Imagine inkin' tasty tidbits like Hamlet while people were droppin' dead from the plague, and you had to wear those itchy fuckin' tights!? Heck, even movie producers--those numbskulls--can't resist adapting the wiggy Brit's plays. Friends, Romans, and countrymen, lend these your ears 'n eyes:

•Forbidden Planet (1956) One groovy s.f. classic! Walt Pidgeon plays a far-future Prospero (of The Tempest) marooned on a far-off planet-island with his Miranda-like daughter (Anne Francis, aka Honey West). There's also a nifty Robby the Robot. 'Tis got Leslie Nielsen, too, before he became embarrassing in those Airplane/Police Academy farces.

•The Tempest (1979) A more direct adaptation of the play. This is the late Derek Jarman's masterpiece: gorgeous, thoroughly Brit, hipper than Shakespeare, and oh-so-gay. (Would make an over-the-top double-header with Ken Russell's Oscar Wilde-meets-De Sade bon bon, Salome's Last Dance, if you've a mind to.)

•Ran (1985) Kurosawa totally nails King Lear in this hallucinatory two-and-half-hour joy ride. The twenty-minute silent battle scene is totally fab cine-poetry. And Mieko Harada takes no prisoners as the Lady of the Kingdom who pushes the King's two evil sons into a bloodbath. What a monster of a flick!

•The Big Knife (1955) Great star-crossed playwright Clifford Odets penned this savage send-up of Hollywood greed, and hack director Bob Aldrich rises above himself trying to keep up. Jack Palance is a kind of hatchet-faced Hamlet. Ida Lupino is a long-suffering Lady Macbeth. And Rod "Virginia Smoked Ham" Steiger is bleach-blond, sexually confused, and screamin' his fool head off. This is bargain-basement Bard to boggle the bean!