Still one of the most imaginative screen adaptations of Shakespeare, Olivier's Henry V is by turns self-reflexive (both as theater and cinema) and magnificently "alive" and believable. The film opens as a staged performance at the Globe Theatre of Shakespeare's time, then expands to yet another level of fantasy via a stylization whose flattened perspective and bright colors are copied from medieval illuminations. (The gatekeeper to the world of the imagination is Leslie Banks, as the Chorus.) From such dreamlike sets the actors seem to spring to life, heightening the realism (or, we should say, the effect of realism) of the location-shot sequences. Of these, the cavalry charge in the Field of Agincourt is the high-point, at once acknowledging its debt to Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky and, in the opinion of at least one critic (Andrew Sarris) surpassing that film in its emotional impact. In 1945, as Britain was preparing to invade German-occupied France, Olivier's performance as the young king who stormed France to defeat a larger army was doubly inspiring (and perhaps doubly inspired); and it lives on.