Hamlet (1948 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Laurence Olivier's 1948 film of Hamlet split its first audiences down the middle. The critic Milton Shulman, writing in The Evening Standard, put it this way: "To some it will be one of the greatest films ever made, to others a deep disappointment." Olivier adapted Shakespeare's play, directed it and played the prince himself. It was his second film as director, and it was the first sound film of the play in English. Shulman added that the liberties Olivier took with the text were sure to disturb many viewers. What had Olivier done to the play to cause such unease? How do you give a murdered king a voice from beyond the grave? And how did a film so lavishly honoured slip from its place as the definitive screen Hamlet?

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• 2. A Ghost Made of Sound

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  Olivier made as many as fourteen separate sound tracks to build the noise that announces the Ghost. According to Felix Barker, his first biographer, one track held fifty women shrieking. Another held the groans of as many men. A third captured a dozen violinists scraping their bows across the strings on a single screeching note. Olivier blended the tracks at different volumes until the result seemed to him to resemble "the lid of hell being opened". Barker notes that it is uncertain on what authority he made that comparison.

  A pulsing heartbeat heralds each of the Ghost's entrances. Olivier remembered the effect from a Paris stage production by Jean-Louis Barrault. He sharpened it for the screen by moving the camera in and out of focus in time with the pulse. Before using the idea, he wrote to Barrault for permission and insisted on paying for it. Because no copyright protects a stagecraft trick, Barker says Olivier was particularly scrupulous about borrowing.

  The Ghost's voice came from Olivier too. He recorded the lines as an amplified whisper, then played the recording back at a reduced speed. The slowed whisper gave the voice a deep, haunting quality. For years, even film reference books claimed that John Gielgud had spoken the part. Gielgud did play the Ghost later, but never in this film. He took the role in three later productions. One was Richard Burton's 1964 Hamlet, in its stage, Electronovision and album versions. Another was a 1970 telecast starring Richard Chamberlain. The third was a 1992 BBC radio production starring Kenneth Branagh.

  Olivier's name appears nowhere in the credits for King Hamlet, the dead father. Olivier is recognisable as the sleeping king in the flashback where Claudius pours poison into his brother's ear. Whenever Hamlet and the Ghost share a single shot, an unidentified stand-in plays the Ghost.

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• 3. The Great Whacking Cut

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  "One great whacking cut had to be made," Olivier said, and the cut he chose removed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern entirely. Fortinbras went too. The full play runs about four hours, and Olivier trimmed roughly one-and-a-half hours of it. He stripped out the political strands in favour of an intensely psychological portrait of the prince, and partly to save time.

  At first, hardly anyone complained about the missing pair. Later critics noticed more, especially once shorter productions of Hamlet that kept the two friends appeared on television. John Gielgud took a similar approach in his 1951 radio production on the programme Theatre Guild on the Air. He left out Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Fortinbras. He also copied Olivier by giving the play's final lines to Horatio rather than Fortinbras.

  The 1969 version directed by Tony Richardson, with Nicol Williamson, and the 1990 version with Mel Gibson, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, undercut Olivier's reasoning. Both are shorter than his film, yet both kept Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Defenders of Olivier point out that the parts of the two friends, and of the courtier Osric, were reduced in those later films.

  The critic Pauline Kael took the side of the cuts. She argued that if Fortinbras and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were sacrificed, "it's remarkable how little they are missed."

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• 4. A Castle of Shadows

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  The film begins with Olivier's own voice announcing, "This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind." Critics found the line reductive. The image that follows is a flash-forward to the battlements of Elsinore, where noble lords carry the dead Hamlet in state while Horatio mourns beside him. Then the scene dissolves, and the sentries begin their watch before the story starts.

  Cameraman Desmond Dickinson shot the film in deep focus, the style popularised earlier in films directed by William Wyler and Orson Welles. Deep focus keeps foreground and distant background sharp at the same time, so a figure can loom near the lens while another waits far down a corridor.

  The scholar J. Lawrence Guntner argues that the film's look owes much to German Expressionism and to film noir. In his reading, the cavernous sets with their narrow winding stairwells match the labyrinths of Hamlet's own mind.

  William Walton composed the music. His score for this film and his earlier score for Olivier's 1944 Henry V are now his most celebrated film work.

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• 5. Mother and Son

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  Eileen Herlie was 29 years old when the film was shot in 1947, and Olivier, playing her son, was 40. The small age gap sits oddly beside the intimacy of their scenes. Olivier had Hamlet kiss his mother lovingly on the lips several times. The film scholar Jack Jorgens commented, "Hamlet's scenes with the Queen in her low-cut gowns are virtually love scenes." Some critics argue that Olivier overstated the prince's Oedipal fixation on his mother.

