Hamlet (Twin Cities Productions, J. Arthur Rank, Universal, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” was the 1948 film of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, directed by and starring Laurence Olivier – though he didn’t win an Academy Award as director, he did as star and the film overall won Best Picture, the first time the Academy’s top honor had gone to a non-American production. Like Olivier’s earlier exercise in filming Shakespeare, Henry V (in which he was also both star and director), Hamlet was produced by a man named Filippo Del Guidice (“giudice” is the Italian word for the noun “judge”) for a company called Twin Cities, and it was released in the U.K. by J. Arthur Rank (the famous gong logo is seen at the front of the film) and in the U.S. by Universal. Rank had just bought the cheap PRC studio in the U.S. and renamed it Eagle-Lion (emphasizing that it was a joint venture of America and Britain by using the two countries’ national animals), and he split his two prestige releases that year, Hamlet and The Red Shoes, between the two companies. Universal got Hamlet (the first film they had distributed to win Best Picture since All Quiet on the Western Front 18 years earlier; Universal would have to wait 25 more years to win another Best Picture for one of their own productions, The Sting) and the new Eagle-Lion company got The Red Shoes (and had a blockbuster hit with it). Not surprisingly I had wanted to see this Hamlet, which had been sitting in my DVD backlog for years, as a point of comparison to the video Charles and I just watched of Ambroise Thomas’s French-language opera based (more or less) on the play, in which librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, working from a previous French adaptation by Alexandre Dumas père, gave the story a happy ending: instead of Shakespeare’s bloodbath, only Claudius dies in the opera’s finale and Hamlet survives and becomes King of Denmark.

So I wanted to see a Hamlet movie that was actually based on what Shakespeare wrote – and I wanted to see this one in particular because, among other reasons, it was one of my mother’s all-time favorite films and she said she got a crush on Laurence Oliiver from watching him in this movie. (She also got a crush on, of all people, Orson Welles, based on his beefy but still hunky appearance in the 1948 film The Lady from Shanghai; she didn’t see him again in a movie for 10 years, and when he came back in Touch of Evil, bloated both by weight gain and body padding, she recalled sitting in the theatre and wondering, “What æ happened? What … happened?”) Olivier’s Hamlet runs two hours and 34 minutes, and only got to that level due to extensive cutting (in 1996 Kenneth Branagh, who like Olivier had started his directorial career with a film of Henry V, starred in and directed a film of Hamlet that ran four hours and 2 minutes because he was determined to include every word of the Shakeapearean text). Like Barbier and Carré, Olivier (who not only starred in and directed the 1948 Hamlet but also did his own adaptation) removed many of the supporting characters, including Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern as well as Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince who comes in as a deus ex machina at the end of the play to take over Denmark now that the entire Danish royal family has self-destructed. (Olivier also eliminated one of the gravediggers, though he cast the marvelous Stanley Holloway as the one he kept and Holloway’s turn is one of the best things in the film.)

Olivier’s Hamlet has often been called the finest film ever made of a Shakespeare play, and it’s certainly right up there in the quality level. He manages to avoid a lot of the traps other filmmakers dealing with Shakespeare have fallen into. He and cinematographer Desmond Dickinson keep the camera in almost constant motion – whoever Del Giudice’s crane and dolly operators were, they got a major workout in this film – to keep the movie visually interesting through the long stretches of dialogue. Olivier and his cast members pull off what one critic (whose name, alas, I have long forgotten) once said was the sine qua non of acting Shakespeare: to convince the audience that you talk this way all the time. Also, for the most part he turned Hamlet’s soliloquies into voice-overs, recording them for the soundtrack but not moving his lips as he’s heard delivering them to indicate he is thinking these things, not saying them aloud. The few occasions in which his lips move and he’s clearly speaking the poetry on set (with a slight change in vocal acoustic between his pre-recordings and his on-set deliveries) are clearly calibrated to represent Hamlet’s most stressed moments, when he’s breaking his silence and actually uttering his thoughts aloud – and there’s a marvelous moment in “To be, or not to be” in which Olivier’s Hamlet, having finally decided to live, is speaking from the parapet of Elsinore Castle and lets the dagger he’s been holding drop from the parapet into the sea below. There are bits and pieces where I thought Olivier was overacting – notably in the lines “The play! The play’s the thing/Wherein I catch the conscience of the King” – but for the most part he delivers a carefully controlled performance that makes me think, once again, that one of Shakespeare’s greatest strengths as a writer was his understanding of mental illness.

