is a rather loose, jaunty adaptation of the original, and there would be little point in making detailed comparisons. As a movie, most of it works all right aside from the occasional instances of awkwardly-paced dialogue and the like that are characteristic of so many films of the early sound era. Fairbanks does help make some of these moments less noticeable with his obvious good humor. There are certainly a number of obvious ways in which it could have been better, and it's fair to point them out. Yet it still has enough of the classic story, plus enough of its own energy, to make it worth seeing as long as you know what to expect.

Douglas Fairbanks is Petruchio and Mary Pickford is Catherine, with bad direction by Sam Taylor. Plus I'm sure that The Bard was not amused that Sam Taylor thought he could improve his original dialogue. But I digress.

The big problem is that Pickford is so small; when I got my first look at her, she looked like a little girl playing at fancy dress. Taylor stages things so she is equal in height or taller than Fairbanks when they are side by side, but when standing apart she is obviously much shorter. Maybe a match in bad manners, but she is obviously not his physical equal. For example, she is blown about by a high wind in one scene, while Fairbanks is unaffected.

Fairbanks as Petruchio is actually playing one of his swashbucklers, and Pickford as Kate is one of her many spunky waif characters. She does not inspire fear, just a "isn't that precious!" reaction given her size. Notice that when Pickford is supposedly beating up servants and smashing furniture, she does so out of view of the camera, because someone her size would not be capable of doing all of that damage.

The odd thing is that the film looks like great care went into the art direction and photography, and the supporting players are pretty good. Neither Fairbanks nor Pickford have that stiff early talkie way about them, but they are given to wild gestures as though they are still in a silent film. So it is the little things that are done well and with care, while it is the big things that sink the film. I'd give it 5/10 with four of those five going to the physical production design.

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 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.