Coriolanus on Film

Paul Nickell’s 1951 Westinghouse Studio One production of Coriolanus is fast-paced, well-acted, and, making allowances for technological weaknesses, interesting and fun to watch. It is also very unlike the play that Shakespeare wrote. The play begins with plebs rioting (or milling around) in the streets of Rome, complaining about the price of grain, patrician greed, and their condition of life in Rome. Martius comes on the scene with the words “What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues,” and after that he gets rude. There can be no doubt why the plebs detest the military hero of Rome as they do.

Nickell begins with the events of Act 1, scene 4, where Coriolanus fights single-handedly to take the Volscian city of Corioles. He excoriates the soldiers fighting under him, but in the context of battle the rhetoric is appropriate. When he is honored by Cominius, he humbly refuses a 10% share of the spoil, and is embarrassed by all the fuss about his heroics. When Coriolanus seeks the plebs’ voice to make him consul, his doubts about the whole procedure are not spoken out loud to the plebs (as they are in the play) but in a voice-over.

All of Nickell’s script is in the play, but by beginning the film as he does, Nickell made it difficult to discern any reason for the tribunes’ hostility to Coriolanus, and their accusation that he is proud seems absurd. Coriolanus is simply the misunderstood and unappreciated war hero, manipulated by ungrateful, shameless, and power-hungry demagogues. This is a possible interpretation of the life of Coriolanus, but it works as an interpretation of Shakespeare’s play only if the play is abridged and rearranged.

No doubt, the fact that the film was produced in 1951 goes some way to explaining the way it is constructed. Still in the glow of the military victory in WWII, Americans would probably not be very sympathetic to a leftish interpretation of the play that acutely probed the uses of military valor.