Hamlet is a film that people who are not aficionados of Shakespeare could appreciate, although I can understand why people who are not would avoid seeing this film. I do enjoy Shakespeare, having taken two semesters of him in college, and Hamlet was always one of my favorites. In fact, if you’ve never seen it, or if you haven’t seen it in a long time, you’ll be amazed at how many lines of Hamlet have become a part of our everyday vernacular. Everyone knows, “To be or not to be”, but how about these:
“Frailty, thy name is woman.”
“This above all; to thine own self be true.”
“There are more things on Heaven or Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
“Conscious doth make cowards of us all.”
“The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
And perhaps my personal favorite of this play/film:
“When sorrows come, they come not in single spies, but in battalions.”
And the list goes on and on.
Shakespeare is a tricky subject for film, as I wrote about in a previous blog.
http://monumentscripts.com/2012/09/03/they-dont-write-em-like-that-anymore/
Filmmakers like Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, and even Mel Gibson, have tried over the years to bring Shakespeare to the big screen with varying degrees of success. There is something intimidating about Shakespeare, especially to modern audiences, that keeps people away. Whether it reminds people too much if being in school, or whether they have a hard time following the language (all of the doth’s and thy’s and thou’s), or whether it just seems to them to be too pretentious, the Shakespeare audience of today is more of a niche audience than a mainstream one.
That’s one of the things that makes evaluating Olivier’s Hamlet challenging is that he was releasing this to a more accepting audience in 1948 than Gibson did in 1990 or Branagh did in 1996. I think that it would be much more difficult for a full on adaptation of Shakespeare to find an audience today. Certainly, as I wrote earlier, there have been plenty of modern adaptations where a Shakespearean story is told in a modern way, but there have been plenty of recent straight Shakespeare adaptations that have not seen any success at the box office, let alone with the Academy.
I understand that Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture of 1999, and I will get to that in due time. But if someone were to release Hamlet in theaters today, it’s doubtful that people would go see it. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet did reasonably well in 1996, but even though it stuck with the Bard’s dialogue, everything else in it was modernized. In reality, that film had more in common with an MTV video than with a production of Shakespeare.
But right now we should be discussing Olivier’s Hamlet, which by any measure, is an outstanding film. It is also an interesting film in the creative choices that Olivier made in terms of how it was shot and how the story was told. He made some choices that were clearly cinematic and other choices that were clearly theatrical. Let’s discuss these in turn.
There are very few close ups in Hamlet. Even when there is only one person on the screen, the shots are wide to give it a very theatrical look. There are scenes in this film where you might feel like you’re seeing it played out in front of you on stage rather than on a screen. Much of the composition was very theatrical as well. The camera angles felt like they were at various seats in the house of a theater. If you ever get a chance to see this version of Hamlet, you should see it on as large a screen as possible, as clearly Olivier was attempting to give this film as much of a theatrical look as possible, and to really get the most out of it you’ll have to see it as big as possible. With the lack of close ups, it’s a little more difficult to get into the minds of the characters since it’s difficult to see their facial expressions.
That’s not to say there are no close ups or no opportunities to see what the characters may be thinking. In fact, there are some extreme close ups spread throughout the film. But seeing it on a large screen will give you the closest possible sense to what it looks like Olivier was going for and will allow you to see the actors in a way that is similar to how they would have been seen in a theater.
However with all that said, there are still some very cinematic elements to the story as well. The opening sequence where Marcellus and Bernardo tell Horatio of the spirit they’ve seen is shot in a very cinematic way with camera tricks to show the spirit and coming in and out of focus to show the uncertainty of the men. There are other scenes throughout the film that use similar techniques when they’re called for. And indeed there are other cinematic elements as well.
When you see Hamlet on stage, or any other Shakespeare play for that matter, there are moments called asides where a character will speak directly to the audience to tell the audience what they’re thinking in their heads, but the other characters cannot hear this dialogue. It’s 100% inner dialogue for the characters. In Olivier’s Hamlet, these asides primarily come from the character of Hamlet and they’re handled with voice over as Olivier stays on the screen silent. His voice says what he’s thinking, but he doesn’t speak. There are single lines that he’ll speak out loud in order to give them emphasis, however the internal dialogue is handled in a way that would be very difficult to do on stage, but is easy and advantageous to do in cinema.
