Legend has it that Winston Churchill asked Laurence Olivier to make a film version of Shakespeare’s Henry V to help raise British morale during the worst days of World War II. It was not an entirely ...

Olivier mustered out of the navy to film this adaptation of Shakespeare’s history. Embroiled in World War II, Britons took courage from this tale of a king who surmounts overwhelming odds and emerges ...

Great Expectations (Rank; Universal-International) is one more proof that the movies can make a fine, thoroughly intelligent translation of a literary classic. In Henry V, Laurence Olivier and his ...

Rulers long have known that prosecuting a war against a foreign enemy is a helpful way of shifting focus from domestic or familial strife. That accusation gets made by one side or another about most ...

In the inspired Olivier concept, Shakespeare's play begins as a performance in the Globe Theatre, shifting in broad cinematic terms to an epic narrative of Henry V, who had developed from a dissolute ...