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Home , Basil Sydney, Eileen Herlie, Frank Finlay, Kenneth Branagh, Nicol Williamson, Richard Attenborough

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WHICH ? ( 1948, Grigori Kosintsev 1963, 1969, 1990, 1996, Michael Almereyda 2000)

Three of these movies can be dismissed from your “WHICH Hamlet ?” line-up, prior to the final decision – namely, that your collection needs all the other three.

I omit all subsidiary versions, including those from television, and one of the worst films I ever walked out of – the 1921 Danish silent in which Asta Nielsen plays Hamlet as a woman in disguise. The question had, by the time I left, boiled down to: “Is she in love with Horatio, Laertes, or ?” The intense summer heat, plus the non-stop laughter of a group of academics, for whom the film was being screened, and who were anxious to appear impressed by nothing, drove me out into the night.

Three hit-and-miss

Richardson: Tony Richardson’s Hamlet is derived from his stage production. Its cast is identical to cast, and it is an economy version, shot in different parts of the Round 2

House (which is a large, circular North engine-shed, converted into a theatre). Relying on his actors’ familiarity with the text, to cut down shooting time, and to disguise the fact that he has no scenery, Richardson keeps his camera in close to the action, and films in long takes, which gives the film great intimacy. Gerry Fisher’s camerawork makes it look highly professional. All this would be useful if Hamlet were interesting. But ’s droning, nasal delivery and weird vowel sounds (he says, not “to”, “do”, and “you”, but “tew”, “dew”, and “yew”), reduce the character’s stature from the outset, and, not for the first time, a performance that was raved over when it was given, thirty-seven years later makes you wonder why. The absence of sets, and the fact that whatever’s going on, we’re in the thick of it – for there are no long shots or establishing shots – also makes it impossible to distinguish the play’s small, private scenes from the three huge, public ones, and a major effect is lost. There’s no social ambiance, which in the cinema you expect, and which the best ones provide. One strange effect of Richardson’s film is that , and the court ladies (amongst whom the young Angelica Huston is visible), are all made up as pale as possible, as if they’re already. I suppose it’s a way of trying to show how peripheral women are in Hamlet – though in fact, their “frailty” is a central theme.

Branagh: Kenneth Branagh’s mammoth disaster is filmed in , but its size, glitter and production-design ambition (its exteriors are filmed at Blenheim Palace), fail to disguise – as it seems designed to – Branagh’s own zero-charisma performance in the lead. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is intellectual, introspective, neurotic, self-analytical, self-deceived, over-rhetorical, hysterical. He’s not normal. He’s not One of the Lads, which is what Branagh tries to convert him into. Hamlet is the most cuttable play ever written: whole scenes and characters can be and normally are removed, without disturbing the drama at all: rare is the actor who has played, for example, either Voltemand or Cornelius. But Branagh cuts nothing, and rearranges nothing. For this he got the weirdest Oscar nomination ever: having done zero adaptation, he was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. The price is very high speed delivery, crude cutting, lashings of not very good music in case the audience is bored, and numerous sequences to illustrate with visuals what they may be too thick to derive via their ears. From the opening, in which, despite the excellent visibility, Bernardo crashes into Francisco and falls on top of him, nothing convinces, and everything is OTT. It seems a film directed and edited in a self-induced panic. It’s above all notable for the astonishing, star-fucking principle with which it’s cast, with mega-luminaries of today and yesteryear in every nook and cranny. There are acting parts which only exist in this version of Hamlet , seen in the wordless cutaway sequences: is Old Norway … is Hecuba … Gielgud is Priam … is the live , and his skull has dentistry to match. But it doesn’t end there. is the First Gravedigger (he has as little idea how to play him as Michael Keaton has to play in Branagh’s Much Ado ). – himself a famous Hamlet – is the Second Gravedigger. , far too old to be in any army, is Marcellus. Charlton Heston is the First Player. Add to these as the English Ambassador, and as Osric, and you have some idea of the size of Branagh’s ambition. Except, no! there’s more! Reynaldo, another part normally cut, is played by Gerard Depardieu! The vulgar ostentation of it all beggars belief – how did Branagh expect to get away with it? It’s clear that the clashing schedules of all these impressive people made filming hell, and that few were there together with the other actors in their scenes. Attenborough and Williams are very badly edited-in, and for Heston they have to use a body-double in some shots. The idea is a stinker, because you wonder who you’ll see next – will be the Priest? In addition, none of the big names act very well, and the Americans are all weak. This is a version to avoid.

