9 / 10
Official trailer
Henry V is Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 British historical drama adapting William Shakespeare’s play of the same name. The film depicts King Henry V of England leading his army into France to press his claim to the French throne. The campaign includes the diplomatic preparations, the siege of Harfleur, the Battle of Agincourt, and the eventual peace negotiations that produced Henry’s marriage to French princess Katherine. Kenneth Branagh plays King Henry V. Derek Jacobi plays the Chorus. Paul Scofield plays King Charles VI of France. Christopher Ravenscroft plays Mountjoy.
Ian Holm plays Captain Fluellen. Emma Thompson plays Princess Katherine. Brian Blessed plays the Duke of Exeter.
Judi Dench plays Mistress Quickly. Robbie Coltrane plays Sir John Falstaff in flashback. Robert Stephens plays Pistol. Daniel Webb plays Gower. Branagh adapted the screenplay from Shakespeare’s text. Renaissance Films and the BBC produced the film on a budget of approximately 9 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 10 million dollars in the United States. The film received three Academy Award nominations, including Best Director for Branagh, and won for Best Costume Design.
Few speeches on film stir me like Branagh’s Crispin’s Day, and what strikes me is that the film then makes you look at the mud and the dead boy the speech pays for. Branagh was twenty-eight and had no business being this sure of himself as a director. It’s a 9, held back only by a Chorus I could live with less of.
Kenneth Branagh made his directorial debut with Henry V, the picture that launched his later career as one of the principal Shakespearean filmmakers of his generation.
Branagh adapted the Shakespeare play with heavy fidelity while making cinematic choices that distinguished his version from Laurence Olivier’s 1944 production. The Olivier Henry V had worked as wartime propaganda celebrating English military tradition during the Second World War. The Branagh version works with major moral complication that the wartime context didn’t permit.
The battle of Agincourt emphasizes violence and exhaustion over glory. The strong cast, the fidelity to Shakespeare and the modern moral complication add up to the most convincing Shakespeare film of the late twentieth century as far as I’m concerned.
Branagh as Henry
Branagh plays Henry with the controlled authority the role requires, a young king who can make a speech and who feels the weight of the casualties his decisions will cost. He gives the Saint Crispin’s Day speech with measured authority over theatrical bombast, and I think that restraint is why it raises the hair on my arms. His Henry comes across as a ruler, and you never catch the actor performing rulership.
The performance launched Branagh’s career as a Shakespearean filmmaker, and the adaptations that followed, including Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Hamlet (1996), extended what Henry V established. I’d put this one first among them, because it has a hunger the later films don’t match for me.
For Writers
Career-launching productions establish patterns that later work extends. Useful for creative work. The first major work that shows a contributor’s approach often shapes what they’ll continue to produce across later decades.
The Agincourt Sequence
The battle of Agincourt occurs in muddy field conditions that capture historical realities the Olivier version had minimized. The English archers shoot from prepared positions. The French knights charge through mud that bogs their horses. The combat involves close-quarters violence instead of the theatrical pageantry that conventional Shakespeare productions had emphasized. The material reflects historical research into actual fifteenth-century combat conditions.
The exhaustion captures something about combat that stage productions usually avoid. Henry walks among the dead afterward, identifying English casualties, and the Non Nobis hymn plays as he carries a dead boy across the battlefield in a single long tracking shot.
That shot is the reason this film is a 9 for me. It turns the famous victory into a funeral, and it puts a lump in my throat.
For Writers
Adaptation can preserve textual fidelity while making cinematic choices that contemporary conditions require. Adapters should study this one. The source text doesn’t require literal cinematic reproduction. The adaptation that interprets the source for current conditions can preserve underlying content while updating surface treatment.
The Chorus Function
Derek Jacobi plays the Chorus as direct address to the audience throughout the film. The Chorus appears multiple times to provide narrative bridges, contextual information, and direct authorial comment on the events. This reflects Shakespeare’s original construction that depended on the Chorus to compensate for theatrical limitations. Branagh preserves the Chorus instead of eliminating it in favor of conventional cinematic exposition.
Most Shakespeare films cut theatrical devices like this one, and Branagh keeps the Chorus to stay faithful to the play’s design. It gives the film a theatrical framing a purely cinematic version would have lost.
People still argue over whether it serves the material, and I come down in the middle. Jacobi is a pleasure to listen to, but each time he steps in I feel the momentum stall, and I’d have trimmed his appearances.
For Writers
Source-faithful adaptation can preserve structural elements that conventional adaptation eliminates. Useful for adaptation. The decision about which source elements to preserve and which to eliminate shapes the adaptation considerably.
Craft Note
Kenneth Branagh directed Henry V as his directorial debut at age twenty-eight. His later career has produced a wide range of both Shakespeare adaptations and conventional commercial productions including Thor (2011) and Murder on the Orient Express (2017). The combination of Shakespearean specialty and commercial directing has sustained his career across multiple decades. The pattern of director-performers operating across multiple tones has continued through his later work.
Is Henry V as good as people say?
My score for Henry V is a 9 because Branagh did something most debut directors wouldn’t dare, walking onto Olivier’s territory and coming away with a darker, muddier film that takes the cost of war seriously. The Crispin’s Day speech stirs me, the Agincourt aftermath hurts, and the Chorus is the only thing I’d pare back. Watch it if you care about Shakespeare on film at all.
- Henry V (1989), IMDb
