Rodney Bennet's Hamlet (1980)

This is the Hamlet film from the BBC Complete Shakespeare series and while I haven’t seen a large number of the movies from the series, my impression from the ones I have seen is that they’re fairly patchy.  I haven’t really hated any, but I find a lot of them to be poorly cast, slowly paced and extremely conventional.  This film touches all three of these, but didn’t manage to be ruined by any of them, mainly due to Sir Derek Jacobi, who was a spectacular Hamlet. However, due to a lot of other factors, I thought this was an extremely mixed production, with some wonderful and some terrible elements. 

One of the biggest things recommending this Hamlet is that it is almost full-text.  The occasional line was removed, but I’d guess less than twenty were cut in total. This is one of the two full-text Hamlet films I’m watching this month, and I wish there were a lot more of them.  Sure, it’s long.  That’s okay, in my book, because each time I see it whole I remember again why cuts always make me sad.  Each character seems to blossom in a full-text Hamlet.  The layers of complexity, the little moments, the inner thoughts all come out in full, in a way they almost never do in a cut performance.  It’s such a gorgeously constructed play, such a tightly constructed play, that any cut ends up being a loss, and I think it takes a full-text movie to remind you of that. 

There seems to be a very wide range of production values in the BBC Shakespeare series, and this is one of the ones on the lower end of that spectrum.  It was shot entirely in studio, with grey backdrops and little in the way of props or background.  They set up chairs and occasionally carpets, and that was about it.  The outdoor scenes were shot in the bare studio, and the lighting was pretty terrible throughout.  The costumes were clearly much higher budget than anything else, but overall, this was a very low-budget production.  If you’re looking for good, or even decent visuals, this is not your Hamlet.   

A lot of the actors also didn’t give spectacular performances.  Patrick Stewart as Claudius, Claire Bloom as Gertrude, Lalla Ward as Ophelia and David Robb as Laertes were all flat, and each for different reasons. 

Patrick Stewart was a jovial, casual Claudius, who never seemed quite like the scheming politician he needed to be.  You can be smiling and “nice” as much as you like when playing Claudius, but you have to get a sense of the darkness and coldness beneath that.  Despite having the full text, which usually makes Claudius seem more intelligent and politically astute, I never really felt that he was much of a threat to Hamlet.  His confession of his guilt seemed to come from nowhere, acting-wise.  Claudius is such a torn, confused person, and however you want to interpret him, you have to show his inner workings in subtle ways before that scene, otherwise, it just seems random, as it did here.  However, despite the poor context of it, I liked his delivery of the soliloquy.  Unlike most other Claudiuses, the full range of emotion in this speech came through: a simultaneous repentance and stubbornness, self-knowledge and self-loathing, and eventual apathy.  If only he’d shown similar depth the rest of the time. 

Claire Bloom was simply too detached as Gertrude.  She never felt like an emotional center of the play, and I never felt like I understood her motivations or mental state.  However, like Stewart, she had one spectacular moment.  During the closet scene when Hamlet started yelling at her, instead of falling apart immediately as most Gertrudes do, she stood up and slapped him in the face.  For a moment, she was every bit a mother reprimanding a misbehaving little boy, and for the first and only time, their relationship came through clearly.  Gertrude can be regal, just like Claudius can be jovial, but there’s got to be more than just those elements. 

Lalla Ward’s Ophelia registered about a zero on the personality scale.  Her acting wasn’t particularly bad, just bland.  More problematically, her madness seemed to come out of nowhere.   I think the part of Ophelia takes a lot of acting in between the lines for her to really make sense on screen, and I didn’t get enough of that from Ward.  Because of this, her mad scenes lacked the raw power they can sometimes have, and they felt a little dull. 

David Robb as Laertes was the last major weak link of the cast, and definitely the worst of them.  He just overacted everything, the entire time.  Especially when he first returned to Denmark, he was painful and slightly embarrassing to watch. 

