BFI

This adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew was one of a series of two-reel truncations of classic texts produced by the British and Colonial Kinematograph Company and released under the banner Gems of Literature (another one that survives is A Christmas Carol, also from 1923). The BFI National Archive only has a copy of the second reel, but it includes most of the play's dramatic meat and gives a good impression of what the whole must have been like.

Unsurprisingly, it's a considerable simplification of the play, with the intertitles alternating between presenting brief excerpts from Shakespeare's original text and explanatory scene-setting. The staging is theatrical and the camerawork basic. Most shots simply frame the entire set, with only a handful of medium close-ups to add visual interest - the only significant stylistic advance on the films that F.R. Benson made a decade earlier (Richard III and others, 1911).

But in terms of script and performance, it's a competent enough trot through one of Shakespeare's better-known creations. Given the extreme truncation, neither Lauderdale Maitland as a rather portly Petruchio nor Dacia Dean as Katharina manage to invest their roles with much subtlety, though she does at least make a plausible fist of the transition from raging harpy to docile admirer. The extremely abrupt ending may be the result of print damage.

Michael Brooke

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