The Mysterious and Wonderful Marine Parkway Bridg

Marine Parkway Bridge aka Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge

When I was five years old, after the end of World War II, we moved from New Jersey to Queens Village in the east part of Queens, New York.  My dad had become a builder by then, and we lived upstairs in a new four plex that he had constructed.  Often, we would visit my grandparents who lived in Brooklyn, where my mom had grown up.  The only convenient way to get there was by car (New York City subways never came that far east).

 

We would take the circuitous Belt (and Cross Island) Parkway that ran not far from my house to Bay Parkway, the closest exit to get to my grandparent's place in Bensonhurst.  This parkway ran all along the outskirts of Queens, by what was then called Idlewild (now Kennedy) Airport, still under construction, and wound around Jamaica Bay into Brooklyn.  It would pass through what still swampy land dotted with surplus Quonset huts for the temporary housing of postwar veterans, as well as residential areas and Floyd Bennet Field--the area's earliest airport.  Once past that, you got into the densely urbanized area of what we considered the "real" Brooklyn. The whole trip, door to door, took about an hour.

 

The Belt Parkway in the 1940's

When you're five or six, an hour seems to be a very long time.  We usually headed home after dark, the trip seemed very boring, particularly in what seemed to be the empty parts 

between the urbanizations of Brooklyn and Queens.  In those days, the parkway was illuminated by rustic-looking yellow sodium lights that would come and go with a kind of hypnotic regularity

A sodium light

along the length of the highway.  To break the monotony, I would look out to our right, where there were the expanses of Grave's End, Sheepshead and Jamaica bays, and beyond that, the Atlantic.  The other side of the bays was occupied by a long, narrow Peninsula known collectively as the Rockaways, and east of that, Idlewild, and the barrier island of Atlantic Beach and Long Beach. At the Brooklyn end, Rockaway Peninsula was connected to it by the Marine Parkway Bridge.

 

All we could see at night out there was a faraway string of white lights, like a long necklace across the bays, and the illuminated bridge.  During the day it looked like the narrow spit it was, widening as it extended east towards the Rockaways.  But since we had never been out there, it looked exotic and distant in the dark, and the lit bridge seemed to beckon towards whatever glittered out there.

 

The bridge itself was (and still is) an elegant, lacy-appearing structure, with a vertical lift unit at its center to allow taller marine transit.  This section is framed by its lifting mechanism within two tall towers with inward curving tops that seem to embrace it.  It was a fitting transport to those fairy lights on the other side.

 

The entrance to the bridge near Floyd Bennet airfield was gracefully landscaped--a nice island between urbanizations and salt marsh swampland.  It was all a part of a vast agenda, including the Belt Parkway itself, carried out in the later 1930's by Robert Moses, the urban planning czar of New York at the time.  He also established a park on the Rockaway side, dedicated to Jacob Riis, a famous muckraker and photographer of the century before.

Arial view of bridge (Photo: Anthony 22)

 

  In my first fifteen years as a New Yorker, I never crossed the Marine Parkway Bridge even though I had a boyfriend whose family lived in Far Rockaway, the totally urbanized beach town at the other end of the peninsula; we always got there by other routes.

 

I moved on to other places, and for the last fifty years I've lived in Texas.  I did go back often to New York, but never to that part of it.  But last month I went up there and made a trip to the wineries on Long Island's North Fork with my friend Debra, who now lives in New Jersey.  Since we both had grown up on Long Island (we soon left Queens and moved on to Nassau County, to Great Neck), and her family in Cedarhurst (also in Nassau County, but further south), we decided to do a drive-by of our childhood homes.  After that, she was taking me to Newark Airport to go home.  The route we decided upon took us through the Rockaways and then westwards--to cross the Marine Parkway Bridge.  At last, I got to see what was out where those fairy lights were.  They were, of course ordinary light poles, but they did string out through and beyond Riis Park, a flat beachy place, to the bridge. And I got to cross it after waiting 76 years! The elegant bridge itself, though long in its component parts, is relatively small compared to so many other bridges around New York and was all-too- quickly traversed, with no trace of Oz on its far end, just some beaches, whose history is interesting, but not to the five-or 83-year-old me.

