Oscars Retrospective: Hamlet (21st Academy Awards Review)

 

Funeral March~Hamlet - Sir Neville Marriner

Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet is considered a landmark in 1940s cinema and is notable as being both the only time a Shakespeare adaptation won the Oscar for Best Picture and also the first time that a British film won the big award. As we’ve covered in previous blogs, British cinema really blew up during and after World War II. After several years in a row where British movies were notable snubs, this is the first time that our neighbors across the pond finally won the big award. It would be many more years (literally decades) before they actually gave the award to a film in a foreign language but, hey, we’ll give credit where it’s due.

For those who have never read or heard of this story that’s over 500 years old, Hamlet is set in Denmark during the medieval times. The crown prince, Lord Hamlet (Laurence Olivier), is moody and trying to come to grips with his new lease on life as his father, King Hamlet (also Olivier), has died and the throne has fallen to Lord Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius (Basil Sydney), who also married the late king’s wife, Gertrude (Eileen Herlie). Things take a turn for the strange, however, when Hamlet meets an apparition of his father who claims that he was murdered by Claudius and swears Hamlet to avenge him. Hamlet is then sent on a collision course with his family as he struggles between seeking vengeance or determining if he’s just losing his grip while his friends and family try to figure out what’s wrong with him.

While this is an admittedly simplistic summary of one of the greatest stories ever written, Olivier one-ups me in this regard as the film opens with the phrase: “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” For a very long time, this was considered the absolute best adaptation of both Hamlet and any Shakespearean play. It wasn’t until the 1990s into the 2000s that enough new adaptations of the Bard’s works came out that you could actually have a debate about this. That’s over 50 years of prestige.

While Shakespeare adaptations weren’t anything new at this time (e.g. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), Romeo and Juliet (1936), Henry V (1944)), Hamlet stuck out from the crowd in a few ways. The look of the film is very Gothic and cool. The shadowy castles and graveyards almost look like something out of Dracula (1931) and help accentuate the quietly chilling story. From the thrones of King Claudius’ court to the graveyard where Hamlet conducts one of the greatest soliloquies in English literature, the look of the movie just pops. Like many other films of the time, Hamlet was made to be in black-and-white. If they ever colorized it, it would lose much of the charm.

Hamlet and one of the greatest soliloquies in English literature.

Hamlet is also very good at making the story move in an efficient manner by knowing where to trim the fat in the original play. The play is about 4.5 hours and the movie sits at a comparatively modest 2.5 hours. Yet, all the major beats of the story are still there and flow: Hamlet meeting the ghost, finding Yorick’s skull, the final sword fight etc. Only things that were deemed totally necessary made it into the movie and yet it still hits the 2-and-a-half-hour mark. Really speaks about how good of a story Shakespeare wrote when an “only the essentials” story still sits that long.

This in turn invites some critiques by Shakespeare purists. When this movie is criticized today, it is normally attacked for leaving out some scenes and characters from the original play that fans dislike. Particularly notable is that the characters Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Fortinbras are all missing. The former two in particular usually stand out as some of the most beloved characters in the story to most fans of the play and it has been criticized as some other adaptations of Hamlet are even shorter yet still include them.

Olivier, for his part, wanted to cut out most of the political parts of the play to give more focus on the psychology of Hamlet. This is a fun argument that usually overshadows many film adaptations of great works, that being how close to the source a film should be when adapting. Should an adaptation aim to be a one-to-one corollary of the book or should the work be seen as an outlet for the director’s vision?

This argument is personally one of those treats that makes studying the history of film through the lens of how pop culture views them (via the institution that is controlled by the people who want to control pop culture). This is a debate that I remember having long arguments about regarding the Harry Potter film series (2001-2011) and other movies during the big YA boom of the 2000s. The fact that this is an argument that people were having even back in 1948 shows how the more some things change, the more they stay the same.

In regards to the debate of how much excision is too much, I can see arguments made for both ends. As great as it would be to see everything in Hamlet adapted through Olivier’s Freudian lens, there ultimately comes a point when some fat needs to be trimmed to hit the film’s running time. In the end, while a great adaptation should aim to present everything that makes its work popular, what’s important is that it captures the spirit of the original work and, in that regard, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet succeeds quite well. On the other hand, if there’s some aspects of the original work that are especially popular with fans, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern clearly are, then it could be argued that the filmmakers should include those scenes in the adaptation.

You can argue this either way though, in this case, there do exist alternatives for Shakespeare purists (particularly Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) which adapts the entire play almost word-for-word and is over 4 hours long). As it stands, the movie flows very well and you probably won’t even notice the cuts from the story unless you’ve read Hamlet so many times that you know where to look. That having been said, I think there are other problems with the movie that are worth addressing.

