Furthermore, Mckellen's Portrayal Is Inherently More Charming Than

Furthermore, McKellen's portrayal is inherently more charming than Olivier's. He seduces the camera with sleepy eyes, every bit as lazy as the gammy arm that the director has given Richard as his necessary deformity (as opposed to the traditional hunchback as characterised by Olivier). The combined effect of a character so obviously based upon the German Fuhrer intertwined with a charming, roguish disposition has the same effect as Olivier's comical Richard devolving into a murderous monster, as Andrews (2002:154) suggests.
With such an agenda, then, we might expect an overtly suppressive Richard; however, we find much to our surprise a romantic and soft Richard. Rather than conquer us by force and intimidation, McKellen's Richard persuades us with charm.
This is a key point, the issue of charm and political seduction - and it is the central argument that Shakespeare and all that have come after him have attempted to explain: how a man may manipulate a nation. McKellen's slow seduction of the camera is a deliberate mirroring of Hitler's propaganda policy that charmed Germany into political submission the 1930's. Loncraine, via this association, also makes the point that the role of kingship and political power per se becomes distorted in times of extreme national crisis. Historians agree that Hitler could only have taken control of Germany in the wake of Versailles, the Wall Street Crash and unprecedented economic and cultural depression. Much the same could be said of England in the 1480's, a country on its knees after a generation of unrelenting warfare; the staple diet for men like Richard and the twentieth century German dictator.
McKellen maintains the virtuoso level of charm in spite of the truly ugly physical composition of the Richard III that he has created. When, for example, Richard leaves the mortuary where he has indulged in an explicit attempt at courting the grieving Anne the central feminine tragedy of the drama he leaps up stairs and through corridors like a giddy school boy, inciting the audience to forget that he is the very man to have taken Anne's husband away from her in the first place.
As Davies (1994:12) suggests, cinema is beyond doubt a more versatile medium, affording a wider range of creative resources, and Loncraine, by virtue of when he was filming, was able to utilise the full range of cinematic detail that was not available to Laurence Olivier. When, for instance, Richard delivers his inaugural speech with the slogan long live King Richard adorning ubiquitous red flags, the similarity between the militaristic fervour engendered within the scene and footage of the early Nuremberg Rallies is undeniable and deliberately transfers the audience to the early twentieth century as opposed to the late fifteenth, making relevant the obsolete question of kingship and monarchical legitimacy.