 

The crossing had one other thing of cool meaning for me: when I was a kid, I was a big fan of Brooklyn Dodgers baseball--and Robert Moses became a villain to me because he was instrumental in getting the Dodgers to move to Los Angeles in 1957, and all of you know the rest of that.  In 1978, the Bridge was renamed in honor of Gil Hodges, star first baseman for Brooklyn when I was a kid.  So there, Czar Moses!

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Histories of the Bridge and its environs can be found at: https://www.untappedcities.com/secrets-marine-parkway-bridge/ and also, of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Parkway–Gil_Hodges_Memorial_Bridge

 

La Otra Mirada [The Other View] Comes to America

 La Otra Mirada, a Spanish TV production from 2018-2019, finally arrived in the U.S. via PBS and Amazon, under the title of The Boarding School.  Set in an elite school for girls in 1920's Seville, the first season chronicles a year in which a false dawn of Feminism occurs among both adolescent students and female teachers within a traditional, paternalistic society.

 

The plot is driven by two events:  The first is the assumption of Manuela, the young progressive director of the school to this position formerly held by her mother, its founder. The second is the arrival of Teresa, the enigmatic daughter of the murdered Spanish Ambassador to Lisbon. He leaves behind a cryptic note to her, with the name of one of the school's students on it, which sends her off on a quest to solve the mystery of his assassination.

 

As with so many TV series, the first season has several directors and writers, but they succeed in giving in-depth characterizations of both some students and faculty members over this fateful year in 13 episodes.  Among the teachers, it focusses on Manuela and Teresa and two others, Angela and Luisa.  Each has her own situation as women in a world still severely limited by tradition.  Manuela, married to an influential lawyer, does not want children, and is in conflict both with rather her conventional husband, and her equally strong-minded mother.  Angela with four sons and a caring stay-at-home husband, finds herself falling in love with a woman, an artist and the single mother with her daughter at the school. Luisa, a woman, remains mired in widowhood, supporting and exploited by her worthless son.

 

Teresa is the outlier--a sort of female knight-errant, who has spent her twenties estranged from her father, but with enough independent money so that she can travel the world by herself, and live as she wishes.  She wears stylishly modern trousers, smokes cigars, and sleeps with whom she pleases.  The school for her is a temporary landing place as a base for her investigations incognito.  She and Manuela click when they meet, and Manuela offers her a teacher's job at the school.  Over the course of the year, Teresa finds that she is a talented, if radical educator, and she and Manuela work to make their female charges begin to value themselves as individuals beyond the views of Seville's (and Spain's at the time--and beyond) men, who view women as breeders and sex objects, and attractive ornaments.

 

A group of the students receive equal focus.  Most come from privileged backgrounds, and their parents seem to expect a sort of finishing school education to make them obedient wives.  Unexpectedly they receive far more, learning how to cope with the usual problems of adolescence and the upheavals of puberty, the courage to speak up and dare to think of a future beyond simple matrimony (some of their teachers are, knowingly or unknowingly, experiencing this as working mothers and career women, in one of few the careers available at a time where they are able to do so).  Several girls have far more difficult ordeals: one has a sister who dies suddenly, derailing her own ambitions.  Another, the Roberta of the fatal note, is raped by her fiancé, the heir of the powerful Peralta family--and decides to accuse him in court.

 

Most of the men don't come off too well, except for Manuela's understanding father, and Ramón, the cute red-haired janitor--and the only proletarian character in the series.  One Peralta brother goes through personal tragedy: Tomás, decides to support Roberta publicly at her trial, and is consequently disinherited by his family (he ends up as an assistant janitor at the school), and can never marry the girl student he loves. But men in Spain would have to undergo a lot in future decades, including a brutal war and repression for everyone before things would start to change.

 

I don't want to reveal any more details of the very complicated plot with the focus on so many characters and situations, but the writers and directors of the series do an amazing feat of keeping it all together, right to the season finale, where many things find solutions, but others do not, as in real life.

 

I understand that the second series was only eight episodes and had an indifferent critical reaction.  I really don't want to see it.

Spanish women would go into a repressive eclipse with the triumph of the Franco regime in 1939 that would turn the clock back for nearly three decades.  As I was growing up in postwar World War II America, the situation initially for girls and women was only marginally better (think Mad Men). But I, like them have  passed through successive changes and have lived in both places (and was fortunate to be married for a while to a very free-thinking Spaniard too).  Hopefully, all this won't cycle back.

