Review of Prince of Players

As a huge fan of Edwin Booth,and a Booth scholar, there were a lot of things this movie got right-I enjoyed the early mining camp scenes and the scenes with his father, and the relationship with Mary Devlin was sweet. The most glaring unfortunate decision was to make Booth a redhead- when he was referred to throughout his career as "raven-haired" and all photos show all the Booth children as dark haired. I do take issue with the Billingsly review which posits that Burton must have had a hard time portraying the exaggerated gestures and declamatory speech style of Booth. It is well known that Booth was extremely naturalistic for his time and the one audio recording we have of him is very modern sounding and not at all declamatory. I was slightly disappointed that Burton chose not to "do his homework" and recreate Booth's Hamlet performance, since we have detailed descriptions of both his physical performance of the role, and his vocal work in the role in two exhaustive scholarly works specifically on his Hamlet. It's a pretty movie, most of the direct quotes are "correct" if that matters at all-and though it's an enjoyable film, it certainly doesn't add anything to the Booth legend- though again I'm sure that wasn't the intention.