Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948)

In the sixty-four years since this film was made, it’s become a sort of hallowed classic.  Everybody I’ve spoken to about my May Project has said something about Olivier’s Hamlet.  For a long time, it has held the place of The Hamlet, the classic standard to which all others must aspire. 

I’m not quite sure it deserves its reputation.  In many ways, I think it fails in its interpretation of Hamlet.  However, I’ve seen this movie three times now, and I’ve honestly enjoyed it every time.  They did a lot wrong here, but also a lot right. 

Straight from the beginning, Olivier tells you how Hamlet should be interpreted: this is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.  There, that’s it.  While I find this to be both awfully reductive and not particularly accurate, I was willing to listen to his argument.  I don’t see much of the archetypal dithering when I read Hamlet, but perhaps Olivier would show me a clear interpretation where Hamlet is defined by his indecision. 

However, through his extensive and brutal editing of the text, Olivier seemed to present a Hamlet who spends very little time at all struggling to make up his mind.  In fact, almost every directorial decision seemed to guide the viewer away from such an interpretation.  While I don’t necessarily think that this interpretation is the best one, if you’re going to assert that it is, you need to follow through on that in the rest of the film with your editing decisions. 

In the Second Quarto and Folio texts of Hamlet, the “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy is delivered after Hamlet’s decision to use the play to test the King’s guilt.  It’s a strange point for him to stop and contemplate what makes resolve waver, and why we don’t all kill ourselves.  He’s just laid out a clear plan and begun to execute it, so why the depressive introspection at that moment? The placement of this soliloquy emphasizes that his mind is still far from made up, and he’s still unsure of his ability to carry out his plans.  However, in the First Quarto text, this soliloquy comes before the arrival of the players, where it seems much more reasonable: he’s not second guessing himself and dithering, he just doesn’t have a plan to prove the king’s guilt yet.  Unable to do this, he hesitates and falls to introspection and depression. Once the players arrive and he formulates a plan, he executes it without any hesitation.  It presents a much less confused and indecisive Hamlet than the Second Quarto/Folio text does. 

If Olivier wanted a Hamlet who “cannot make up his mind,” the Second Quarto/Folio placement seems like an obvious one to choose, because it places the emphasis on his indecision.  However, he placed the soliloquy before the arrival of the players, and before he has a clear plan of how to proceed.  Hamlet is confused and lost, and decides to kill himself.  He seems about to do it when suddenly the thought occurs to him, “to sleep perchance to dream” and he lowers his dagger.  This shows that Hamlet is depressed, that he’s lost, that he doesn’t know how to do what he needs to.  This doesn’t show that Hamlet unable to make up his mind. 

The “Rogue and Peasant Slave” soliloquy is another opportunity to show his inability to act and his own confusion as to why he finds himself hesitating.   Here’s another instance where Hamlet seems to be struggling to make up his own mind, even though the speech ends in triumphant resolve.  However, Olivier completely cuts the soliloquy, making my inner purist cry, and losing yet another opportunity to prove his point.  Instead, Hamlet shouts “The play’s the thing!” spins around, and runs off stage.  I have no idea what I would have made of this if I didn’t already know the play by heart, but I can guarantee that I would find this extremely confusing.  “The play’s what thing?” I can imagine myself asking.  In addition to losing a wonderful soliloquy and going against his own interpretation of the play, this cut also obscured a major plot point: why Hamlet has chosen to put on a play for the King. 

The last major opportunity to prove Hamlet’s inability to decide comes during the soliloquy where he decides not to kill Claudius while he is praying.  If you read this as simply an excuse to avoid doing something he doesn’t have the resolve for, he yet again comes off as indecisive.  However, if you read the soliloquy as a genuine resolve to punish Claudius as much as possible, his mind seems more made up than ever before.  Given the previous pattern, I’m sure you can guess which interpretation Olivier went for.  Sure enough, he had his sword drawn, about to strike, when suddenly the realization hit him that this would send Claudius to heaven.  Reluctantly, he withdraws, swearing to kill him later. 

