Long-lost Henry V film shots go on display

Long-lost publicity photos from Sir Laurence Olivier's film adaptation of Henry V are to go on display at Newport's Riverfront Theatre.

The scrapbooks, containing dozens of rare images taken during the 1944 production, were discovered by Charles Ferris while clearing the house of a friend.

That was about 20 years ago - and little is known about the owner - even Mr Ferris says he only knew him as Uncle Hubert.

The pictures are to go on display to coincide with the screening of the film on 11 June, as part of Wales' 600th anniversary commemorations of the Battle of Agincourt.

Mr Ferris said: "They came in a box with a load of exquisitely-painted model soldiers from the period.

"I must admit I'd paid more attention to the soldiers than the photos, until this year when my friend Phil Cox said that the Friends of Newport Ship would be showing Olivier's Henry V to mark the anniversary of Agincourt.

"When we started going through them we realised we had quite a special collection. They're a mix of action shots and staged publicity photos. There doesn't seem to be anything quite like this out there anywhere."

The film was partly made as a piece of morale-boosting propaganda to coincide with the Allied landings on the Normandy beaches, and was part-funded by the government War Office.

As such it deviates somewhat from Shakespeare's original play, placing greater emphasis on Henry V's "once more into the breach" speech, and playing down his slaughter of captured Frenchmen after the battle.

Much was made of the fact that the patriotic Welsh soldier Fluellen was played by an ex-serviceman, Esmond Knight, who'd been blinded in an attack on HMS Prince of Wales by the German battleship Bismarck.

While the film itself was shot in three-strip Technicolor, the publicity photos are all black-and-white, although some have been hand-tinted to give them a sepia appearance.

Perhaps the film's most iconic scene is the opening aerial panorama of London as Shakespeare would have known it around 1600.

Mr Ferris says it is an image which inspired the Friends of Newport Ship.

"When we saw the photos of how they'd created this incredible model of a London streetscape, it made us wonder if we could do the same thing for Newport," he said.

"We were lucky enough to secure a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and now we've been able to produce our own Olivier-inspired model of how Newport would have looked at the time the ship first set sail around 1450, still within living memory of Agincourt really.

"We're delighted that this too will be ready to go on display at the Riverfront Theatre for the screening of Henry V in June."

Taking over £2m at the box office, Olivier's Henry V was the first screen adaptation of Shakespeare to be commercially successful.

It spawned a whole genre of the bard's work on the silver screen, including the 1989 Henry V re-make, starring and directed by Kenneth Branagh.