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The first season is currently broadcast on PBS stations, with all episodes streaming on PBS passport, and also available on Amazon Prime.

                                                   Pistol Packin' San Antonio: 

1882 Dedicated to the very diverse victims, white, brown and black, from children to the           elderly of Uvalde, Buffalo, Sutherland Springs, El Paso, Las Vegas, etc. etc. etc. 

  DEADLY WEAPONS. -Chapter XIII. of the Revised City Ordinances), page 38 and 39, provides as follows : 

  " Section I. If any person shall, within the corporate limits of this city, carry arms about his or her person, a bowie knife, dirk, butcher knife or razor, or any fire arm known as a six shooter or pistol of any kind, or having around his or her person what is known as brass knuckles, slung shot, club, loaded or sword cane, or any other weapon manufactured or sold for the purpose of offence or defense, and capable of inflicting death or great bodily injury, such person shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof before the Recorder of the city,shall be fined in a sum of not less than twenty-five dollars nor more than one hundred dollars, and in default of payment shall be confined in the City Prison, or placed in hard labor upon the public works of the city, for not less than twenty-five nor more than thirty days, to be determined by the Recorder; provided, that this ordinance shall not apply to any legally authorized conservator of the peace, when he may be in the legal discharge of his duty, Section 2. That it shall be the duty of all civil officers from other counties than Bexar, visiting San Antonio, officially or otherwise, who have authority to wear arms, Bexar, visiting San Antonio, officially or otherwise, who have authority to wear arms, shall, upon arriving in the city. report to the Mayor, who shall examine their papers as to their right to wear arms, and endorse the same; otherwise to be dealt with as the law directs." 

 If anyone reading this blog gets angry reading the above quote and wonders when this law came out, they should note that it was written and published for the city of San Antonio in 1882, when the attitude towards weaponry in the city was radically different, it seems, from today. 

 Movies and fiction would have us believe that in the 1880's, the west was totally lawless: most everyone had a six-shooter and in most places, it wasn't safe for ordinary people to walk in the streets. While it was true of some locations, such as the Tombstone and Dodge City, where gunfights really happened in the 1880's, there were far more where it didn't.

 The city of San Antonio did have a famous shooting in 1882. It happened in a saloon and vaudeville house owned by Jack Harris, who was assassinated by Ben Thompson of Austin. Two years later, Thompson would be killed, apparently in revenge along with an acquaintance, King Fisher at the same

venue. The theater's location, above a cigar store at the corner of Soledad Street and Main Plaza became popularly known as the "Fatal Corner," though the building itself burned down in 1886. 

 But these two related events were highly unusual for San Antonio and caused a sensation in the local newspapers. There were certainly violent acts related to drunkenness and gambling in the city, but these were largely confined to Main and Military Plaza areas, in which commerce flourished by day, and drinking in the surrounding saloons at night. By 1889 a "Sporting District," which contained the bulk of 

the saloons and prostitution establishments was established by the city government. For families, there were beer gardens in the German tradition in the more genteel residential districts, which were extravagantly touted along with San Antonio's other businesses in the 1885 in The Industries of San Antonio, Texas.

 What is, to this writer, is more interesting is really how mundane San Antonio was in the 1880's. Finally becoming attached to the greater United States by the introduction of its first railroad line in 1877, and a second four years later, this decade saw the paving of downtown streets--with hexagonal mesquite blocks, a streetcar system, gaslighting being replaced by electricity, and reliable water service. An indicator of the progress in the city was the publication in 1882 of Stephen Gould's The Alamo City Guide. San Antonio, Texas, Being a Historical Sketch of the Ancient City of the Alamo and Business Review; With Notes of Present Advantages, Together With a Complete Guide to All The Prominent points of Interest About the City, And a Compilation of Facts of Value To Visitors and Residents. 

 Gould had been a journalist in San Antonio for some years, and was secretary of the short-lived Mercantile exchange until its demise in 1884. He also seems to have been a one-man chamber of commerce. 

 At the time of the guide's publication, the city had a population of about 20,000 people, which would nearly double during the decade. It had been multi-ethnic since Texas joined the union in 1846, at first being equally divided among its Hispanic, German and Anglo-American inhabitants, with a small number of African Americans, at first enslaved, then freed. By 1880, the proportions shifted, with increasing numbers of Anglo-Americans coming from other states, but the city still retained strong elements of Germanic and Hispanic cultures. 