Despite all this, I liked this film a lot, and the reason boils down the Derek Jacobi.  That’s not to say he was perfect, however.  He definitely had a tendency to overdo it, especially after his encounter with the ghost, and at those times it was almost difficult to watch.  Most of the time he was more reined in, but he was always hovering on the edge of overacting.  However, despite his rather over the top style, he did many things extraordinarily well. 

The main quality he had was the psychological understanding of Hamlet.  Sometimes with a bad Hamlet, you can’t follow his emotional journey, and it’s hard to connect his actions, his emotions, and his words.  Sometimes, with a good Hamlet, you get the clear emotions behind every word he says.  And rarely, as with Derek Jacobi, not only is every emotion crystal clear, but every thought is as well.  The flow of one thought to another, and how that guides what he feels and what he says was completely clear.  Each time I’ve seen him, I see lines in new ways that I never have before, because the thoughts beneath them come through with such clarity.   When he speaks, he’s not making a speech, he’s just thinking.  I was willing to look beyond the overacting and fall in love with his Hamlet because of this psychological clarity. 

His Hamlet was clearly distinguished from the rest of the court, wearing only a rough white tunic in contrast to their richly adorned clothing.  His excitement and comfort with the players was abundant, and he seemed more comfortable with them than with anybody else. He was a Hamlet with no pretentions, and little interest in reining in his emotions in front of others.  Only several times did he attempt to rein himself in, mainly during the nunnery scene when he’s yelling at Ophelia.  He suddenly gasps, and says quietly, to himself “It hath made me mad,” then hurries away, horrified.  The rest of the time he was emotional, energetic, and intellectually engaged with everything.  He was not a supremely depressive Hamlet as Olivier was; his mood in the beginning especially was much more furious than sad.  He was completely consumed by his rage at his mother. 

Jacobi has stated that he views Hamlet not as a man of inaction, but a man of “great, diverse action.”  His Hamlet was certainly not the stereotypical weak ditherer.  He delayed revenge because after his initial surge of excitement, he couldn’t work up the right passion to do it.  He swore to revenge in an almost manic frenzy after his encounter with the ghost, but afterwards, his passion for doing it completely dissipated.  During the “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy, he tried to work up the passion by acting out how he’d murder the King: “Bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindles villain! Oh, vengeance!”  It didn’t work.  He still wasn’t feeling it because when he was in a calm state he couldn’t feel the same excitement about the prospect of murder.   

He also pulled off the mad scenes spectacularly.  Some Hamlets are just embarrassingly strange: they pull faces and act silly, and they come off as mad to the other characters at the expense of coming off as stupid to the audience.  Some Hamlets are witty and mocking in the mad scenes, leaving the audience confused as to why everybody else in the play has decided that Hamlet is crazy.  Some Hamlets come off as genuinely insane, and that’s a whole other can of worms.  Jacobi’s Hamlet hit a perfect note in between wit and madness: the audience was in no doubt of his sanity, his wit came through, and he still seemed insane to the other characters around him.  Since we were inside his head enough to see where each of his jokes and gibes came from, his mocking of Polonius was clear and amusing, but it was also understandable why Polonius came to the conclusion that Hamlet was insane. 

I also thought his treatment of Gertrude during the closet scene was an interesting take on the sexual elements of that scene.  He didn’t avoid dealing with the sexual nature of Hamlet’s attack on Gertrude, but he also didn’t go for the Oedipal interpretation, and instead gave something much more effective and interesting.  At one point during the scene when he was describing her behavior with Claudius, he pinned her on the bed and mimed thrusting on top of her.  It wasn’t sexual for either them or the audience; it was disgusting and horrifying.  But that was exactly how it was supposed to be.  He was using the disgust she felt at being humped by her son that to illustrate that, in his mind, what she did with Claudius was no different.  What’s more, the disgust felt by the audience helped you feel Hamlet’s outrage much more deeply than you otherwise would, since most modern audiences don’t feel that Gertrude’s relationship with Claudius is incestuous.   While it was difficult to watch, I thought it was extraordinarily effective for exactly that reason. 

