Hamlet (1948)

Director: Laurence Olivier                         Writer: William Shakespeare
Film Score: William Walton                      Cinematography: Desmond Dickinson
Starring: Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Basil Sydney and Terence Morgan

It seems pretty clear that the Best Picture Oscar award of 1948 for Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet marked a subtle turning point for the awards, from simply a popularity contest to one that rewarded real artistry in filmmaking. Prior to this it was mostly box office smashes that won the award, films like Gone With the Wind, or Mutiny on the Bounty. And while plenty of hits won the award after 1948, there were lots of unique winners like On the Waterfront, or All About Eve that were more stylistically or narratively artistic. Hamlet was also the first non-American film to ever win the best picture award. Granted, it was a weak field that year, but for a staged Shakespearean production to win the Oscar at all is something of a feat.

As with many Shakespearean films of the day, it is a shortened production, eliminating certain scenes in order to streamline the action and keep the audience’s attention on Hamlet himself throughout the two and a half hour running time. Production values are good for a British production made so soon after the war, but not quite on par with other Hollywood Shakespearian productions during that era, like John Houseman’s Julius Caesar or Orson Welles’ Macbeth. There’s a stage bound quality to Olivier’s Hamlet that even some fluid camera work can’t overcome. Olivier’s work in the title role is very good, however, and the climax is arresting. There are some quirky readings of the lines, in the “to be or not to be” speech for example, where he suddenly shouts, and the antic “the play’s the thing” even when no one else is there for him to keep up his phony craziness, but overall the interpretation is excellent.

The play itself is one of Shakespeare’s best, probably for the fact that the main character is so enigmatic, so resistant to analysis, so . . . human. The inability to easily categorize Hamlet’s behavior, for the other characters in the play as well as the audience, is one of its great attributes, even amid a body of work as brilliant as Shakespeare’s. And of course there are the dozens of lines that have made their way into the vernacular of everyday speech. In my review of Annie Hall I mentioned how much of Woody Allen’s innovation in that film had been absorbed by modern culture; the same is true for Shakespeare’s writing in Hamlet where, more than any of his other plays, the poetry of his writing has be co-opted by the culture at large for hundreds of years.

Naturally, Hamlet has been remade numerous times, another testament to its genius, as well as being the inspiration for films as diverse as Strange Brew and The Lion King. The remake that has been the most dramatically satisfying is probably the 1996 version by Kenneth Branagh. In not only restored all of the text from Shakespeare’s play, but the amazing cast as well as more modern staging and use of exteriors makes it something of the definitive Hamlet. Still, the best line from Laurence Olivier’s version is one that the director added himself to the introduction and really sums up the genius of the play: “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.”