 There were gunsmiths in the city to be sure, but the firearms trade was aimed at hunters and shooting clubs, which had its origin in San Antonio's German community who sponsored very popular target shoots with medals. 

 A look at contemporary newspapers, the San Antonio Light and the San Antonio Express, reveal few accounts of violence beyond the "Fatal Corner" incidents. Death was far more likely to claim its inhabitants by epidemic diseases and accidents. As Gould put it: 

  "Visitors should remember that San Antonio ranks as one of the best-governed cities in America. The citizens are law-abiding, intelligent, and refined. They are composed of representatives of every nationality in the civilized world, and with accessions from all of the older States of the Union. of human life and personal property are as safe here as in any of the cities of America or Europe, and compared with many far more pretentious cities, San Antonio occupies the first rank for the maintenance of law and order." 

 Almost every issue of the San Antonio Express-News in the twenty-first century reports some sort of murder within city's the urban confines. Part of has to do with the fact that we're now over 1.5 million inhabitants, but I wonder if the number is so high may in part be due to the fact that the 1882 statutes are long gone? It would be hard to imagine a member of the Shooting Club walking calmly down Commerce Street, picking off pedestrians, merchants and the occasional mule, as he went. _______________________________ 

 Stephen Gould's Alamo City Guide is available online at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009597033

 On the Vaudeville Theater shootouts, see: Alice C. Geron and Gary W. Yantis, Fatal Corner which appeared in San Antonio Monthly in July, 1982, and republished on the Watercress Press website: http://watercresspress.com/previous-site/Fatal-Corner.htm 

On shooting clubs in San Antonio, see Paula Allen's articles in the San Antonio Express News, August 7, 2020: https://www.expressnews.com/life/life_columnists/paula_allen/article/San-Antonio-s-German-style-shooting-club-of-the-15468421.php

 

A recent Texas Public Radio podcast series on the sporting districts can be accessed at https://www.tpr.org/history/2022-04-01/no-boundaries-how-san-antonios-red-light-district-grew

 The best book of 19th-century Photographs with commentary is still, Cecilia Steinfeldt's San Antonio Was, San Antonio, San Antonio Museum Association, 1978.

Life, Death and Vax

This is my second rant on Vaxing, but I feel I have to say it again--and more strongly. The past two years of Covid 19 has given modern Americans, and everyone else in the world, a taste of what major epidemics used to be like. Of these, the Black Death in the 14th century and the 1918 Influenza epidemics are probably best known to us, because they were thoroughly chronicled in Western European and American society, but they occurred all over the world, nearly all the time. The introduction of measles and smallpox to the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries virtually wiped out the lives of the indigenous people who had lived there for millennia. When outbreaks of an infectious diseases like smallpox or

cholera spread, people in their paths could only wait, hide and pray--in the nineteenth century, for example, newspapers might chronicle the day-by-day progression of an epidemic towards you, but there wasn't much you could do about it. You could wait to contract childhood diseases such as measles, mumps and chickenpox--your parents were probably expecting them to get you and to stoically nurse you through, knowing that in surviving them, you were immune from getting them again. My generation (I was born in 1941) is probably the last to experience some of these epidemics. Sanitary conditions had certainly cut the rate of baby deaths and many of the risks of it to our mothers. We were immunized against smallpox and diptheria by then, but not measles, mumps and chickenpox. I got them all between the ages of 6 and 7. The only one I remember was measles. I came down with it at my grandmother's house, my temperature spiked at 104, and I became delirious. I was put to bed in my grandparents' bed (I don't know where they slept during the 3 weeks I was sick), and my mom camped out there too. I can remember having weird visions in the darkened bedroom. And all everyone could do was wait and hope. Well, I'm still here. The following year (1948), I had rheumatic fever, and was supremely lucky to receive penicillin, just becoming authorized for civilian use.

As more immunizations became available, we rushed to get them. Everyone was vaccinated for smallpox at birth, but when I was in second grade in 1949, a foreign tourist came down with a case in New York. Everyone in my school, students, staff and kids, were marched down to the school cafeteria, and revaccinated. No questions asked. There were only 12 cases of smallpox that year, all in New York, and most occurring in the hospital where the carrier was. Since then, there hasn't been a single case in the U.S--and it's been wiped out worldwise since 1980..