Several of the more minor characters really shone as well. Rosencrantz and Gildenstern were played by Jonathan Hyde and Geoffrey Bateman as deliciously slimy courtiers, whose loyalties lay with whoever had the most political power at the time.  Hamlet, who didn’t know them very well in the first place, wasn’t fooled for a minute.  Ian Charleston also did a remarkable turn as Fortinbras.  He had enough of a screen presence that when he marched in for the final scene, you remembered who he was, and he didn’t seem completely random as he sometimes can.  He was politically clever, powerful, and had an impact much larger than was reflected in his percentage of lines. 

Despite the mixed quality overall, this is completely worth watching to see Derek Jacobi’s wonderful performance as the most psychologically real and complex Hamlet I’ve seen. 

Philip Saville's Hamlet (1964)

There are two big selling points for this Hamlet: Elsinore Castle and Christopher Plummer.  Filmed at the actual Elsinore and with a famous, highly regarded actor as Hamlet, this film had a lot of promise.  However, I found it depressingly disappointing on pretty much every level. 

I’ll start off with Elsinore itself.  Perhaps this was due to the contrast between expectation and reality, but I found Elsinore to be pretty dull.  Of the three Hamlets I’ve reviewed so far, this was by far the most uninspiring set.  The outside of the castle actually looked pretty nice, but unfortunately, this was only shown a handful of times.  Most of the movie was shot indoors where there were white walls and windows.  The windows had bars on them and sometimes that walls had tapestries.  Not particularly rousing. As a selling point, then, Elsinore fell pretty flat.  

That wouldn’t matter though if the movie were well acted and well directed.  Nobody watches Hamlet primarily to see a pretty castle, so this could have been a success even if the real Elsinore was rather disappointing.  Unfortunately, I found the acting to be uniformly overdone and unconvincing.  It was so overdone it was almost camp: certainly not a good direction for a Shakespearean tragedy to head.  

The problem was only accentuated by the fact that most of the shots were up-close shots of the actors’ faces.  There was really no room to overact without it being extremely noticeable, and they were overdoing it enough for it to be glaring from a long way away.  In such an intimate film, understatement is key, and they went as far as possible in the other direction. 

Plummer himself was the worst offender when it came to camp: everything felt overly dramatic, silly almost, and lacking in psychological reality.  I could never believe that he was a real person, much less Hamlet.  He was a character being pushed around by the writer, not a person whose own thoughts and personality guided his behavior.  I found it hard to see much in him beyond the hammy overacting, but what was there certainly could have been good, had he just toned it all down quite a bit. 

He was a hypersensitive Hamlet throughout, taking everything to heart and swinging wildly between moods at the drop of a hat.  His relationship with Horatio was loving and tender, and he made no effort to hide his emotions from Horatio in any way.  He also seemed to have been quite close to Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, greeting them initially with as much affection and joy as when he greeted Horatio.  Unlike many Hamlets, he was never overtly cruel to them, and his role in their deaths was never discussed.   Even after they admitted they were spying on him, he was unable to control himself from confessing his inner thoughts to them; he began the “What a piece of work is a man” speech sarcastically but quickly became genuine, as if he couldn’t help but to be honest with them. 

He was a fairly gentle Hamlet; he yelled at Ophelia but didn’t hurt her, and though he was rough with Gertrude, he wasn’t nearly as violent as many I’ve seen.  As he was leaving Gertrude after the closet scene, he turned and ran to hug her and reassure her that “I must be cruel only to be kind.”  His mocking of Rosencrantz, Gildenstern, Polonius, Claudius and Osric, which can sometimes come off as incredibly harsh was toned down, and only really stung at all with Claudius and Osric. Part of this was that his interactions with Polonius were mostly done with him grotesquely pulling faces and trying to act mad, so that his jabs at Polonius came off as simply crazy instead of insulting.  His “Play upon this pipe” speech was done with a tone of personal hurt rather than anger, and though Rosencrantz and Gildenstern were uncomfortable around him, he didn’t give them much of a reason to be. 

Really though, the main thing I noticed about him was the extent to which he overacted.  It was so bad that it overshadowed the characterization of his Hamlet and made it impossible to be drawn into the world of the film. 