Hamlet and the epic Gothic imagery.

The best and worst thing about Hamlet is that Olivier steals the show as the tortured prince and outshines everyone else in the cast. Olivier is electrifying in his performance as you believe every single word that Hamlet says. His slow descent into madness and frustration as he hurts everyone around him is captured chillingly well. Olivier also adds a somewhat Oedipal dimension to Hamlet’s relationship with Gertrude. His hatred and love for his mother mix swimmingly which makes his spurned relationship with his lover, Ophelia (Jean Simmons), even more tragic.

How is this a bad thing you may ask? Well, the rest of the cast don’t impress as much. One of the things that makes Shakespeare such a gift for actors and directors is that his characters are given just enough depth to be memorable characters while still leaving some level of interpretation in the actor’s hands. So depending on who’s playing these characters and putting on these plays you can end up with radically different performances of the same character. Watch this version of Hamlet then watch Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet and then go watch a local production of Hamlet at your nearest theater and you’ll have seen three different portrayals of the same character.

Olivier seems to have a lot less interest in the side-characters than he does in Hamlet himself. For example, King Claudius can be a great character depending on who’s playing him. Claudius could be a soul every bit as tortured as Hamlet who feels immense guilt for having killed his brother. Or he could be a ruthless, controlling tyrant who wants everyone to do what he says when he says it. Or he could be someone who was so madly in love with Gertrude and his brother was an abusive husband so he felt he had to save her and now is stuck in a job that he doesn’t particularly want. These are three different directions that actors playing Claudius could have a lot of fun with. Here, Basil Sydney’s King Claudius is just the bad guy.

Gertrude is just the mom, Horatio (Norman Wooland) is just the best friend, Laertes (Terence Morgan) is just the rival. The only other actress who stands out is Jean Simmons as Ophelia who does get down the tortured aspect of the character very well. Whenever Hamlet isn’t on-screen, the film gets very boring very quickly. And you notice this because there is a chunk of it about halfway through where Hamlet leaves the film and the movie becomes very, very dull. I don’t know if this is a situation where Olivier was so self-absorbed that he didn’t want anyone upstaging him or if he was just so concerned about making Hamlet so invigorating that he forgot everyone else but, whatever the case, this is a big problem with the movie.

Hamlet and a bunch of other people you won't care about.

This key flaw makes for kind of a weird dichotomy in assessing Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet as a movie. On the one hand, yes, this does prevent it from aging with the greatest of graces. Especially comparing it to the aforementioned Kenneth Branagh version (which is now considered the superior version) which is surprisingly engaging from beginning to end. On the other hand, Olivier’s actual performance as Hamlet is still considered a landmark in film acting and is often considered one of the all-time great film performances.

Considering how the story begins and ends with Hamlet, this is enough to say that, yes, this is a great movie. And compared to a lot of other Shakespearean adaptations from around the same time, this still stands heads and shoulders above the rest. But could it be called movie of the year though?

In case you missed it:

1st Academy Awards (1927/28): Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans: Part 1, Part 2

2nd Academy Awards (1928/29): The Broadway Melody: Part 1, Part 2

3rd Academy Awards (1929/30): All Quiet on the Western Front: Part 1, Part 2

4th Academy Awards (1930/31): Cimarron: Part 1, Part 2

5th Academy Awards (1931/32): Grand Hotel: Part 1, Part 2

6th Academy Awards (1932/33): Cavalcade: Part 1, Part 2

7th Academy Awards (1934): It Happened One Night: Part 1, Part 2

8th Academy Awards (1935): Mutiny on the Bounty: Part 1, Part 2

9th Academy Awards (1936): The Great Ziegfeld: Part 1, Part 2

10th Academy Awards (1937): The Life of Emile Zola: Part 1, Part 2

11th Academy Awards (1938): You Can't Take It With You: Part 1, Part 2

12th Academy Awards (1939): Gone With the Wind: Part 1, Part 2

13th Academy Awards (1940): Rebecca: Part 1, Part 2

14th Academy Awards (1941): How Green Was My Valley: Part 1, Part 2

15th Academy Awards (1942): Mrs. Miniver: Part 1, Part 2

16th Academy Awards (1943): Casablanca: Part 1, Part 2

17th Academy Awards (1944): Going My Way: Part 1, Part 2

18th Academy Awards (1945): The Lost Weekend: Part 1, Part 2

19th Academy Awards (1946): The Best Years of Our Lives: Part 1, Part 2

20th Academy Awards (1947): Gentleman's Agreement: Part 1, Part 2