Michael Mann’s 1992 “The Last of the Mohicans” transformed James Fenimore Cooper’s stirring but occasionally absurd tale of the French and Indian War into an adult action adventure and military history movie, as bloody and efficient as it was romantic and elegiac.
Having thus proved he’s not just a maestro of urban crime dramas, Mann is now turning to a major battle of the misnamed Hundred Years War, which Britain and France fought from 1337 to 1453 to determine which nation should rule the French. He is to film Bernard Cornwell’s bestselling novel “Azincourt” (published as “Agincourt” in the U.S.), which reimagines the events of October 25, 1415, when Henry V’s vastly outnumbered knights and longbowmen decimated the French ranks, causing between 4,000 and 10,o00 casualties.
Henry’s victory solidified his power in Britain. It also led to the 1420 Treaty of Troyes, which made him the French regent and royal heir and united him in marriage to Catherine of Valois, daughter of the insane French king Charles VI. Both kings died in 1422 and since Henry predeceased Charles, the French king was succeeded by the Dauphin, who became Charles VII. In 1429, Joan of Arc turned the tide of war back in favor of France. The British didn’t formally renounce their claim to the French crown until 1475.
Shakespeare’s recreation of Agincourt in “Henry V” (c. 1599) was, of course, filmed in very different styles by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh. Olivier’s pristine, stylized 1944 film — with its famous charge of the caparisoned French cavalry and the swarm of English arrows descending on it — was propaganda for the British war effort. Branagh’s muddy, bloody 1989 version obliquely commented on the carnage of the one-sided recent Falklands War.
The first of Branagh’s 13 completed films, it remains his best. His incorporation of Falstaff (Robbie Coltrane), as posthumously recalled by his cronies and Mistress Quickly at the Boar’s Head Tavern, enhanced the play’s feeling for the common man, which Olivier had treated quaintly.
Whereas Shakespeare’s protagonist is the 29-year-old Welsh-born King “Harry” (played by both Olivier and Branagh), Mann’s film will be seen from the perspective of a commoner — the forester and mercenary archer Nicholas Hook, whose bowmanship catches the king’s eye. He has a love interest in the shape of the French nun Melsande, whom he rescues from rape. Cornwell’s depiction of Henry visiting his troops on the night before Agincourt overlaps with the scene in Shakespeare’s play, which Olivier rendered almost existentially.
According to Deadline, British screenwriter Stuart Hazeldine (co-writer of Warner Bros. upcoming Moses film “Gods and Kings”) has been assigned to do a rewrite of the “Agincourt” script, previously worked on by Michael Hirst and Benjamin Ross. The website reports that Mann is currently in pre-production on a cyber crime drama to star Chris Hemsworth and Viola Davis, so the English archers’ deadly arrows won’t be rising and falling anytime soon.
Below: Henry V (Kenneth Branagh) rouses his army with Shakespeare's St. Crispin's Day speech, once known by every English schoolboy.