In the early 1950's, prior to the Polio Vaccine, which debuted in 1955, polio came every summer; it paralyzed so many children--and Franklin Roosevelt too--and there were all-too-common photos of children limping along in heavy braces or encased in iron lungs to help them breathe. Public swimming pools, movies and anywhere kids congregated were closed down. I escaped going to sleep-away summer camp that year, and so avoided a situation in which several campers were infected, and one died. I played with my nextdoor neighbor the day before he came down with it and my mother had I fit. We all worked to save money and held fundraisers to contribute to vaccine research, and when it came, we all lined up with enthusiasm to get it. The speed in which Covid 19 vaccines were researched and then made available--for free, has no medical precedent for such a major event. I must say outright that I can't understand why anyone would not want to be vaccinated against Covid-19, or any other potentially fatal disease. Reliable scientific studies have revealed that since vaccines for diseases such as measles, diptheria, polio and numerous other infectious diseases have become available, the mortality rates of children under 15, which was historically averaging 46% until the middle of the 20th century (that for infants below the age of 1 was 26%) has been cut worldwide to 2% or less. I've taken every vaccine I could get, because I can remember what it was like before this was possible. I haven't turned into Frankenstein or a crocodile, and my brain is wholly mine and functionally sharp. Why wait? ___________________________________________________________________ An Article about Historical Diseases and Effectiveness of Vaccines: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/209448... An article about the history of Child mortality:https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past

Lucy and the Four Bullies

Last week San Antonio Opera did a stripped-down Covid-friendly live performance of Donizetti's Lucia de Lammermoor with rising stars Brenda Rae (Lucia), Scott Hendricks (Enrico), Scott Quinn (Edgardo), and Musa Ngqungwana (Raimundo). This semi-staged production cut to the chase: the chorus was eliminated, so the drama had to be carried by key soloists. It worked very well, and Rae did a spectacular mad scene. Composed by Gaetano Donizetti and his librettist Salvatore Cammarano and first produced in 1835, the plot was based on The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott, written on commission in 1835. Scott himself based it on a late 17th-century historical incident concerning a noblewoman named Janet Dalrymple, who, forced to renounce her true love and marry a suitor approved by her family, stabbed him on their wedding night and though he survived, she shortly afterward died insane.

Scott's novel has many plot twists and retained the real villain-- the girl's ambitious mother, who engineered the estrangement of the original suitor via fake news (in this case, forged letters). The novel, set in 17th-century Scotland, is full of the complicated politics of the time, and pits the heroine's (here renamed Lucy) family against that of her true love (Edgar), who are on opposite sides both politically and as the result of a feud that has been going on for generations. On both sides there are crises of property ownership and many machinations and changes of plan that eventually lead to Lucy's forced marriage to Arthur

Bucklaw, whose wealth and influence can salvage her family's fortunes. Lucy, like Janet, loses her reason, stabs her husband, again not mortally, on their wedding night, and she soon after dies. /a>

In Covid Times, or The Big 8-0: where would I be without Vaxes?

