Left Field Cinema

First written over four hundred years in the past, at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuary, Hamlet represents one of the most famous of William Shakespeares plays, only possibly superceded in that regard by Romeo and Juliet or Richard the III. It was popular in Shakespeare’s day and it remains popular today. The story for those few of you unfamiliar with the piece follows the titular Prince Hamlet who sets about avenging his fathers murder, and sets a plan into motion to kill his Uncle Claudias who has subsequently married Hamlet’s mother. This is one of Shakespeare’s longest plays and possibly his most philosphically and emotionally complex, exploring themes of madness, moral fortitude or a lack of it, incest, revenge and greif; this is the Bard on top form, and top scale throwing everything he’s got into a powerful crucible of violence and pain which inevitably, as with all Shakespearian tradgedies, ends in a blood bath.

There are a plethora of different film adaptations produced over the years, two of the most famous adaptations being Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 version with Mel Gibson in the leading role, and Kenneth Branaghs somewhat bloated but lushoius attempt released in 1996 which was gloriously shot on 65mm film and remains the last film to do so in its entirety with only Terrance Malick’s The New World attempting in part to do so since. More recently Ethan Hawk took the title role in a modernised version released in 2000. There are currently over 60 film, video or TV movie versions of Hamlet filmed in dozens of countries across the globe, two were produced as recently as 2007 and the earliest version dates back a hundred years to 1907. Depite this, one and one alone has been regarded as the definitive film adaptaion of Hamlet and that is Laurence Olivier’s 1948 version.

Olivier’s Hamlet is a masterpiece in many respect, with one of the greatest revenge tales ever told as its sourse material it does have a head start, but this was one of three Shakespearian adaptations Olivier put to screen at the time, and this is easily the superior of the three. Four years earlier he’d taken the Bard’s historical epic Henry V to the screen, it was an overblown and fairly ugly presentation of the play, a patriotic play employed here to rally the troops in World War II, such blatent flag waving is toe curling, cringe inducingly manipulative and as such it loses substantial points, Kenneth Branagh’s grittier, meaner adaptation decades later is a far superior version. Seven years later Olivier would bring us his adaptation Richard III, both Henry V and Richard III suffer from being early colour films, at the time when the process wasn’t quite there yet and the effect was garish and in somecase downright unpleasant to look at. Black and white film is technically and visually far superior, the choice wasn’t artist as it had been intially claimed, nor was it budgetary (far from it as this production had a budget of two million dollars which was a huge amount in 1948) the decision to use black and white wasn’t a decision at all, Olivier had been in the middle of a blazing argument with Technicolour so the option wasn’t availible for this production and thankfully so as black and white not only suits the film tonally but helps to mask some of the background matte paintings which appear so painfully stagy in Henry V and Richard III. The visual style was heavily influenced by the works of Orson Welles and John Ford, in particular Citizen Kane is cited as a major influence for Olivier when constructing this film visual signature, Olivier’s camera glides through the large castle, floats down coridors and rises up towers like the point of view shot of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. It is constructed in the majority by magnificently balannced tracking shots and high contrast lighting. This is a moodly, detached and cold world, built of shadows, silouettes, mist and small shafts of light, in some scenes it looks and feels more like a 40’s noir than a Shakespearian adaptation. The production is half way between theatre and cinema, taking the best elements of both and merging them together. There are moments of theatrical performance, times when the set feels a little stagy, but the visuals override these concerns. Other Shakespearian adaptations fail miserably because they remove the theatrical from the production and in doing so forget their origins. Hamlet never falls into this trap, like all the best Shakespearian adaptations it remembers where it has come from and is constantly mindful of where it is going.

This was the first sound version of Hamlet produced in the English language, and despite its slow pace and long run time, clocking in at 155 minutes, it does have several major ommisions from the play including the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Shakespearian purists and formalists were angered by these omissions, but it has been subsequently been proven that it is near enough impossible to include everything from this monstrously huge play. This was a mammoth project for one man to both direct and star in, so huge that Olivier could have been forgiven if his performance wasn’t quite up to the standard, as it is, Olivier is incredible as the Danish prince, he brings the character alive, throughout his corpus he’s never again achieved the dizzy heights of performance and production that he achieved with Hamlet. He was the first actor to direct himself to the best actor award at the Academy Awards, this film was critically adored at the time, and since, it was the first none American production to win best picture, it was also the first to win both the Academy Award for best picture and the Venice Film Festival best picture award, which is no easy feat.

Olivier and company injected their own life into this play, taking the words of Shakespeare and crafting them into their own memorable scenes and sequences. Perhaps their greatest innovation was the ghost of the father, whose macabre deep voice penetrates everything, his silhouetted face and deep breathing makes him appear as a possible influence for Darth Vader’s appearance and voice in the Star Wars films, the productions approach to the ghost of Hamlet’s father is almost modern. A famous scene where Hamlet has the opportunity in the middle of the film to kill his Uncle, but he does not take it because he is praying to God. Scholars have often pondered why Hamlet spares him at this point, perhaps only to drag the plot line out further, but there is a psychological case for Hamlet’s hesitance, perhaps to expose the truth of his Uncle’s treachery before he dispatches him. He needs his uncle to be incriminated and humiliated before he can commit to his murder. This scene was famously sent up in John McTiernan’s The Last Action Hero, where the child protagonist fantasises about Arnold Schwarzenegger taking the role of Hamlet and killing Claudius with and machine gun. “To be or not to be…. Not to be” grunts Schwarzenegger. The connection between this production of Hamlet in 1948 and the action films of the mid-1990’s is a valid one, although far from action packed, the swordplay in the final act is kinetic, well choreographed and remarkably fast paced for the time.

There are also great scenes between Hamlet and his mother, where their affections for one and other are borderline incestuous. A famous scene has Hamlet speaking to the Skull of his former jester; a man is in no way caught up in the web of treachery and murder Hamlet is dealing with. Another scene towards the climax of the film Hamlet's Uncle watches silently as Hamlet reconstructs the murder of his father within a play. The dilemma for his Uncle is clear, he knows that Hamlet knows but he can’t say a word or he’ll accidentally implicate himself in the murder, this is all conveyed without a word of dialogue. And of course there is the matter of the final blood bath which here is done exceptionally well, and even though most of us know the eventual out come of this play, the final moments are loaded with tension probably more so because we know the outcome.

This represents one of the greatest British films of the 1940’s, which puts it automatically in the running for greatest British film of all time. A British production which took on Hollywood but with our own game and our own play. The influence of Forde and Welles on this production shows how willing we were at one time to embrace and assimilate new visual ideas, new methodology within film making rather than our modern propensity for restricting ourselves to Social realism or mediocre gangster movies. It was a time when Britain could produce and champion films like Brief Encounter, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Hobson’s Choice, or The Red Shoes. A terrible shame that our film industry died the way it did and has never truly recovered; back in the time of David Lean, Carol Reed, Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, and Laurence Olivier we really knew how to make films.

M.Dawson