HAMLET
A film review by Ivana and Cooper Redwine
Copyright 1997 Ivana and Cooper Redwine
Starring: Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Basil Sydney, Eileen Herlie, Felix Aylmer, Terence Morgan, Peter Cushing, Stanley Holloway. Director: Laurence Olivier. Screenplay: Alan Dent, Laurence Olivier. Production Design: Roger Furse. Costume Design: Roger Furse. Music: William Walton. Cinematography: Desmond Dickinson. Producers: Laurence Olivier, Reginald Beck, Anthony Bushell. MPAA Rating: Not rated. Running Time: 155 minutes.
Laurence Olivier's HAMLET is a classic film that is generally considered to be one of the greatest movies of all time. It has been accorded numerous honors, including four 1948 Academy Awards: Best Picture, Actor, Art Direction-Set Direction, and Costume Design. There was a time when almost every well-educated person in the English-speaking world had seen the film, and it provides a standard of excellence against which all other film versions of HAMLET are measured.
Olivier had complete artistic control over every aspect of his version of HAMLET, including casting, screenplay, sets, costumes, editing, and music, and of course he directed and played the title role. But Shakespeare purists have always been unhappy that Olivier took extreme liberties with the Bard's play. Olivier wanted to make a film that was not just for culture vultures, but rather he aimed it at the ordinary moviegoer. To this end, he shortened the drama from 4 hours to 2 hours 35 minutes by drastically abridging Shakespeare's text, even though this involved the cutting of significant characters (for example, Fortinbras, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern) and the elimination of important story elements (for example, Denmark's conflict with Norway and the rebellion led by Laertes). Moreover, Olivier moved some of the Bard's key scenes (notably the "To be or not to be" soliloquy) to a different place in the story in an effort to simplify Shakespeare's complex tale. And even for those viewers who are not Shakespeare purists, it is jarring when Olivier, the omniscient director, in voice-over intones words not found in Shakespeare: "This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind." Nevertheless, Olivier was largely successful in making a movie that is engaging for both the Shakespeare buff and the ordinary moviegoer.
Whatever can be said of Olivier's treatment of the story, it is difficult to find serious fault with the uniformly high standard of acting in his film. The entire cast makes the Shakespearean dialog seem easy and natural. Basil Sydney is fine as Claudius, Peter Cushing is amusing as Osric, and Stanley Holloway is witty as the Gravedigger (Olivier cuts Shakespeare's Second Gravedigger). Ophelia is played adequately by the eighteen-year-old Jean Simmons, and the obvious youthfulness of the actress helps to make the character more credible. And of course Olivier will always be remembered for his subtle, sensitive, and poetic performance in the title role as he portrays Hamlet's transition from a melancholy, ineffectual dreamer to a man of action. But while everything in the movie appears seamless on the screen, it is interesting to realize that when Olivier/Hamlet leaped from a fifteen-foot height onto Claudius's stand-in, he broke two of the stand-in's teeth and knocked the man unconscious!
A distinctive feature of Olivier's interpretation of HAMLET is his heavy reliance on Freudian psychology. It is provocative to contemplate that while Olivier was around 40 years old when he portrayed Hamlet in his film, the actress he cast as Hamlet's mother (Eileen Herlie) was only 27. Olivier's Oedipal slant is strongly evident in the scene where Hamlet sits with his mother on her bed and they exchange a prolonged kiss on the mouth. The actions of the actors are reinforced by the folds of the drapery surrounding the bed, which seductively transform it into a powerful image with aspects of both womb and orifice. And the significance of the queen's bed is emphasized by having the camera linger on it at other times in the film, first near the beginning as the camera glides down the central spiral staircase, and again near the end as the camera slowly moves up the same staircase.
Perhaps the single most memorable thing about Olivier's HAMLET is its sense of brooding intensity, enhanced by the setting in a gloomy, bleak Elsinore Castle. The self-absorbed Danish royal court seems to live in a claustrophobic maze with a tangle of corridors and a vertigo-inducing spiral staircase where it is hard to know which way to turn. With tongues planted firmly in cheeks, some wags have proposed the exercise of trying to sketch a floor plan of Olivier's castle, but we recommend strongly against this.
While Olivier's HAMLET does not preserve the complexity of Shakespeare's story, it does maintain the poetic beauty of the Bard's language, and Olivier wraps everything in a moody black and white chiaroscuro that gives his film a visual lyricism which is well-matched to that language. So, if you want to see a unified, poetic vision of HAMLET that focuses on the personal tragedy of the Melancholy Dane, Olivier's version can't be beat. But if you're more interested in a version of HAMLET that adheres closely to Shakespeare's original play with all its social and political complexities, you'll probably be happier with Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film, although the latter version has a few rough edges and loses some of the raw psychological power of Olivier's version.
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