This is a sort of personal musing after such a long hiatus for Covid times. But this morning, this headline was in my daily newspaper: "VACCINATED WORKERS BANNED AT FLA. PUBLIC SCHOOL" The story went on to say that a school has been established by anti-vaxers, and they would not hire anybody who had had a covid shot. I'm assuming these guys were born yesterday. If they were as old as I am (80), they would remember a world without many of them, and the fear and misery this lack used to cause. I'm glad I've reached this age, but 100 years ago I certainly wouldn't have reached it. Aside from surgeries for a few parts replacements, I was born in 1941, and at that time there were no antibiotics to treat sicknesses, and few vaccines to prevent them. We were all vaccinated against smallpox at birth, and as little kids we were vaccinated against diphtheria and tetanus, but that was about it. Lack of birth control aside, one of the reasons that people had so many kids up to the early 20th century and earlier was because it wasn't unusual to lose a few of them to lethal childhood diseases. There was nothing much to do but pray if your child got sick. The shots we take for granted now didn't exist then, and the general attitude was to let your kids catch measles, mumps, chickenpox and whooping cough, and hoped they'd recovered fine, because then they'd have immunity. I managed to dodge the bullet of whooping cough but got all three of the others when I was six and got the measles so badly that I was delirious and had a temperature of 104. I was lucky that I recovered, and with outside effects that sometimes come with it. We tend to forget that Measles wiped out more native Americans than wars did. In the bad old days, people would hear or read in the news about imminent epidemics and knew that they couldn't do anything about it but wait for it to come and pass and hope they didn't get it. In my childhood, before the Polio vaccine, parents would dread each summer, the usual season for the disease. I played with my next-door neighbor the day before he came down with it, and my mom was petrified for a few weeks, until it was evident that I didn't catch it. I did get rheumatic fever, though--that comes off a strep infection and there were no antibiotics then. Luckily, that was just after World War II, and penicillin had just been released for the general public and I was able to get it. Public health measures, when available, were more draconian too. In 1947, I was growing up in New York, and a man landed in the city from abroad with smallpox. No matter if we were vaccinated against it at birth, who knew how long that protection would last? My entire elementary school, students, teachers and staff were taken down to the cafeteria one day and we were all vaccinated again. More than a million schoolkids were inoculated en masse when the Salk vaccine came out, and the rest of us got it as soon as we could. The Covid epidemic is a wakeup call. For a year, we experienced what our grandparents did with far more frequency. Nobody realizes how awful these sicknesses are until you get them. I got my covid shots as soon as they were available. I'm still here and would like to be here for a while longer. _______________________________________________________________________ For an amazing website on the history of Vaccines, see:

A Little Touch of Harry In the Blight: Henry V in 1944

 England, 1944: still fighting in World War II.  In the fall of that year, Laurence Olivier's film version of Shakespeare's Henry V was released, two months after D-day.  It had been in production since the year before.  During this time, England was a drab place indeed, ravaged by the German Blitz bombings of 1940-41, and by 1944, though hope was increasing, there were shortages of things everywhere, the country was still in a belt-tightening wartime mode, and V-E Day would not come until May of the following year.  This film was made with backing from the British government's Ministry of Information, with an aim to giving some respite to the British public during this dark period, and this was the reason that the most brutal episodes of Henry in Shakespeare's play, such as the execution of the three treacherous English noblemen by order of the king were cut, and  Henry's basic aggressiveness in invading France at that historical moment was glossed over, and the whole justification of the war, the issue of Salic Law, was made comic, while the doings of Pistol, Nym and their mates were rather sanitized.

 

Many of the criticisms made by film historians have to do with the integrity of Shakespeare's play itself, and its proper context within the grouping of Henry V, and Henry IV, parts I and II.  To my reasoning, all of choices made in this production was the logical outcome of the film as a stand-alone production and the circumstances that drove its making in the first place. In that sense, it is more akin to Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938), also a morale-raising propaganda movie, which probably influenced Olivier's treatment of the Battle of Agincourt.

 

Olivier and his production crew envisioned his version more as an extravagant pageant--an unreal, exciting yet comforting vision of a battle far removed from the realities of World War II, coming to us from a galaxy far, far, away. Not only that, there are two separate moments in time depicted here, one as a staged performance being done at the time of Shakespeare's Globe theater, the other, concerning the actual battle, in France of 1415, with a return to the Globe in 1600 at the end.  In addition, the film was shot in Technicolor, with its bright saturated colors, making the Battle sequence even more spectacular.

 

The Globe theater scenes are filmed with a zoom-in Smithsonian "Arial Britain" style over a pristine model of 1600 London and seamlessly into the little Globe "wooden O" theater where the play itself is presented, with views of both audience and backstage, with the initial scenes in Elizabethan dress.  The style of the actors'

Henry V at the Globe

presentation is exaggerated with broad gestures and declamatory manner, and audience response is very robust. The makeup is equally exaggerated.  There's even a rainstorm drenching the audience and players, but the show goes on. William Walton's score--contemporary British orchestrations of period music, provides accents.

 

As soon as Henry begins his departure in Southhampton we enter the even more imaginary world of the 15th century as is verbally invoked by the play's Chorus.  We know it is fantasy, because suddenly we've entered a 15th century as it is pictured in manuscripts of that period. Landscapes are painted with tilted perspectives, the distant fortresses also tilted--and broadly painted too.  This is staged as are the Globe sequences, but in a totally different way, particularly as envisioned with the eyes of the Limbourg Brothers' celebrated book of hours of

Très Riche Heures… January

1416--the Très Riche Heures of the Duke of Berry.  The costume references are so specific, that the Duke of Berry in the play is dressed in a costume that almost exactly matches his portrait in the January Calendar page.  The costumes of the other men invoke the same source, right down to the bowl-shaped haircuts of the younger men, the tall hats and turbans or chaperons on their heads, colored tights and long robes or shorter doublets. 

