Sherry Chandler

One could make a sort of minor hobby out of watching film adaptations of Hamlet. There’s Kevin Kline’s Hamlet and Kenneth Brannaugh’s Hamlet and Mel…well, no. One has to draw the line somewhere and Hamlet as Mad Max is more than I can thole. I watched about ten minutes and then left.

The great-granddaddy of them all, of course, is Lord Olivier’s 1948 black & white version, and that’s the one, it being the Bard’s birthday and all, we chose for our Netflix adventure this weekend.

Compared to all these modern guys, Olivier’s Hamlet seems slow, stately, almost static. More a pageant than a play. Some of the minor characters speak their lines in a monotone, almost affectless. The crashing emotions are supplied by the William Walton score.

Even the fencing duel between Laertes (Terence Morgan) and Hamlet at the end is more ballet, less battle. With all that, however, the film contains plenty of physical acting and enough of it is done by Olivier, who at this point is 41 years old and perhaps a bit long in the tooth for the role. (There is, I think, a long theatrical tradition of aging Hamlets.) Also, we must remember that there was no computer enhancement in those days so the stunts the actors accomplish have to be moves the human body can actually survive. This climactic murderous leap onto Claudius was, apparently, the last shot filmed for fear that Olivier would hurt himself.)

I had seen this film years ago and I carried away only one strong visual impression: a wan, blond Olivier draped on some sort of cliff, above a crashing surf, with the “to be or not to be” soliloquy in voice-over. All very Maxim de Winter (1940). Or Heathcliff (1939).*

The scene was as I remembered it, except that the cliff was a castle turret. What I had missed in my callow youth was significance of that set. The castle, which seems to grow out of the very cliff on which it is built, is a maze of percipitous steps. towers, and arches opening out of arches. “We’re in Gormenghast,” my son exclaimed. But I thought more of Escher and that old graduate student saw, house as mind symbol. Olivier’s face is lighted, so that in the black & white, it becomes a thing of planes and angles like the castle itself.

This is a very Freudian Hamlet, framed beginning and end with long panning shots of the huge royal marriage bed. And in case you missed that, there are the long and lingering kisses that Gertrude gives Hamlet on the lips. (Eileen Herlie, playing Hamlet’s mother, was 28.) Any ambiguities in the script are resolved by stage business such as this that tells us exactly how we’re to understand things.

For trivia buffs, Patrick Traughton, the first second Dr. Who, is cast as the Player King. Peter Cushing gives a charming performance as Osric, the foppish courtier (Robin Williams in the Brannaugh version), and Christopher Lee appears uncredited as a sword-bearer. Find him if you can.

Felix Aylmer was entertaining as Polonius and Jean Simmons made a lovely and affecting Ophelia, though the scene of her drowning is perhaps a bit over-the-top for modern audiences.

The film won the Oscar for best picture, best set design (as well it should have), and best costume design. Olivier took the Best Actor laurels for this role.

*Throughout this movie, Olivier conveys melancholy as “pale and wan,” striking poses one is almost tempted to call effete: lounged in a chair, hand dangling languidly, one leg extended, the other bent at the knee, foot not flat on the floor but cocked up on the side. I found this distractingly noticeable.

At first I thought it was just a matter of the acting style of the period. But this was 1948. It’s competition in the Oscars included The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Then I decided that maybe he’d just got a little old for that kind of posturing, his body no longer school-boy lithe. But it may be simpler still. Wikipedia says Olivier was uncomfortable playing the introverted Hamlet, preferring extraverted roles.

(Wikipedia is nice on the film itself.)

Late added thought: If Olivier had trouble playing an introvert, how could Mel Gibson even try?

The brutal fact of the matter is that there simply does not exist even the vestige of a scientific approach to prosody. And it seems to be impossible to get any university to sponsor such research. …What little work has been done on poetry read aloud by sensitive, competent readers has revealed that the elements of speech that form the materials of the artist in words are far more complex than light and color, musical notes, or architectural, sculptural, and dance space, and that the prosodic analysis which we have inherited from the Greek grammarians of Alexandria and which they applied after the fact, often centuries after, had no real relevance to poetry in the English language and that the reading of poetry aloud by Englishmen and Americans differs drastically. Beyond those facts, which we knew already, we know practically nothing else.

— Kenneth Rexroth, American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (The Seabury Press, 1973)