1 WHICH Hamlet? (Laurence Olivier 1948, Grigori Kosintsev 1963, Tony
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1 WHICH Hamlet? (Laurence Olivier 1948, Grigori Kosintsev 1963, Tony Richardson 1969, Franco Zeffirelli 1990, Kenneth Branagh 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 Fortinbras?” 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 Hamlets Richardson: Tony Richardson’s Hamlet is derived from his stage production. Its cast is identical to the stage cast, and it is an economy version, shot in different parts of the Round 2 House (which is a large, circular North London 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 Nicol Williamson’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 Gertrude, Ophelia and the court ladies (amongst whom the young Angelica Huston is visible), are all made up as pale as possible, as if they’re ghosts 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 Panavision, 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: John Mills is Old Norway … Judi Dench is Hecuba … Gielgud is Priam … Ken Dodd is the live Yorick, and his skull has dentistry to match. But it doesn’t end there. Billy Crystal is the First Gravedigger (he has as little idea how to play him as Michael Keaton has to play Dogberry in Branagh’s Much Ado ). Simon Russell Beale – himself a famous Hamlet – is the Second Gravedigger. Jack Lemmon, far too old to be in any army, is Marcellus. Charlton Heston is the First Player. Add to these Richard Attenborough as the English Ambassador, and Robin Williams 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 Tom Cruise 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. 3 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 . Ethan Hawke 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 John Gielgud – 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. Sam Shepard is excellent as the Ghost – dematerialising at one point into a Pepsi dispenser. Bill Murray looks ill-at-ease as Polonius: 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 Anthony Hopkins 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 Derek Jacobi 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 Frank Finlay as Iago to his Othello. 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.