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Almereyda: The modern-dress version of Michael Almereyda has one really good performance in the confident King of Kyle MacLachlan, and one very vividly-realised idea, the setting of Ophelia’s breakdown in the Guggenheim Museum. Elsewhere its attempt to adapt Shakespeare to 1990s corporate Manhattan is interesting. The film is well worth seeing as a major curiosity, though Hamlet transplanted to a completely foreign milieu is not Hamlet . as Hamlet is short, pale, and creepy in his Andean woolly hat. He’s also dull – which can’t be right for Hamlet. Almereyda’s invention is considerable: at one point Hawke is watching, on two separate televisions, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause , and – one of the most famous Hamlets ever (he’s Kenneth Branagh’s Priam), doing the speech to Yorick’s skull. The “politic worms” scene is set in a laundromat: “How all occasions” climaxes in an airliner toilet. Osric is a fax. Only the idea of a fencing match in the roof garden of a tower block fails to convince. is excellent as the Ghost – dematerialising at one point into a Pepsi dispenser. looks ill-at-ease as : but Polonius never works in the cinema – you need an audience.

He who plays the King: Before I look at the three really excellent versions, I should state my conviction that Hamlet is himself a charismatic, parasitical serial-killer, and the King a version of Everyman, with whom the audience should identify. The fact that the King’s a fratricide, in the tradition of Cain, makes him normal. It’s Hamlet, in his non-stop verbalising, fruitless self-examination and failure to do anything except kill irrelevant parties, who is the human freak, but because he has so many soliloquies we see the action through his eyes, which distorts it. The King should thus be carefully cast to redress the balance: this is the one virtue of the Almereyda version – if anything, McLachlan, a more charismatic presence than Hawke, causes the desirable effect to be overdone. Tony Richardson has as the King. Hopkins – a superb actor in non- Shakespearean roles – has never had much success with Shakespeare in the theatre, indeed, has been outstandingly bad in most of the Shakespeare leads he’s undertaken. Exceptions are the movie of Titus Andronicus ; and the King, here. Sometimes he rattles speeches off as if they’re the phone book, but for the most part he gives the part the sad humanity it needs. But place him opposite Nicol Williamson’s flat Hamlet, and you have stasis: the most important scene between them – “Oh, my offence is rank!” is neutralised by being placed after the Closet scene, and by having Hamlet’s “Now might I do it pat …” cut completely – another way in which we’re made to forget the play’s main narrative thread. 1 Kenneth Branagh casts as the King. The qualities which make Jacobi an excellent Hamlet, in the BBC TV Shakespeare, militate against his being a good King, for his asexuality deprives his marriage to Gertrude of credibility, and his inability to suggest even a forced avuncularity – as the King tries to with Hamlet before their relationship disintegrates – weakens his relationship with Hamlet. With the director’s own mediocre Hamlet, you thus have, where you should have mighty opposites, one blank circling another blank. Laurence Olivier was well-known for his inability to tolerate stage rivals – hence his casting of the short, downbeat as to his . He casts, as the King, the dull-but-presentable Basil Sydney, a staunch character actor, whose whiskey-sodden delivery works well if you want the King to be just a villain, which seems Olivier’s aim. Grigori Kozintsev has as his King Mikhail Nazvanov, a huge actor with a much more commanding presence than Basil Sydney, but even more villainous. He is given his “Oh, my offence is rank” soliloquy (done into a mirror, not, as so often, before a cross); but, as with Anthony Hopkins, there is, oddly, no “Now might I do it pat …” from Hamlet, to balance it. Zeffirelli has , capable of being sympathetic as well as bad – but then cuts most of “Oh, my offence is rank”,2 which would put us into his head and give the drama the dialectic it needs.

1: I imagine that budgetary constraints made it impossible to film Williamson’s contribution here – as it probably did to Zeffirelli’s failure to film the King’s soliloquy at all. The impossibility of affording a retake is probably why they had to keep in the extraordinary camera-wobble in the middle of Williamson’s “How all occasions … !” 2: All Bates says is “Oh wretched state! Oh bosom black as death!” in medium shot, with his back to the camera. 4

Bates was an experienced Shakespearean actor, but, as with Jacobi, there is an absence of unambiguous masculinity about him, which is the quality in his uncle which drives Hamlet crazy, so powerful is the love that it inspires in Gertrude. He screws one eye up, and raises his eyebrow, a bit too often. Mikhail Nazvanov, by contrast, has masculinity a-plenty. By this criterion, then all the movies fail except the Almereyda version, because none of the Kings are good enough apart from Kyle McLachlan: and, with the alienated, bloodless Hamlet of Ethan Hawke, their 1990s Manhattan version is the only one that gets the balance almost right. Hawke is, however, lacking a few dimensions – he has, for instance, no sense of humour, and neither does the film.