There is one other thing to discuss regarding this film and that is how it was adapted. Branagh’s version is the play in its entirety and it comes in at just over four hours. Both Olivier and Gibson releases abridged versions and Olivier’s comes in at just over two and a half hours. Naturally things need to be left out and changed around, but there was one thing in Olivier’s version that I had a hard time with. Thinking on it a little, it could have less to do with the adaptation and more to do with the chemistry between the actors, but I felt that the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia was insufficiently developed in this version. This is unfortunate because it’s the single most important relationship in the film. It’s also the most complex relationship in the story, and thus the most difficult to get right. Hamlet loves Ophelia and she loves him, although her father and brother don’t want her to have anything to do with him, thinking that he’s gone mad in the wake of his father’s death.
Ophelia, played by Jean Simmons, just didn’t seem to mesh all that well with Olivier. Some 12 years later, they would share the screen again in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, but I had a hard time buying Hamlet’s affection for Ophelia in this version. As mentioned, their relationship is a complex one, and classically every time Hamlet seems to open himself up to her, he slams the door in her face. In Olivier’s version, I saw very little of him opening up to her. Their scenes were filled with conflict but there was little affection. What this does is lessen the emotional impact when Ophelia dies. I think that the problem is that Ophelia was not developed enough as a character. We see her bidding adieu to Laertes when he leaves for France, and we see her with Polonius her father, but we don’t have the chance to emotionally engage with Ophelia in a meaningful way.
Overall, however, Hamlet is a terrific film. Its production value is terrific. It had amazing costume design and the set design was superb as well. As an actor, there was never anyone better than Laurence Olivier. This would be the second Best Picture winner with him in the leading role (Rebecca being the previous winner), and his brooding, yet explosive style was tailor made for him to play Hamlet. Even though he was 41 when he played this role, and Hamlet is a character who is still in his twenties, it almost seems that Olivier and Hamlet are kindred spirits. As a director, Olivier was less dynamic. There isn’t anything wrong with the direction in Hamlet, but at the same time, there’s nothing extraordinary about it either. It was Olivier’s acting that won the Oscar for Hamlet.
There is one more thing that I need to say regarding Shakespeare in general. If you are a writer, you need to read Shakespeare. I’m sure there are people out there who think that he’s over rated and there are people who will tell you that knowing Shakespeare is not worht the time it will take you. Those people couldn’t be more wrong. William Shakespeare was one of the greatest writers of all time and modern screenwriters could learn much from his writing, especially writing dialogue. Now, you’re not going to write dialogue in the same style, obviously. But Shakespeare was a master of subtext, which is a skill that any screenplay writer needs. Shakespeare’s stories were compelling, dramatic and emotional. He could write comedies as well as tragedies with equal skill, and he came up with lines of dialogue that are often quoted to this day. Since this is primarly a blog about screenwriting, I’m going to say it one more time. If you are a screenwriter, you must be familiar with Shakespeare.
Did the Academy get it right?
This is a tough one for me. The two signature nominees of 1948 show how difficult it can be to discern which is the Best Picture of the year because it’s rarely an apples to apples comparison. I am a fan of Shakespeare. I’ve read most of his plays, and I try to see his plays performed on stage whenever I get a chance. Hamlet is one of my favorite works of Shakespeare. To use a more modern vernacular, I would say that when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, he was in the Zone. As mentioned above, and to use another modern term, Hamlet is in Laurence Olivier’s wheelhouse, and I greatly enjoyed this version. All of that said, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is an amazing film. It was nominated against Hamlet in 1948, and it is a film fan’s film. It comes in at number 30 on AFI’s list of the 100 greatest films of all time (Hamlet is not on the list), and it is one of the signature roles for Humphrey Bogart, one of the seminal actors of the twentieth century. But how can you compare Hamlet to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? They couldn’t be more different. Could you see Humphrey Bogart playing Hamlet? Likewise, how do you think Laurence Olivier would have handled playing Fred Dobbs? Both films have heroes that are eventually and tragically done in by their own internal flaws, but the stories themselves are as far apart from each other as the earth to the moon. So how does one person, let alone the many people who were Academy members at the time, determine which of these films was better? Both films accomplished what they set out to accomplish. Both films are perfect in their own way. Both films are entertaining, moving and powerful. The acting in Hamlet is superior to the acting in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre but only from a technical standpoint and not in terms of what each film required. For what it was, the acting in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was perfect. Personally I probably would have voted for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre had I been a voter in 1948, but it would not have been an easy vote in the least to cast.