HAMLET

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 482, 17 September 1948, Page 12

HAMLET

(Rank-Two Cities)

AMLET is here and it is good. Whether it is also ‘great is a matter which will "be earnestly debated by all to Whom the play is more than a name, and whether it is great enough will be argued even more exhaustively by those who. have room in their minds to accommodate an enthusiasm for the cinema as well as a love of Shakespeare. But for most filmgoers little more need be said than that this is A picture no one in his senses will miss. It is staged with an austere dignity, photographed most skilfully, and presented by a company of players who give new life to the most smooth-worn lines in all _ literature. Walton’s music, from the ominoussounding viols and recorders which accompany the play-within-the-play to the solemn majesty of the final funeral march will stir even the unmusical. Hamlet, in fact, from the first glimpse of the murky battlements of Elsinore, is tremendously exciting. It is magnifi-cent-C’est. magnifique (I can already hear the phrase creaking in the wind of criticism) mais ce n’est pas Shakespeare. And there’s the rub! For, of course, you ‘can’t judge this simply as a film.

Shakespeare could (and did) borrow his plots holus-bolus from the old chronicles and’ the works of earlier dramatists and no one thought the less of him-nor was he, indeed, the less Shakespeare for doing so. But whoever adapts Shakespeare is in danger of the judgment, and whether this is called Hamlet or "An Essay in Hamlet" matters not a jot. How, then, does Sir Laurence Olivier’s Essay compare with the play? % * * HAKESPEARE, it is said, never -"blotted out a line once he had written it, and Ben Jonson wisely wished he had "blotted a thousand." But from Hamlet Olivier has blotted two thousand. Long sections of text have vanished without trace (Act IV., Sc. 4, to take one example, has disappeared entirely and with it the soliloquy which begins "How all occasions do inform against me’). Those amiable fools Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, along with the young Fortinbras and his captain, and the second gravedigger have been cut off even in the blossom of their sin. Stage directions have been disregarded and the sequence of scenes altered with an audacity which has at times the touch of genius, and the action ceaselessly flows back and forth through the cavernous corridors and antechambers of Elsinore. As far as time is concerned, the film takes two and ahalf hours, against about four and a-half for the play.

So absorbed does one become in the unfolding tragedy that it is’ only in retrospect that the effects of this wholesale reorganisation and compression become apparent. In a brief spoken foreword Olivier summarises the theme: "Hamlet is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind." And so far as it is possible tq erystallize the essence of the play in a phrase, that is the phrase. But the film Hamlet, it seemed to me, is from the outset caught up in the march of events rather than in the toils of his own conscience. He has less time to himself, less time for introspection -- two important _ soliloquies have gone into the discard. When you come to: think of it, he has only two and_ a-half hours in which not to make up his mind. The tragedy, in fact, loses

some of its intellectual quality and acquires a faint but unmistakable flavour of modernity; almost a roman policier air. * * * HERE. is a constant battle between the text and the new medium in which it is being interpreted. On the stage, the play progresses irresolutely, the action flows and eddies by turns as Hamlet's resolution stiffens or becomes sicklied- o'er with the pale cast of thought; for anyone seeing or reading the play with (as it were) a virgin mind, there is a continuing doubt whether Hamlet can indeed screw his will up.to the sticking-point. The film, on the other hand, seemed to me to move with an irrevocable predestination. to its end. For this defect-if defect it is-the film-camera is largely to blame. In fact, the camera should have a place on the list of dramatis personae-alongside the Ghost. Like an invisible broom it sweeps the players into groups or disperses them along the endless corridors of the palace. It draws Hamlet aside from the rest, or hurries him from the council-chamber to the topmost castle batt'ement-and almost hurls him down into the sea. It glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, it pries slyly into bed-chambers, it stoops fiercely like a hawk-and always it moves, for this is a moving-picture, a new medium. The play has been translated and the new language has lost some of the old sense. But if something has been lost, a good deal has been gained. There is scarcely a line-and what clipped currency so many of them are-which is not enriched afresh by that same camera. Ophelia’s report to her father of Hamlet’s strange behaviour, for example, is illustrated by a mimed scene that gives new sense and substance to her'words. ‘The final violence