Of the rest of the cast, Robert Shaw as Claudius and Michael Caine as Horatio gave the most convincing performances.   Shaw was masculine, vain and a little bit insecure as Claudius.  He delivered the line “My cousin Hamlet and my son,” as a question, as if he was still unsure of how to negotiate that relationship.  After the play within a play, he was upset almost to the point of being dysfunctional.  However, the rest of the time he maintained a virile, strong exterior.  Caine’s Horatio was a bit of a yes-man, especially because many of his longer speeches were omitted, but he managed to create a solid, believable relationship with Hamlet.  Their relationship to each other felt more genuine than anything else in this movie, and that was in a large part due to Caine’s way of quietly and constantly showing tenderness and affection. 

The last point I have about this movie was its general sloppiness.  There were a number of problems with jump cuts, such as when Hamlet managed to walk towards, open and partially climb out of a window during a half-second cut to Rosencrantz and Gildenstern.  Issues like that happened fairly often, and I found them to be very distracting.  The biggest and most confusing of these was when the entire Royal Court vanished during the final scene.  Because of the heavy use of close-ups, I can’t say exactly when they disappeared, but when Claudius was stabbed about one hundred people were there, and when Fortinbras entered the room, it was only the dead bodies and Horatio.  Somewhere in the middle of that, either one hundred people managed to silently exit the room, or were abducted by aliens. 

There were also several scenes staged in ways that rendered them fairly illogical.  They cut the actual text of the Play within a Play, and instead did only the dumb show.  I don’t have an incredibly strong objection to that, but, if you’re going to do that, you have to cut references to the text of the play as well.  In the middle of the dumb show when Gertrude says the lady protests too much, the lady isn’t saying anything at all.  How could she possibly be protesting too much? 

Similarly, they had Hamlet overhear the King admit that his praying isn’t working because he isn’t genuinely repentant.  That, of course, makes Hamlet’s decision not to kill him completely illogical.  His belief that killing the King while praying would send him to heaven doesn’t hold if he knows that Claudius isn’t really atoning for his sin.   This sort of sloppy illogicality in the filming and staging got in the way of enjoying the movie and it only accentuated the already overpowering lack of realism.  If you can’t really believe the lead actor, and he can also open windows instantaneously, it’s hard to get engrossed. 

That’s really all there is to say.  If you’re dying to see Elsinore Castle, there are some lovely photos you can find with a quick Google search.  

Grigori Kozinstev's Hamlet (1964)

From before I even sat down to watch it, this Hamlet had one major strike against it for me: it’s in Russian.  I happen not to speak a word of Russian, so I was expecting to have a lot of trouble getting through this.  I mean, the biggest reason to watch Shakespeare is the language, right?  I almost considered not watching it at all, but I heard somewhere that it was good and decided to give it a shot. 

Thank god I did, because I was simply blown away by this film.  There are a couple of issues I have with it, but as a whole, it’s one of my favorite adaptations I’ve seen. 

However, I’m going to start with the biggest issue: the subtitles.  They were bad.  Really bad.   I know Hamlet well enough that it wasn’t a major problem, but for someone who’d only read the play once, it would have been hard.  I can’t quite figure out how they were done or why they came out the way they did.  Some of the time they directly quoted from Shakespeare’s text.  Some of the time it was an approximate paraphrase.  Some of the time there weren’t subtitles at all.  And some of the time it was just incorrect, like when Hamlet carefully instructs his mother to “let the bloat king tempt you again, pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse.”  There was a fairly consistent issue with negative statements, and they often came out as assertions instead of negations.  There were also a number of lines that just weren’t subtitled.  This happened most commonly in conversations: ten lines of dialogue would be exchanged and only half of them would be subtitled.  I could often fill in what was left out, but sometimes I had no idea what they were supposed to be saying. 

Had everything else been less exquisite, this would have been a nail in the coffin.  However, I couldn’t bring myself to care too much about the subtitling because the rest of it was just so good. 