Shakespeare’s plays are full of carefully delineated mentally ill characters that are shown the way we define them today; King Lear is obviously a clinically exact depiction of Alzheimer’s (something I realized watching the surviving kinescope of Orson Welles’ 1953 TV production – the only evidence we have of him in the role since he never got to make a theatrical film of the play – which cut away most of the subplots and kept the focus on Lear’s mental and moral degradation throughout), and likewise Richard II would be diagnosed today as bipolar. Indeed, Hamlet too can be read as bipolar; the most important thing everyone remembers about his character – his inability to decide on a course of action and stick to it – can be seen as a sign of bipolarity from which it literally takes a fatal wound to rouse him. The relationship between Hamlet and his mother, Gertrude, has also often been analyzed in Freudian terms – especially the way Olivier films it, emphasizing the complex combination of bitterness, repulsion and attraction between them: one could readily believe this Gertrude, who’s already married her late father’s brother, might want to add her son to her collection. (Maybe this is why Olivier cast Eileen Herlie in the role, an actress only three years older than he.) Also, while Olivier had filmed Henry V in color, he shot Hamlet in black-and-white; as James Agee put it in his contemporary review of the film for Time magazine, “color feeds the senses and cloys the mind, and this is not a poem of sensuousness, but of sensibility.”

It also takes place on a series of sets, more elaborate than the ones Olivier (or anyone else producing Hamlet at the time) would have used on stage but not attempting literal realism the way most period films would have done in 1948, designed by Roger Furse in a way that reminded me of the 1930’s horror films from Universal. Many of the buildings consist of high towers ringed with stone staircases without guard rails or bannisters – one wonders how people, especially older people, managed to get up them (and, sometimes even harder, down them) without falling – and there’s an astonishing visual quote from the 1931 Frankenstein at the start of Ophelia’s big mad scene, in which she begins by picking a flower from where it is floating on the surface of the river in which she will eventually drown herself. The 1948 Hamlet is obviously a film of quality, fully worthy of its literary source, though I have problems with two of the cast members: Terence Morgan as Laertes seems too “modern,” too mid-20th century, to fit into a Shakespearan context. And I thought Jean Simmons’ Ophelia just too stylized, from those bizarre curls in her hair (you may find yourself thinking, “I didn’t know they had permanents in 17th Century Denmark”) to the white dress to all the photography of her in water even before she drowns herself. The real Simmons was 18 years old at the time – Olivier had to explain to her the meaning of the line, “That’s a fair thing to lie between maid’s legs” – and she would eventually develop into a genuinely talented and haunting actress, but she wasn’t one yet. Ophelia is one of those maddening parts in which, by the time you’ve lived long enough to understand the character and portray her emotions and motivations, you’re too old to look believable. (One wonders how the teenage boys who would have played the part, in drag, in Shakespeare’s own productions handled it.)

Part of Ophelia’s problem is Shakespeare’s; he had a grasp of mental illness far beyond his contemporaries either in literature or medicine (or what passed for medicine in 16th and 17th century England), but whatever is wrong with Ophelia, we don’t get enough information about it to diagnose it in modern terms the way we can with Hamlet, Richard II or Lear. About the only thing we see that could have driven her crazy is Hamlet’s absolutely horrible treatment of her, verging on psychological abuse; however much we might like some of Hamlet’s other qualities and wish he’d rouse himself from his torpor and kill Claudius already, during his scenes with Ophelia we really don’t like him very much and we wish he’d either treat her like he loves her or break up with her instead of keeping her on the hook (and Shakespeare’s writing also doesn’t explain why she puts up with him for so long). While Olivier was working on this film in Shakespeare’s own country, Orson Welles was shooting Macbeth on a three-week “B” schedule at Republic Studios in the U.S. – and when it was released in Europe six months after Olivier’s Hamlet, a lot of critics said Olivier had shown the way Shakespeare should be filmed and Welles had shown the way he shouldn’t be. I didn’t like the Welles Macbeth when I first saw it, in the shortest (86 minutes) of the three versions and with much of the dialogue, which Welles had originally had spoken with Scottish accents, redubbed into American English – but when Republic discovered Welles’ earlier 107-minute cut with the Scottish voices and reissued it on home video in the 1980’s, I thought the film was a masterpiece. (Later I screened it for Charles and his reaction was, “Unalloyed genius is a little hard to take.”) Welles’ Macbeth was, I suspect, a stylized production that attempted to reproduce Macbeth’s homicidal mania the way the 1919 German classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari had done through stylized sets and actors’ movements; Olivier took a more faithful, more traditional approach to Hamlet and used the capabilities of film to express Shakespeare rather than radically rewrite him – but I think both the Olivier Hamlet and the Welles Macbeth are great movies, each faithful to Shakespeare in their own ways, and two of the highlights in the otherwise largely sorry and frustrating history of the Bard on film.