Three great cinematic Hamlets

Laurence Olivier: the Olivier film of Hamlet is one of the best cinematic Shakespeares there are, despite my reservations, not only about Basil Sydney, but even about the Oscar-winning performance of Olivier himself. It has a wonderful visual flair, and the black-and-white photography imprints it on the memory’s eye at once. Having said that, it’s also formal and sentimental. No-one’s giving a cinematic performance: everyone’s acting for the stage, and scaling it down. They make lots of pauses, which slow things up. This cannot be said for anyone in the Richardson or Zeffirelli versions, where the pace is lively, and you feel involved, as you don’t here. Olivier’s Hamlet is a sad, simple soul in an impossible situation: yes, he has a soft spot for his mother, but as she’s played by an actress (Eileen Herlie), visibly his junior by over a decade, that’s not surprising. “At your age the heyday in the blood is tame!” he shouts, as she cowers before him, looking about the same age as , his Ophelia, and, with her own hair, a lot more real and vulnerable. Place him next to the manic, half-crazed and you see what a conventional, romantic reading Olivier’s is. Cameras were in 1948 too heavy for the mobile shots they can get nowadays, but it’s still true that Olivier keeps the characters too far away from us: we’re still spectators most of the time. There are some shots which are exceptions: an upside-down close-up of Hamlet, lit from below his chin, on “Oh, all you host of heaven!”: a memorable low-angle one with the hilt of Hamlet’s sword looming across the frame as he makes his friends “swear” in I v: another low-angle shot of him disappearing into a shaft of light as he goes upstairs to his mother, on “I will speaks daggers to her”: the shadow of Hamlet’s head moving over Osric’s skull the moment after it’s been taken out of the grave. And who can forget the close-up tracking shock along the rapiers, revealing Laertes’ rapier to be unbated? I intuit several screenings and discussions of here, on the part of Olivier and Desmond Dickinson, his lighting cameraman. Elsinore is well-designed but underpopulated. It doesn’t look like a bustling court. The next two films took note here, and decided to rectify things. Olivier twice takes his camera all over the building in long trick tracking shots, for reasons that aren’t clear, for they hold up the action. But the Olivier Hamlet has two trump cards which make it absolutely necessary to have in your collection: the Play, and the Duel. All six versions take the conventional line on the play, namely, that awakens the conscience of the unsuspecting King, and that, out of control, he disrupts the proceedings with “Give me some light! Away!” For a cooler, more controlled exit, see how does it in the BBC TV Shakespeare version. But Oliver’s camera-movements and reaction-shots build up the tension to the climax, and he then edits the chaos after the climax, as no others do. And his duel is brilliant (Denis Loraine, fight arranger): using rapier and dagger throughout, he and his Laertes, Terence Morgan, really look in danger of killing one another, and indeed apparently were: Morgan, encouraged by Olivier to “come closer” in one shot, did so, and pierced Olivier’s throat, though without doing major damage. This is a screen sword- fight to put next to the one between Romeo and Tybalt in the Zeffirelli .

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Grigori Kozintsev: the Russian version, in Cinemascope, has black-and-white photography which is even better than Olivier’s (at least on DVD),3 and films its castle interiors and exteriors with uncompromising harshness – the exteriors are real Estonian locations, which gives it a conviction denied to Olivier, all of whose shooting is done in a studio. Near the opening, the castle’s massive drawbridge is closed, and its correspondingly massive portcullis comes down. The cast are locked into Elsinore, their prison, never to escape. Outside is the sea (an idea borrowed from Olivier), and the huge waves, filmed in slow motion, seem at first to represent flight, but, in their inexorability, they will just cast you back to your doom. Ophelia is trapped by her father and her brother. She’s taught a – a grotesque, jerky dance, making her look like a puppet. Being fitted into her mourning garments, she’s trapped into a metal corset. Only insanity offers her an escape. Hamlet, thanks to the King’s edict, does escape, to : but he has to return. Kozintsev shows him by the shore when he comes back, dressed as a poor man and contemplating the freedom of a seagull: but soon he’s fighting with Laertes over Ophelia’s body, and the tragedy moves closer to its culmination. The Russian Hamlet is in some ways the most impressive of the three really good ones. Its settings and costumes show what an unlimited Soviet budget could do (Fortinbras really has an army), and the way the Danish court is bodied forth gives the drama a social grounding which makes it more tragic. Especially moving is Ophelia’s mad scene, in which she stops Laertes’ insurrection by wandering in amongst the bands of hard military men, and distributes twigs for flowers, making the guards forget the proletarian insurrectionists they’re tying up, and the insurrectionists forget the guards who’ve defeated them. It doesn’t seem Marxist at all, and probably isn’t. One odd feature: we never see the King dead. We don’t actually see the sword-thrust which kills him, either; and as soon as whatever has made the impact on him has made the impact, he runs off, bellowing – but doesn’t die before us. We see the corpses of Laertes, the Queen, and Hamlet: but final closure is denied us. Has the King, like Russian criminal autocracy, survived every attempt to end it? Innokenti Smoktunovsky was the leading Russian actor of his generation, and plays Hamlet with brooding dignity, but doesn’t enlarge one’s conception of the part much beyond what Olivier revealed.