All of these cuts and interpretive choices combined, plus the extreme shortening of the first three acts, serve to create a Hamlet who makes up his mind quickly and wastes little time in getting down to business.  He experiences a brief setback when he kills Polonius by accident, but quickly comes back and finishes the job.  Olivier is almost the opposite of the indecisive Hamlet. 

Why then, did he choose to state in the beginning of the film that this is primarily a tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind?  Perhaps he had decided to take such a popular interpretation and deliberately undermine it throughout the movie.  However, much of the other editing felt extraordinarily sloppy, making me more inclined to believe that it was just not very well thought out. 

Throughout the film, editing of the text felt sloppy and haphazard, leaving gaps in the plot and obscuring character development.  One of the most major offenses was the lack of the “Rogue and Peasant Slave” soliloquy, but there were a lot of other cuts that I found problematic as well. 

The single cut that caused the most logical problems was the reduction of the Play Within a Play to only the dumb show.  Hamlet speaks to the Player King about adding in sixteen lines and gives them extensive instruction on how to speak their lines, only for the them to put on a play with no lines at all.  When the king storms out, he leaves as the two actors are miming the marriage ceremony, and Hamlet exclaims that Claudius left “upon the talk of the poisoning”.  It was jarring, and very unnecessarily so. A little more attention to how the scene fits together would have eliminated the problem. 

The other major logical problem was that Claudius told Laertes that Hamlet killed Polonius, after the graveyard scene where Laertes obviously knows this already.  In one scene Laertes was jumping up and down to blame Claudius and in the next he’s blaming Hamlet.  At a critical moment, his character made little sense, and it undermined their attempt to portray a victimized, sympathetic Laertes.  The movie is clearly trying to portray him as being manipulated by Claudius, and almost as much his victim as Hamlet is, but this sloppy cutting and reorganizing made his motivations and assumptions unclear.   

The extensive cutting also shortchanged literally every character, even when the cuts weren’t directly unclear, confusing or sloppy.  Gertrude, Claudius, Horatio and Hamlet all suffered from the cuts, and poor Fortinbras, Reynaldo, Rosencrantz and Gildenstern suffered most of all because they were completely left out.  The Fortinbras subplot is often the first to go, but I was surprised and dismayed by the elimination of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern.   

I understand the need to cut Hamlet down to the length of a normal movie, but cuts this extensive left many of the characters pared down to almost nothing.  So many scenes of essential character development were left out: much of Claudius’s manipulation of Laertes, the reactions to Ophelia’s death, the conversation between Gertrude and Claudius after the closet scene, much of the banter with the gravedigger, and the Player King’s Hecuba speech.  With all these scenes gone, in addition to all the characters who were completely missing, I felt cheated, and the characters lost much of their depth. 

With all those cuts, the actor who played Hamlet needed to be able to show off sides of his character that had been short-changed by the cuts, otherwise the character would seem flat.  Unfortunately, Olivier’s Hamlet seemed to have only two sides: depressed and angry.  Most of his speeches, even those where I’m not sure Hamlet is particularly sad, were delivered like he was at a funeral: slow, melancholy, and verging on melodramatic.  At a couple moments he became angry, and he smiled only twice: at the arrival of the players and Claudius storming out of the play. 

Now, Olivier did this quite well.  If you wanted a Hamlet who’s depressed and not much else, he was wonderful, managing to make the constant depression poignant and not repetitive.  However, I missed Hamlet the Theater Fanatic, Witty Hamlet, Teasing, Mocking Hamlet, Cynical and Bitter Hamlet, and all those other sides of him that were covered up by the constant layer of depression.  He didn’t even crack a smile while mocking Polonius and Osric, he didn’t relish diving into a battle of wits with the Gravedigger, and he didn’t gleefully start demonstrating passages he’d memorized to the players.  While he was good at what he did, I felt like Olivier presented only one side of Hamlet, making him a shallower, more one-dimensional, and less loveable character.