The visuals throughout this movie were consistently striking.  Unlike Olivier’s film that was shot almost entirely in the empty, winding halls of Elsinore, much of this film was outdoors or in wide, open hallways full of people.  However, Hamlet’s isolation and entrapment felt even more pronounced here than in Olivier’s film.  In the opening sequence, Hamlet rode into Elsinore as black flags were lowered from each window.  As he dismounted and walked in, the bridge was raised behind him, and an iron portcullis slammed shut.  It only opened once again in the film: when he was carried out by Fortinbras’s men on a makeshift stretcher of spears.  Ringed in on one side by the castle walls, Hamlet was fenced in on the other by the ocean.  The camera continually returned to gaze across the horizon every time Hamlet went to the shore, as if he was searching for some way out of the prison that was Denmark.   The sense of Hamlet’s complete isolation was cemented in the first scene: he sat at a small chair in the corner, apart from the rest of the king’s courtiers, and he delivered “Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt,” in voiceover as he walked through a crowded room of nobles and courtiers, all talking except for him.  He didn’t look at them, and they only acknowledged his presence by moving out of the way to let him through.  He was completely alone in a crowd of people.  

Ophelia too was completely trapped and isolated in Elsinore.  The only person who showed her any affection, Laertes, departed for France, leaving her alone with her father and Hamlet, who both terrified her.  She was visibly, physically afraid when she spoke to them, and they both treated her with callous disrespect.  In the nunnery scene, Hamlet wasn’t angry or out of control so much as contemptuous and callous.  Afterwards, she ran, sobbing, to Polonius, who pushed her away so he could continue plotting with Claudius.   The only other character she interacted with while sane was a household servant who played music for her so she could robotically practice dance moves alone.  Throughout the movie, Ophelia was viewed through metal bars: when she first encountered Hamlet in the nunnery scene, when Hamlet saw her through the bars of her window as he left Elsinore, and when the Queen came to see her in the first mad scene.  When her servants were dressing her in black after Polonius’s death, they surrounded her and locked her in an iron, cage-like corset, shutting her up behind bars yet again.  After her death, a single bird flew away from Elsinore and out over the sea: the only one who escaped Elsinore intact.  

In other ways as well, beautiful, striking images were used throughout.  When the Ghost appeared, horses bolted from the stable before the camera panned up to show a massive black silhouette with a dark cloak flapping behind it.  Most of the time it seemed barely human: just the outline of a giant looming over Hamlet.  It only once showed more of itself than an outline: when it instructed Hamlet to leave Gertrude to heaven, it raised its head up so its eyes were visible for just a moment.  The mad Ophelia was draped in a sheer black veil, and she walked with her hands up by her face like a blind woman trying to feel her way around.  The camera focused in on a willow leaning over a brook, then, almost painfully slowly, panned over to show Ophelia’s body floating under the water.   This elegant, striking imagery was extraordinarily effective, and one of my favorite parts of the film. 

Unlike the Olivier Hamlet that shied away from the political elements of the story, Kozinstev’s Hamlet embraced them.  In the very opening scene, a town crier read the first part of Claudius’s speech to a crowd of commoners.  The movie showed the servants who broke their backs closing Elsinore’s portcullis, and the starving beggars shooed away from Ophelia’s funeral procession.  Laertes stormed into the castle with a massive, well organized mob that took out Elsinore’s guards and broke into the King’s room.  The people were restless, poor, and socially distant from court life.  As for the Court itself, everybody was on edge and tense. The new King hadn’t quite gotten everybody on his side yet: “With equal scale!” a nobleman scoffed after hearing the announcement of the Royal marriage.  When the situation came to a crisis during The Murder of Gonzago, a tone of panic descended and never quite lifted. 

Of course, I still haven’t addressed the center of the film: Hamlet himself.  Unlike Olivier’s single-note, depressed Hamlet, Innokenti Smoktunovsky created a multilayered, complex Hamlet who was simply a joy to watch. 

