Pacino acknowledges that much of the credit for his performance belongs to Radford, who reimagined Shylock and transformed Shakespeare’s unwieldy, anti-Semitic farce into an important movie for modern audiences. Out of this unconventional approach to Shakespeare’s genius has come a remarkable movie with a stunning performance by Al Pacino.

When Radford confessed that he had no professional experience with Shakespeare, Navidi thought, “All the better.” With similar irreverence, Cary Brokaw got Al Pacino to play Shylock Pacino would put people in the seats, but not because of his vast experience as a Shakespearean actor. Intrigued by the challenge of producing the first big-screen version, Navidi, who is British, teamed up with the American producer Cary Brokaw and convinced the British director Michael Radford ( Il Postino) to adapt the play into a screenplay and direct the movie. Like other “revisionists,” Navidi understood the play as Shakespeare’s “realistic” portrayal of the anti-Semitism of his age, not as an indictment of the Jewish people. Bloom, who has wrestled for decades with The Merchant of Venice and with the efforts of Shakespeare revisionists to reinterpret Shakespeare’s genius for modern consumption, remains convinced that the play is irredeemably anti-Semitic: “It would have been better for the last four centuries of the Jewish people,” Bloom writes, “had Shakespeare never written the play.” In fact The Merchant of Venice was so admired and so often performed in German theaters in the 1920s and during the Third Reich that some Jews still living in the shadow of the Holocaust draw a line from Shylock to Auschwitz.īarry Navidi, the producer of last year’s big-screen version of The Merchant of Venice, had a quite different reaction to the play. If you agree with Harold Bloom, these failures were a good thing. There had never before been a big-screen version of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice-Orson Welles had given up in the middle of rehearsals, and Laurence Olivier did a stage production but could not raise enough money to make a complete film.

Harold bloom merchant of venice