Richard III.

There is a subgenre of science-fiction called "alternative universes," exemplified by such novels as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the high castle, in which the United States groans under the yoke of the victorious Axis powers, and Kingsley Amis's The Alteration, with its portrayal of an England that never experienced the Reformation. The most interesting thing about the new film version of Richard III--adapted by and starring Ian McKellen and directed by Richard Loncraine--is that it presents Shakespeare's play as taking place in just such an alternative universe. The England in which the York family seizes the throne from the Lancasters only to be decimated by its own most infamous member, Richard Gloucester, the hunchback from hell, here assumes the aspect of fascist dictatorships between the world wars. The York regalia is Nazi-like, with the family insignia, a wild boar, substituting for the swastika. This is a country in which Oswald Mosley would have flourished and Edward VIII could have felt free to admit that he found fascism almost as attractive as Mrs. Simpson. This is a London where tanks outnumber taxis, where noblemen in trenchcoats visit proletarian assassins in their tenement homes and dicker about the price of murder over cups of tea fetched by the missus. Whatever the flaws of this adaptation (based on a Royal Shakespeare production directed by Richard Eyre), it does have many striking moments inspired by the need to recast the play in a twentieth-century setting of power politics and machine guns. The treachery and lovelessness of a world in which brother murders brother here takes on the peculiar dreariness and metallic taste of our century.

I will long remember:

McKellen delivering the first part of Richard's famous soliloquy, "Now is the winter of our discontent," as a victory speech at a York banquet, right after a big band singer finishes her number, "Come live with me and be my love."

Richard watching his own coronation on film in the palace screening room while he murmuringly plots with henchmen the destruction of the little princes in the Tower.

Anne, Richard's wife, popping pills and injecting herself with heroin to dull the horror of being married to a monster.

Perhaps the best image of all is the last one: Richard falling backward off a high platform into the flames of battle below and shrieking with laughter all the way down, while on the soundtrack Jolson sings "I'm sitting on top of the world." (Surely this was inspired by Cagney's fiery finish in White Heat--"on top of the world, Ma!"

But such visual fizz constitutes the one real triumph of this film, aside from Jim Broadbent's superb Duke of Buckingham. For the most part, this film lacks real dramatic power because it never takes on the real challenges of the play.

Richard III is a melodrama, not a tragedy. Unlike Macbeth, Richard never changes, and his soliloquies aren't so much self-inspections as verbal dances of self-delighting deviltry. Yet the play isn't static, for nearly scene scene is a dramatic stunt in which we watch the loathsome hero pull off some feat of deception or manipulation. How far can he get? we keep asking ourselves. Always further than seems possible.

The paradigmatic scene is Richard's successful wooing of Lady Anne over the dead body of her husband, whom Richard murdered. (In the original text, it is the body of her father-in-law, whom Richard also murdered.) That we accept its outcome is due not to Shakespeare finessing the irrational but to his confronting it head on. Throughout most of the scene Anne verbally attacks while Gloucester parries every thrust. At each parry the woman's capacity for fury dwindles. He never deceives her about his guilt, but, more insidious, so thoroughly undermines her view of herself as righteously raging widow that, when offered a sword and permission to kill Richard, she can't do it. What would have defied our belief at the beginning of the scene wins credence at its conclusion.

But Shakespeare's passage to this conclusion is gradual and carefully graded, and so must be its staging and enactment. It's not necessary to leave the text unabridged. Olivier cut strenuously for his 1955 adaptation, but he approached each tune, each twist carefully and gave it its due. You saw Lady Anne take Gloucester's lure, and you saw the trap shut with chilling finality.

The current version gives us not a rendering of the wooing but an abstract. A few insults, a little pleading, the blade offered and refused, the engagement ring slipped onto the lady's finger. Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. The incredible remains incredible and the scene goes for nothing. Given the fact that director Loncraine sets wooing in the mortuary of an army hospital, with the corpses of soldiers all around, Anne's surrender could have been played as a desperate lunge at life after the trauma of war. But this notion isn't elucidated by either acting or staging. Richard's sexual magnetism might have been the deciding factor, but sexual magnetism is something that lan McKellen, a clever actor, does not possess in abundance. His dapper, mustachioed villain is an adequate representation of, say, Black Michael in The Prisoller of Zenda or some other subsidiary villain in a swashbuckler or spy flick, but Shakespeare's egregious monster he most certainly isn't. And that points to what's wrong with this film. It's a clever feat which vividly pictures an England that never was, but it skims a story that works only when laid out for us in fascinating detail.

Reviewing Olivier's version, the critic and scriptwriter Paul Dehn wrote, "Wherever the play was loose-jointed or ill-fitting, Sir Laurence has been its tinker and its tailor, but never once its butcher." Alas, McKellen and Loncraine have sliced and diced.