Hamlet

I remember this presentation of Hamlet very well. I was in college studying English in preparation of becoming an English teacher, and I thought it was quite good. Later on, my fellow teachers and I would sometimes bring up the subject and wonder if there was any way we could view it again. I have searched vainly for information about it. Apparently, there are many people who are looking for it, but most sources say it was never filmed. I did find one mention that UCLA has a copy in their library and that it is almost impossible to access. You say you watched it three times. So do you have an idea where and how one might be able to find this presentation?

In the Navy, I literally fought to see Olivier's Hamlet. My crew mates pointed to the bruises they had inflicted and wondered why I had suffered them. On the other hand, there is Chamberlain's Hamlet. His is not a Freudian Oedipal study. His is not an exercise in masculine/feminine sides of a character. Chamberlain's Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark. He is angry with his mother's infidelity to the fresh loss of his father. He is demanding revenge of himself for his father's murder. And most important. He is expecting to be crowned king. There is no loss of character study. There is no wanting for complex relationships. The is the dynamic portrait of the young noble. Nor is this Shakespere Shakespeared. Rather it takes the advise of the script and "speak(s) the speech, I pray thee as I have spoken it unto you, trippingly on the tongue." The cast, universally, plays believable characters. Even(of course, it's Geilgud),The murdered king is believable. The staging is magnificent. And to take nothing from the stage fighting skills of the actors, this required good choreography as well. If I missed the downside of this Hamlet, it is because the shortfalls are so overwhelmed by this production. One is drawn into the play and not inclined to pick nits. The crew of the USS BOWEN would have fought to have seen this.

This should really be listed as "Hamlet (Hallmark Hall of Fame)" rather than as an episode of a television series. (Which is actually true for most Hallmark presentations.) This is a performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and not an "episode" of anything.

When this was first shown, Chamberlain, having only recently abandoned the "Dr. Kildare" series, was at the peak of his popularity, especially with young women. I remember the "oohs" and "aahhs" of the young women in my high-school of the time, when they heard that Dr. Kldare would tackle the great Shakespeare. Of course, most guys knew he was gay (he recently admitted it in his autobiography - well, duh, Richard, who woulda guessed?), but in the early years of the '70s, this actually added to his credibility as a Shakespearean actor, at least among Americans. Then, of course, all of our teachers - some of whom were young women, some of whom were gay - ordered us to watch this film, the bard returned at last to the popular arts. (They really wanted us all to forget Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet which had included naughty bits.) Of course, within two years Roman Polanski would produce his blood-soaked MacBeth and Peter Brooks a version of King Lear shot as if in the middle of a hurricane - there really wasn't any saving the bard from the 20th Century. The Chamberlain Hamlet thus stands as the last attempt to preserve a middle-brow American classicist approach to this material.

That's a complicated way of saying that the Chamberlain version not only lacks depth, but seems to shy away from it. Chamberlain is actually perfect for the role, but he doesn't get the direction he needs to sound the depth of his character. I watched this about three times, and every time ending up asking myself - "is that all there is to it?" well, of course, there's much more; and occasionally we get from Chamberlain and his fellow cast communicate a sense of the much-more Hamlet involves (especially in the Ophelia sequences), But this is never allowed to develop.

Worth viewing, but perhaps only for the "episode" it might have been.

I'm giving this production a 5, because I really don't remember if it was awful or awesome.

i was in 8th grade. Mrs McCracken (actually a fairly young woman at the time; sounds like an old hag) had us reading Hamlet. Perhaps it was a coincidence it aired during the time we were reading the play; perhaps she knew in advance and chose to teach it.

She did not order us to see it, but encouraged us to try; I was happy I was able to see it. It made the printed page come alive, and stands as a moment of clarity for me. I've never lost my taste foe Shakespeare imparted by viewing this production.

That said, it was a two-hour production (including commercial breaks) of a three-to-four- hour play. It HAD to have jettisoned major chunks of story to accommodate that time slot.

And for me, a 14-year-old male, Richard Chamberlain was just the former Dr Kildaire. I didn't know gay from Gevalia.

I hope it will one day be available for viewing.