Hamlet

The amount of lines taken from this play and used in our everyday conversation is staggering. Like all of the Bard's works, his endurance is not only the mastery of language, but really in storylines that just never get old. Above, everything else, Hamlet is an interesting tale. Olivier's interpretation however, is very dark. Very deliberate. He shies away from the humor completely, and instead takes a slow, purposeful tack. To that, it might not appeal to some. In such a long play and movie, the humor is sorta needed to jostle you a bit, and break the overall bleakness of the tragedy. You don't catch a break here I'm afraid. Id classify this therefore as for more advanced taste, and not for the average moviegoer. Olivier's other two attempts, Henry V and Richard III, specifically the latter, will garner more mainstream appeal.

It stands to reason that Larry Olivier's version of Hamlet is one of the best, and even if he was a little old for the role (in his forties by this time) it really is the perfect role for him.

One or two things to note - the camera angles and shots are often stunning, from above, using angles and shadows, extreme close-ups, and so on. This gives the sometimes ponderous adaptation atmosphere and the black and white photography is gorgeous. Amongst the supporting cast Jean Simmons is a childish, doting Ophelia but this works well. Not working so well are the soliloquies largely within Hamlet's head (and therefore, voiceover). This seems a little gimmicky and only really makes sense with 'To be or not to be'.

That aside, this really is Larry's show and he is brilliant. Despite a few cuts it does the original play proud and is, like Welles' Macbeth and Othello, a truly cinematic reading.

This adaptation of "Hamlet" by Laurence Olivier (he both starred and directed) is a brooding, somewhat slow-moving, but also memorable version of Shakespeare's great play. Olivier's personal performance as the Danish prince is by far the strongest aspect of the picture.

Hamlet is one of the most complex and fascinating characters ever created, and no two great actors ever play him quite the same way. Olivier portrays him primarily as "a man who could not make up his mind", and his fine and often subtle acting brings to his role a deep understanding of his character's inner struggles and dilemmas, both moral and practical. He renders Hamlet's most famous lines in a distinctive way that reveal the many possible paths in Hamlet's future. It is a performance not to be forgotten.

If Olivier the actor is masterful, Olivier the director is good but not perfect. A great deal of Shakespeare's text was eliminated, getting the running time down to 2 1/2 hours, but even so there are times when the movie seems rather slow-moving, especially in the first hour or so. Most of the cuts involve interactions with the minor characters, and some of the original play's minor roles are cut completely out of the film. The result is to concentrate the emphasis even further on Hamlet himself and on his pessimistic meditations. While this enables Olivier's fine acting to become even more prominent, it does eliminate some very interesting portions of the story whose absence will be regretted by those viewers who love the play.

Olivier does add some good touches, though. He emphasizes the somber tone with numerous tracking shots of the castle's gloomy corridors and staircases. The filming of the famous sequence of events at the end is very good, and is much livelier than the rest.

While this is probably not the very best interpretation of the play "Hamlet", it is as good an interpretation of the character Hamlet as you will ever see. For that reason alone it is must viewing for any fan of Shakespeare or of Olivier.

Any film based on Shakespeare is worth seeing because the scaffolding is so rich that even a failure is interesting. And in the case of Hamlets, we have several to compare. Here we have the celebrated Olivier Hamlet, much celebrated.

I see a few very strong elements with some blots, and I suppose these have both become amplified with the passage of 50 years.

First, the blots:

-- Every actor but Olivier is of lesser caliber. I suspect that some of this is what he had to work with, and some apparent clumsiness results from the then standard rendering of the Bard's works as speechifying.

-- The women, especially Ophelia are dreadful, absolutely dreadful -- Ophelia's only present because she screwed the boss.

-- The score was so heavy, so dated and so hard to ignore it almost made me turn away, regardless of the balancing strengths.

-- Hamlet's text presents problems. The best choice in my opinion is to keep it all as Branagh has. But the standard wisdom is that audiences won't sit through 4 hours, no matter how engaging. Then, the question is what to cut. One often keeps the well-known speeches and cuts into the plot about ideas. So here we lose Fortinbras, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, together with some rather lovely related language and notions. Too bad because there is a development in the logic of metaphor in the later, longer version of the play, and this is totally lost here.

-- Olivier insists on including the notion of Oedipus and Gertrude, absolutely not supported by the text, and only inferred if you don't understand that Hamlet's initial distress is because his succession has been interrupted (not that his access to his Mother has been interrupted).

-- Worse, Olivier not only believes Hamlet is a 'man that couldn't make up his mind' but tells us so at the beginning! Does he not get it? Does he not understand the complexities of reason? This is not a play about doubt, but about reasoning.

Now the gems:

-- Even though Olivier gets the character wrong, and has cut some good lines, he has a natural talent for living well in the language. Even though he's coming from the wrong place, and overly postures, his rendering of the lines comes from a rare genius. Worth experiencing, despite the surrounding distractions.

-- The costumes are too lush for my tastes, but they fit the set. And my, what a set it is. Except for the cheesy painted sky, this castle is pretty wonderful: lots of colonnaded corridors, mezzanines, stairs, aligned archways. Olivier may be trying to top archrival Orson Wells, but I think he has done very well in using the building to frame the action in a way that is fully cinematic, transcending the stage. The only effect that jarred was the thrice-done long pullback when Claudius conspires with Laertes.

--The film is in Black and White. Olivier had no choice of course, but it is a happy accident. Allows the photography to be more artistic, better lit, more abstract, just as the mood of the play would have it.

Bottom line: This is worth seeing to discuss, but the Branagh version is more true and has many fewer distracting blots.

I understand that Laurence Olivier called his adaptation of William Shakespeare's masterpiece more of a study of "Hamlet" than a direct adaptation. Nonetheless, the result was a marvelous film. At heart, the movie is a look at base impulses. In fact, I see a connection to another 1948 movie: "Treasure of the Sierra Madre". The latter focuses on the horrific actions to which greed drives people, much like how "Hamlet" looks at vindictiveness. Neither offers a rosy view of humanity.

The cold, Gothic sets frame the story perfectly. Elsinore's dreary look does as much to emphasize the characters' futile existence as any of the actors do. I should note that I've never seen a stage production of "Hamlet", so I'm not the best person to offer a comparison to a live version. I understand that Olivier cut much of the story to condense the movie so that he could emphasize the psychological aspect. Even so, he turned out a masterpiece, becoming the first person to direct himself to an acting Oscar, and giving us the first Best Picture winner not from the US. As for whether it was the year's best movie, I'd rank it as equal to "Treasure of the Sierra Madre", with both offering devastating focuses on the human condition. Definitely see it.