of "Get thee to a nunnery" which precedes the great soliloquy in the film, sends Hamlet angered to the battlements and the camera focusses on _ his feet as he climbs. Hamlet picks up Yorick’s skull and a handful of dust falls noiselessly to the ground. %* By * UCH of the vivid detail which the camera so faithfully records is, of course, the result of Olivier’s genius for "business," for suiting the action to the word, but this same talent occasionally traps him into a shallower gesture. Why did he bleach his hair? Most Danes may be blond, but many are not and artfulness on top of art is surely a gratuitous addition. Moreover, on a black-and-white screen, hair that is almost white inevitably gives an effect of age which contrasts oddly with the young-seeming queen. It is the soliloquies, naturally, which give us the most interesting glimpses of Olivier’s mind at work, and yet nowhere (it seemed to me) was the clash of screen and stage techniques more evident, nowhere were the unexplored possibilities of the screen more potently

suggested. The soliloquy is a highly conventional stage device, and the conditions which made it necessary. on the stage do not exist in the film. But the film has not yet developed an adequate technique of its own to take. the place of the soliloquy. Hamlet’s soliloquies, therefore, are a mixture of stage and screen forms. Most of the time we are watching Hamlet, and hear his thoughts, and only occasionally do these thoughts break through into direct speech, But the screen, which can bring an actor’s face to within a hand’s-breadth of the audience, can, if it wishes, take them right inside his Skull. We see the ghost through Hamlet’s eyes, but we see Hamlet himself draw the bare bodkin. More subjective treatment might. have distilled more of the essence of the play. Just what subjective treatment can mean to the audience is brilliantly demonstrated in the scenes in which the ghost appears. Each appearance is ‘accompanied by the grotesquely amplified sound of pulsing heartbeats and the image of Hamlet on the screen swims in and out of focus in time with them. This device of the swinging camera (used by Fritz Lang in Metropolis 20 years avo) exerts a positive physical effect on

the audience and immeasurably strengthens the tension of these moments. With such good camerawork, it is a pity that the ghost’s delivery is so bronchial. % * * HAVE purposely left little space in which to discuss the calibre of the players. For most New Zealanders there is no comparative basis on which to judge the individual performances. I cannot compare Olivier with anyone in his class to-day-I saw Frank Benson nearly 39 years ago, when I was a small boy, and have seen no one of comparab!e standing since. For me, then, as for most filmgoers hereabouts, Olivier will be the nonpareil-was there ever a more dramatic assault-at-arms than that with Laertes? Of the minor members of the cast, there did not seem one who was not fitted as to the manner born for his part. I would single out in particular Felix Aylmer’s splendid portrayal of Polonius (not such a fool, the old man, and honest after _ his

fashion), Eileen Herlie as Gertrude, and the quaint appealing wistfulness of Jean Simmon’s Ophelia — so much younger than I had imagined Ophelia to be, and yet so aptly young. a ~ * AMLET is great, but is it great enough? I am not wise enough to say, but I cannot rid myself of the’ thought that Olivier has been somewhat precipitate and has forced himself on before the mellowing year. There are other worthy Shakespearian plays which might admirably have followed after Henry V. and smoothed the steep agcent to Elsinore, giving time for the maturing not only of an individual genius, but of film techniques and processes. To leap from Henry.to Hamlet is the mark of vaulting "Bu Ambition -let us be honest--has not overleaped itse'f, but it has not, perhaps, landed so surefootedly as it might have done. (The above review was written a fortnight before the arrival in this. country ‘of Sir Laurence and Lady Olivier-and the simultaneous arrival of the news that ‘Hamlet’? had won the premier! award at the International Film Festival held this year at Venice. The Festival judges also awarded first place to Jean Simmons for her portrayal of Ophelia, and the » photography in the film was voted best for 1948. Desmond Dickinson was director of photography and Ray Sturgess was cameraman.)