Smoktunovsky’s Hamlet was certainly depressed, but he primarily manifested it by showing a cold disdain for everyone.  He didn’t quite seem to have the energy to care enough to hate anyone, so instead he held himself aloof and reacted coldly when spoken to.  He didn’t really mock Polonius, Osric, Rosencrantz or Gildenstern; he was too detached and in his own head for that.  Instead, he seemed like he was trying as hard as possible to make them go away: they bored and tired him.  He kept himself tightly under control most of the time: when told of his father’s ghost, he visibly tensed and engaged in the conversation, but he didn’t display any emotion beyond that.  During the nunnery scene he was cold and harsh, but never raised his voice.  He kept the same sort of control for most of his confrontation with Gertrude as well, only yelling once, just before the Ghost arrived. 

He seemed to vibrate constantly with nervous energy, even while he kept all of his actions tamped down and under control.  He had a powerful intensity about him, and because he was so thoroughly inside of his own head the entire time, he was unpredictable to everybody around him.  Every character except for Horatio seemed frightened of his intensity, unpredictability and intelligence.  If he walked into a room, it would clear almost instantly; Ophelia shrank away from him when he touched her hand; the King treated him with obsequious politeness; and all he had to do was walk towards Gertrude, speaking softly, for her to beg him not to murder her.

There were really only two issues I took with the film itself (leaving aside the subtitle problem).  The first was Stepan Oleksanko, playing Laertes.  He continually overacted throughout the entire movie, but it was at its worst during Ophelia’s funeral, where the writhed and yelled embarrassingly.  Except for him, the acting was artfully understated, so his ridiculous overacting stood out even more in contrast. 

The second issue I had was the cutting of the text, which seems to be shaping up to be a running theme for the rest of this month.  Unlike the Olivier text that cut deeply, excising entire characters and scenes, Kozinstev cut shallowly, leaving in almost every scene but cutting pieces here and there from each one.  I generally prefer this method of editing: it doesn’t leave me feeling cheated of an essential piece of Hamlet, but it still gets the movie down to a reasonable length.  He also managed to both cut less and have a shorter film that Olivier by taking it at a faster pace than Olivier did; again, I thought this was a step in the right direction over Oliver’s occasionally glacial Hamlet. 

However, the few scenes that were entirely omitted seemed strange to me.  Naturally, I will miss anything that is cut, but the decision to cut the second half of both the “Rogue and Peasant Slave” soliloquy and the “How all Occasions do Inform Against me” soliloquy seemed odd.  I find both of those, but particularly the first one to be very important to character development, and I was disappointed that only bits of them were left in.  They also left out Hamlet’s encounter with the praying King: a decision I usually feel is slightly cowardly, as if they don’t think they’re capable of making a sympathetic character who wants his Uncle to suffer in Hell.  I think Hamlet’s less pleasant side is an important part of him that shouldn’t be removed or understated. I also missed the conversation between Gertrude and Claudius after the closet scene; it’s the only time that they’re seen alone together, and it also establishes where Gertrude’s loyalties lie after her encounter with Hamlet.  Without that scene it’s almost impossible to know where she stands and whether she still trusts Claudius or not, so I can’t understand why that would be cut.   It’s acceptable to leave her somewhat ambiguous, or unsure herself of where she stands, but showing nothing at all of her response seemed problematic.  I understand the need to cut the text, but these edits seemed to keep some less important scenes at the expense of these much larger ones that I think really needed to be left in. 

These issues were minor though in contrast to the rest of the film.  It was visually striking, well acted, engaging and thoughtful.  Definitely worth watching, even if you don’t speak Russian.  

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.  

May Project: Hamlet in Film

Each May at my school, seniors have the option of taking the month off to work on an independent project of their choice.  It's a wonderful opportunity to focus on something you want to do, and it's something I've been looking forward to for years.  For my May Project I've decided to watch through every major film adaptation of Hamlet that has been made: all sixteen of them.  After seeing each one, I'll be posting a review on this blog, so by the end of the month I'll have a detailed review of every Hamlet movie.  I hope you enjoy reading, and I'm looking forward to the next month!