Franco Zeffirelli: this film is in colour, and, like Kozintsev’s, interchanges studio interiors with real exteriors – principally Leeds Castle in Kent – so seamlessly that one can’t tell which is which. Because I’d seen Olivier and Kozintsev so often, the idea of a Hamlet in colour took some time to overcome my prejudice: but the quality of the acting – particularly that of Mel Gibson and Glenn Close – was ample compensation. Whereas the verse-speaking in Olivier’s version is RADA-beautiful, as in 1948 it was bound to be, Zeffirelli opts, like Richardson, for a conversational style, quick and quiet: and the result, as with Richardson, is to bring us right into the characters and their relationships: some of the reaction-shots are superb at creating tension. As with Kozintsev, you believe in the castle, with its windy corners, its seagulls, its barking dogs, and people running to and fro: though Zeffirelli doesn’t use the castle as a metaphor in the way that Kozintsev does. For some scenes he takes the camera on to the beach, like Kozintsev, though he doesn’t film the sea as dramatically as the Russian. Zeffirelli has one big advantage over all the rest: a great actress, Glenn Close, as Gertrude (few major performers like the role). With the sort of impeccable English diction we expect from Americans these days, she conveys the Queen’s silliness and weakness so sympathetically that her death is the most shocking and moving death in all six films – the expression on her face when she realises she’s been poisoned has to be seen to be believed, and her agonised convulsions in death are horrible. It’s worth getting the DVD for just this moment. Mel Gibson may be a mega-movie star in a way that none of the other Hamlets ever were, but he’s an excellent actor, and is encouraged by his director to go into areas of hysteria,

3: I’m grateful to Svetlana Klimova for the DVD of Kozintsev’s Hamlet . 6 brutality and buffoonery which make the part so much more interesting, and worrying. It’s said Zeffirelli chose him because of his performance in Lethal Weapon , where he plays a cop so distraught with grief he doesn’t mind whether he dies or not: a good preparation for playing Hamlet. See how, in the “politic worms” scene, he jumps up on to a table and kicks scrolls everywhere. Listen to the way he goes completely Australian on the line “Oh throw away the lesser part of it, and live the purer with the other half!” This may be accidental, but it shows an abandon of a sort which one could never accuse Olivier or Smoktunovsky. Yet he can be as solemn as need be when the scene demands it. Mel Gibson’s Hamlet has my vote as the most multi-dimensional one: the only daring one, indeed. All the rest, fearful of posterity’s verdict, play safe.

Ghosts

The six Ghosts form a striking series of contrasts. Olivier does its voice himself, electronically depressed a tone or two, and with heavy breathing which anticipates Darth Vader. The poisoning is shown, in a dissolve-away flashback. The figure we see is in full armour with mists about it, and what’s visible of its face seems already in a state of post- mortem disintegration. Richardson doesn’t show you the Ghost at all, but lights glaringly the faces of the characters looking at him, and has Nicol Williamson, his Hamlet, do the Ghost’s voice, as Olivier does. The battlements are not open-air, but the tunnels of the Round House, which, very well photographed, give the scenes an effective claustrophobia. But because we don’t see the Ghost, his message is lost, and we aren’t aware of the burden he lays (ambiguously) on Hamlet, to revenge his murder. Thus the plot of the play, unless you know the script intimately, is hard to follow. Kozintsev has a terrifying ghost – a seven-foot figure in full armour, with a long cloak billowing out behind him in slow motion. Shostakovich’s music roars and pulsates, and the Ghost’s face is only visible once, just before “The glow-worm shows the matin to be near”, when we see only his eyes, full of sadness. This is the only one of the films, and the only Hamlet in my memory, in which the Ghost carries more moral weight than any other character. It makes for a very clear narrative. Zeffirelli has as the Ghost, and uses him in a way directly opposed to the frightening Russian version: this Ghost is dressed as a monk, not a warrior: he’s human, looks pale and unhappy, moves slowly, and is dimly and eerily lit. When he speaks, it is with the quiet conviction which being in Limbo would give you. Branagh’s ghost is , a staple of Branagh’s repertory company. He, too, is huge (and in full armour, even though the film has a nineteenth-century Ruritanian setting), and he whispers his lines loudly, wearing stark blue contact lenses in which he never blinks. All the while, the ground fissures and steams about him. But his sequences were obviously shot without his Hamlet, and the editing is unable to suggest that they are together on the spot at the same time. Sam Shepard, for Michael Almereyda, is by contrast a physical presence, embracing Hamlet passionately at one point, and the relationship between the two is intimate, helped throughout the film by the way the dialogue is broken up and taken at a 1990s conversational pace.