  The tension begins in the Great Hall, where the court celebrates the marriage of Gertrude and Claudius while Hamlet sits apart. Once the court has left, he mutters, "and yet, within a month!" Later, in the confrontation in Gertrude's room, Hamlet hears a voice behind the arras and plunges his dagger through the curtain. He has killed Polonius, not Claudius, and he is only mildly upset. When the Ghost appears again, Gertrude cannot see it, and she concludes that her son is mad.

  The prince's treatment of Ophelia is far colder. In the nunnery scene, Jean Simmons' Ophelia is destroyed by his rejection. Her father's death then drives her to madness and drowning, and her brother Laertes sets out to avenge them both.

  Simmons' performance earned her a nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the 1949 Oscars.

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• 6. The Company

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  John Laurie, who played the weary sentry Francisco, appeared in all three of the Shakespeare films that Olivier directed. So did Esmond Knight as Bernardo, and so did Russell Thorndike as the Priest, the younger brother of Sybil Thorndike. Felix Aylmer, cast as Polonius, had worked with Olivier on Henry V and As You Like It. Aylmer was also a long-serving President of the actors' union Equity, and he championed screen acting as undervalued.

  Basil Sydney, who played Claudius, had himself played Hamlet in a modern-dress stage production in 1923, at the age of 29. Terence Morgan, cast as Laertes, was discovered by Olivier in 1945 at the age of 23. He joined The Old Vic company in 1948 and went on to become one of the most highly paid stars of British films in the 1950s.

  Several small parts went to actors who became famous elsewhere. Christopher Lee has an uncredited role as a guard with no spoken lines. Peter Cushing plays the foppish courtier Osric, who referees the duel. Patrick Troughton plays the Player King, and he later became the second Doctor in Doctor Who. Both Lee and Cushing later starred in Hammer horror films.

  Other casting stories were less happy. Stanley Holloway took the Gravedigger after the Irish actor F. J. McCormick died before he could film his scenes. The film also leaves out the play's Second Gravedigger. Niall MacGinnis plays a Sea Captain, a character invented for the film, who speaks lines that Shakespeare gave to a sailor.

  Eileen Herlie won the role of Gertrude through an arrangement with Sir Alexander Korda, to whom she was under contract. She played the part once more in the 1964 Broadway production starring Richard Burton.

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• 7. Prizes and Verdicts

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  At the 9th Venice International Film Festival, Hamlet won the Golden Lion. It also won the Academy Award for Best Picture, the first for a British film and the first for any non-American film. Olivier won Best Actor, the only Oscar he received for acting, despite three earlier nominations and five later ones. He is also the only actor to win an Oscar for a Shakespearean role.

  Two other records followed. Hamlet was the only film in which the lead actor had directed himself to an Oscar-winning performance until 1998, when Roberto Benigni did it with Life Is Beautiful. And it was the only film to win both the Golden Lion and Best Picture until The Shape of Water in 2017. Nomadland repeated the double three years later.

  Audiences paid to see it. The film was popular at the British box office. The producers' receipts were £187,900 in the UK and £1,164,400 overseas, for a reported profit of £779,700.

  The critics were not so united. James Agee, writing in Time in 1948, said that the film contains no single unquestionably great performance but a complete roll call of fine ones. Of Olivier himself he wrote, "In its subtlety, variety, vividness and control, Olivier's performance is one of the most beautiful ever put on film." Agee also judged that a man who could do what Olivier was doing for Shakespeare was "certainly among the more valuable men of his time."

  British critic Leslie Halliwell found the central performance "one of his least interesting" and wrote that only people unfamiliar with Shakespeare could have given him an award for it. In his view, Olivier was too old, too stiff and too careful with his words. When this Hamlet finally stabs the king, Halliwell felt it landed as an Olivier stage trick rather than a development of character.

  On Rotten Tomatoes today, the film holds a score of 96% based on 49 reviews, with an average rating of 8.6/10.

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• 8. Afterlife on Screens

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  On the 11th of March 1956, NBC gave Olivier's Richard III an afternoon television slot, on the same day it premiered in American cinemas. Hamlet followed as the second of his Shakespeare films to be telecast there. ABC gave it a prime-time showing in December 1956. Like many films shown on television in that era, it was split into two 90-minute halves and broadcast over two weeks.

  The film was once considered the definitive cinematic Hamlet. Over the years it lost some of that status. Many critics now rate the unabridged 1996 adaptation more highly. That version restored everything Olivier had omitted, and it runs almost 90 minutes longer. The 1994 animated film The Lion King, also based on Hamlet, drew its own audience. Critics have also set Olivier's Hamlet beside his other Shakespeare films, Henry V and Richard III.

  On home media, The Criterion Collection has released Hamlet on DVD in North America, alongside Olivier's Henry V and Richard III. A Blu-ray exists in the UK, but it is Region B locked and will not work in most American players. Criterion later reissued Henry V and Richard III on Blu-ray with extra features. It has not regained the rights to do the same for Hamlet.

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