Hamlet

Johnston Forbes-Robertson was accounted the finest Hamlet of his generation by George Bernard Shaw, so that must be true. By his own admission, Shaw was never wrong. Hepworth's hour-long production of the Shakespeare play was undoubtedly seen as a very English sort of feature and a reply to Famous Players in Famous Plays that Adolph Zukor was producing in the States. As a result, Forbes-Robertson, who also had the distinction of appearing in the first Shakespearean film (1898's MACBETH, which was just part of the duel) seems to have brought his entire West End cast so that the 60-year-old actor could record his performance as a disaffected college student for eternity.

It's a big performance. It strikes me that not only were the cheapest seats at the back of the balcony aware of everything that Forbes-Robertson said and did, but so was anyone standing in the lobby and quite possibly anyone walking by the theater while a performance was on. His performance is a full stage performance for a generation earlier, with grand gestures and Forbes front stage and the camera (supervised by Geoffrey Faithfull, who would still be a director of Photography in the early 1970s) seemingly set right over the prompter's box, so that every gesture made during the long soliliquies (summed up in brief catchphrases: "To be or not to be: that is the question"; "Alas, Poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio"; et c.) will be caught.

This one makes it clear: the movies are not the stage, pageantry is a different matter and Shakespeare is about the words and thoughts as much as the performances. Without the words, this is an unfortunate mess, just a dumb record of what must have been an exciting stage performance. It's too bad we'll never get to hear it.

By no means should this be a Shakespeare-lover's favourite adaptation of Hamlet. Perhaps most notable is the lack of dialogue (or many intertitles) in what seemingly appears a relatively static film which may be off-putting for modern audiences (the artistic ambitions of the 1921 version might possibly account for that silent version's comparative popularity?). Furthermore, the acting is melodramatic even for the silent era, and the pacing would be wrong in any era.

Despite this, it must be remembered that this was one of the first feature length British films, and one of the first feature length film adaptations of Shakespeare. Viewed in context, this contains ambitious set pieces, cinematography, and special effects which can only be admired given the lack of experience of the British film industry at that time. It still does not stand up entirely well when compared with the more confident British film A Message from Mars (1913), or Italian epics L'Inferno (1911) and Cabiria (1914), all other underrated entries of the early 1910's. Nevertheless, it shows a similar level of determination to provide something which at the time would have been genuinely innovative and exciting, and, for the most part, that still shows.

As an adaptation of Shakespeare, it is lacking. As a piece of film history, however, it has been criminally overlooked.