Olivier also had a tendency towards melodrama.  While it rarely crossed the line into the realm of the ridiculous, it certainly strayed awfully close a number of times, and it was quite painful when it did cross that line.  Olivier seemed to like the device of falling over from extreme emotion, and employed it multiple times to universally negative effect.  He fell and caught himself on a chair during the first soliloquy; he fell when the ghost appeared; when it left and when it appeared again.  He looked silly every time, partly because he fell as if he was afraid he was going to hurt himself, so it looked stagey and unreal.  Little details like that abounded throughout, mostly from Olivier, though several of the other actors were guilty as well. 

So, with all that said, why do I like this film as much as I do? 

Part of it was the excellent setting and camera work.  Throughout the film, the camera roved aimlessly through the castle before finding a character to focus on.  Searching through endless hallways and staircases before choosing a victim, everybody seemed both lost and constantly under surveillance.  The castle itself almost seemed to be a character: winding, endless and frightening, a place that dwarfed everybody, even the King.  The only place in the castle that wasn’t hard and uncomfortable was the Royal Bed, but both times the camera found the bed, it was empty and unused, as if even that one place of comfort had been abandoned. 

From the very beginning, the tone of unease was established, with the guards waiting anxiously for the Ghost to appear, squinting out into the mist and distrusting each other.  When it finally did show up, it appeared behind them, shrouded in smoke and difficult to discern clearly.  The Ghost, fabulously understated, delivered its message, and then returned to Somewhere, leaving everybody more disturbed than ever.  The unsettling, disturbing tone is maintained throughout by the spectacular set and camera work.  Unlike the unrelentingly grim Hamlet, the unrelentingly grim setting did its job magnificently. 

While Olivier’s performance as Hamlet was well done, despite being reductive, two other performances stood out much more to me: Eileen Herlie as Gertrude and Jean Simmons as Ophelia. 

Simmons won an Academy Award for this performance, and she completely deserved it.  In the beginning she walked the line between following orders and her own desires, clearly hopelessly in love with Hamlet at the same time as she was unable to disobey her family.  Unlike some Ophelias whose madness seems to come out of nowhere, Simmons laid the seeds of it from the very beginning.  She was young, vulnerable, and terrified both of Hamlet and her father.  She practically trembled when speaking to them, and her pain at being torn between the two loyalties was beautifully and quietly done.  Felix Aylmer as Polonius made his relationship to her abundantly clear: as she lay sobbing on the staircase where Hamlet threw her, he stood by and coldly ignored her, giving her only a few words to tell her that he’d heard everything that was said, before leaving her there, unable to stand up.  Simmons’ mad scene was spectacular: poignant, understated and not remotely silly.  The trajectory of her mental state was completely clear, and it was impossible not to feel pity for such a trapped, victimized young girl.  She really never stood a chance. 

Herlie’s Gertrude was subtle and complex as well, despite the paring down of her lines, and though the film hinted at an Oedipal interpretation of her relationship with Hamlet, it was never overtly sexual. Herlie’s Gertrude was never really in love with Claudius, though he was certainly quite lustful for her.  The marriage seemed to be one of political expedience: she rarely even made eye contact with him, and flinched away from his touch.  During the closet scene with Hamlet, she broke down completely from the overwhelming horror of it all: she was married to a man she hated, and her distant, unloving son had just killed her friend, attacked her, and went insane. Like Ophelia, she seemed trapped and helpless as her world fell to pieces.  She knew precisely what she was doing when she drank the poisoned cup, and she waited calmly to die and thereby reveal the truth to her son.  Her performance was excellent throughout, and I admired it even more because of the extreme razing of her lines: she captured the full complexity of Gertrude despite being given very little to say. 

Despite this film’s many problems, I genuinely enjoyed it, even as I gritted my teeth at the brutal cutting and reductive interpretations.  It’s a good movie, but it’s certainly not the definitive Hamlet film.