Hamlet and his Ophelias

Another important touchstone is – how is Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia interpreted? Near the start, Olivier lingers over a shot of the two staring at one another down a long corridor, while a sad oboe theme on the soundtrack expresses regret and sadness. In the Nunnery scene, having rumbled the presence of her father and his uncle from the outset, he throws her down on to the stone floor with a concussing clunk (she’s Jean Simmons, in a silly blond wig), then actually lifts a strand of her hair as she lies there sobbing, and kisses it, even though she’s not in a position to notice – it’s his invisible way of making a “just kidding” gesture. He says “To a nunnery, go” as if it’s a sincere piece of advice, then runs upstairs and 7 does “To be or not to be” staring down at the waves.4 Stewart Granger, Simmons’ husband at the time, said Larry had a bit of a pash on his wife, so couldn’t resist the tiny bit of sentiment. It’s a pity he had to give in to his off-screen feelings, for Shakespeare’s Hamlet doesn’t seem very fond of women at all. When Ophelia’s love for him meets his hysterical misogyny, it’s one reason why she goes mad. Richardson and Williamson will have none of this, and play with great determination against the text, making the pair lovers: “I loved you not,” says Hamlet, with an ironic smile, as she swings before him in a hammock – “I was the more deceived,” she answers with another smile, and they kiss tenderly (she is ). Then he sees Polonius spying through a grill, and has more reason than usual to get cross. Her “Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!” makes no sense, for his is the reaction, not of a lunatic, but of any lover who’s been betrayed; and the King’s “Love! His affections do not that way tend!” makes still less sense, when it’s just been shown that they do. Grigori Kozintsev will have none of this perverse stuff. Nevertheless, as Hamlet, pinning Ophelia to the wall during the Nunnery scene, mutters “I loved you not” into her ear, you can see how they turn one another on. But in the prison-society dominated by such a Stalinesque king as Mikhail Nazvanov, love cannot flourish – only violence and deceit. You aren’t yourself, you’re who the state says you are. An invented comic sequence has the King marching towards the play, and putting on a false smile, whereupon the courtiers trailing after him put on false smiles too – even the musket-toting guard puts on a false smile. Hamlet’s speech about the recorders, and how no-one can play upon him, is given much more weight than usual. Mel Gibson is seen staring from the battlements at Ophelia (), during Polonius’ speech to Laertes, but it’s not clear why. When they come into dramatic contact, there’s no sexual feeling at all, just remonstration and hysteria on his part, and bewilderment on hers – which seems right. Zeffirelli is, so far as I know, the only one of the directors who’s completely gay (Tony Richardson was bisexual), so he’s not sentimental about women, or nostalgic over what might have been. Part of the Nunnery scene is here done just before the Play; it increases Hamlet’s tension, and Ophelia’s unease at his mental unbalance. After the play has finished, he says “To a nunnery, go!” kisses her violently, then adds a casual “Farewell!” and disappears. By this time it’s clear that they’re both suffering from mental unbalance. Zeffirelli’s is a very intelligent, subtle analysis, and is the best version, in this as in other respects. Branagh has Kate Winslett as Ophelia, and they have several nude scenes together – perhaps to sell the movie to America. It convinces even less than the relationship in Tony Richardson’s version. Ethan Hawke seems to have been the boyfriend of his Ophelia (Julia Stiles), at some time in the past; but, with greater loyalty to the text, his father’s death and reappearance is shown as having knocked all the stuffing out of him: so that when, unbuttoning her shirt during the Nunnery scene, he finds that she’s wired, his bitterness is everything it should be. Julia Stiles plays Ophelia very well as a dumb inadequate, which makes sense of her submissiveness and willingness to be used. Ophelia is the reverse of the self-assertive, but just as self-destructive, Juliet.

The verdict, then: buy Olivier, Kozintsev, and Zeffirelli: Kozintsev’s is the best film, Zeffirelli has the best Hamlet.

4: This idea is pinched from the opening of Hitchcock’s .