 

Ernest Thesinger as  Berry

The interior set of the King of France's palace evokes the images of architectural interiors in the illuminations too: thin columned and almost pavilion-like, some of these columns lacking shafts so as not to mask the characters' actions, and an interior entry point so tilted as to resemble a street access to a subway entrance marquee in New York City.

 

These sets, and the painted landscapes with their bird's eye views of distant high castles and vertically sloping pathways are invocations of the labors of the month calendar pages from the Berry manuscript, brilliantly achieved by matte paintings produced by Walter Percy and his associates. These create seamless setting for the real actors, skillfully placed so as not to seem out of scale. Foregrounds often have jagged rock faces.

Walter Percy Matte design

Added to this festive artificiality is the color scheme of the costumes in the fifteenth-century sections.  They are bright in hue and conceived in broad sweeps of ultramarine and vermillion--expensive pigments back then, as well as yellow, grass green, and of course a lot of metallic silver for armor. When the foot soldiers are massed, we are shown tiers of helmeted figures holding flags and spears.

 

Très Riche Heures: March

Henry Before the Battle

The battle scenes were filmed in Ireland in actual landscapes, fairly flat and very green. The charge of the French troops certainly owes much to Eisenstein's filming of the battle on the ice of Alexander Nevsky, but here they are also like the battles in French Manuscripts, including one in Enguerrand de Monstrelet's Chronique de France of the battle of Agincourt itself (though the actual illustration postdates the battle by eighty years).

 

Paradoxically, the lines in the 1415 sections are said much more naturalistically than those at the Globe. The rousing cheerleading of Henry's "Sts. Crispin and Crispinian speech, recited this way, serves to introduce the battle of Agincourt itself. The ground is muddy, as has been historically noted, but not enough to impede the French charge. There is blood and chaos in the battle, but certainly no hacked-off body parts.  One of the most exciting special effects here is the perfect grid pattern of the English archers' arrows against the sky hurtling towards the mounted French troops.  I've seen this film several times in theaters, and the audience gasps as this happens every time; it's as good as any modern special effect. Towards the end of the battle, when Henry unhorses the Constable of France in single combat, the battle becomes a tournament.

Enguerrard de Monstrelet: Agincourt

 

The set-pieces of the battle, the scenes at the French court and Henry's wooing of the Princess Katherine are all presented in the "International Gothic" conception of this fifteenth-century world.  The viewer gets so enchanted that incongruities are accepted. The battle took place in October, but the scene suddenly switches to the

Henry and Katherine 1415

dead of winter so that the snow-covered February page of Berry's hours can be used for the interlude scene of Fluellen and his leeks, then switching abruptly back to the autumn of 1415 so that Henry can court his Princess.Everything resolved, it's back to the Globe again where the actors portraying Henry and Katherine are seen once more in Elizabethan dress.

 

If we look at his film today, we actually have to deal with not two, but four time periods. Besides the two shown in the film, we need to be aware of the late World War II environment when it was released and towards which it was aimed. Early showings of the movie had an inserted dedication to "the commandoes and Airborne Troops of Great Britain the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture."  And now, some 76 years later, we have to consider the film's debut in the historical context of that 20th century war. Maybe in our own bleak times of fire, flood, plague and conflict, we could use another movie like this one.

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You can rent the 1944 Henry V from Amazon

Here are a few websites that discuss technical aspects of making this film:

https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/designs-laurence-olivier-henry-v-hamlet

http://www.thepropgallery.com/painting-in-pictures-the-lost-art-of-the-matte-shot

Many interesting posters and stills from the movie can be found at:

http://michaelpjensen.com/henry_v_1944_page_1 (there are additional pages)

Here are three diverse reviews/discussions on this film:

https://www.taoyue.com/film/henry-v.html

http://criterioncollection.blogspot.com/2005/10/41-henry-v.html

And an excerpt from Andre Bazin's What is Cinema:

https://books.google.com/books?id=y3EKWOUQtxcC&pg=PA76&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false