RIII (1955)

Laurence Olivier's Richard III is insanely, absurdly bad. The acting is awful, the scenery is terrible, the women all literally wear the same dress. Seriously. It's nuts. The wigs are absurd: you can see his awful wig in the poster. And Olivier rolls his rs incessantly throughout. 

John Gielgud has a really great couple of scenes before he is killed, and Mary Kerridge also comes off pretty well, but nearly everyone else was surely embarrassed by this. Oof. This RIII is apparently rather a classic, too, somehow! I really don't know how. It's a bad film. I think what makes it so bad is that Shakespeare's script just wasn't written for 20th century audiences, and so there are new characters every twenty minutes with whom we are supposed to bond immediately, and characters are killed off without the film seeming even to care. A 20th century writer would give us time with these characters. Films like Cromwell and Anne of the Thousand Days and A Man for All Seasons and Mary, Queen of Scots. But this one... Ugh. oh my god and the ghost sequence at the end. This thing is absurd.