Richard III (1955)

  Since everyone is stuck at home now, some of you may be looking to enrich yourselves by starting an online class or reading those classic books people are always talking about.  But why put in all that effort when there are movies that are just as cultured?

Edward IV (Cedric Hardwicke) has emerged victorious from the Wars of the Roses, seized the throne, married a lovely woman (Mary Kerridge), and had the requisite heir and spare.  Everything seems to be heading towards peace, but his youngest brother, Richard (Laurence Olivier) covets the throne.  Richard schemes and plots to have his middle brother, George (John Gielgud), discredited, thrown in jail, and eventually murdered, and has his flunky, Buckingham (Ralph Richardson), spread rumors that Edward was actually a bastard and that Richard is the only true heir, all the while wooing the rich widow (Claire Bloom) of a man he killed in battle.  Richard is not a good dude.  But it works and he becomes Richard III, only to see his paranoia unravel all the gains he made.

It's kind of nice when the villain is just completely unrepentant.  In the opening monologue, Richard directly faces the camera and tells the audience that he is just The Worst.  There's no shades of gray, no antihero, no wrong-thing-for-the-right-reasons.  He just wants to be king and he wants both his brothers and their heirs out of the way to get it.  It's refreshing in a way I didn't know I needed.

And despite that, Olivier is so charming that he almost gets away with it.  (Except for the parts with Anne.  That's just straight gross and creepy.)  Seriously, though, this version is like the gold standard of Shakespearean adaptations.  Everybody who's anybody in British theater is in this.

It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.