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Sir Laurence Olivier might have taken a pair of sheers and pruned off much of the text (including any and all comic relief), but what he left is some terrific stuff. Sure, he’s clearly too old to be Hamlet, and others are too young or don’t look exactly right, but, and this is important in each of Sir Laurence’s Shakespearean adaptations, this version was his individualized point-of-view on the character. It wasn’t just “doing” Shakespeare. He was adapting and reinterpreting Shakespeare.
This version is mostly filmed in very obviously fake sets, both interior and exterior, and while this can lead to moments of static and dull viewing, it also helps place us inside a psycho-sexual Freudian liar in which a prickish royal is about to showcase for our entertainment all of his disturbed psyche. So while Olivier is obviously too old for his role while others are too young, this actually starts to make logical sense the further into Hamlet’s psyche we delve.
The unresolved issues with his mother and his cruel treatment of Ophelia let me see the connections as to why they’re both cast so much younger than they probably should be. Hamlet cannot reconcile his sexual longings for a maternal figure, and this borderline-psycho child isn’t the answer. (Especially the mother, who looks maybe even slightly younger than Olivier was at the time.) And there’s a neat trick involving the ghost of Hamlet’s father. It appears to him as a talking skeleton still dressed in his royal garments through fogs of smoke speaking to him in a modulated voice. The voice is Hamlet’s own, pitched and distorted to be both slower and lower. Perhaps there never was a ghost; perhaps Hamlet was schizophrenic all along.
Highly atmospheric and very intriguing, Hamlet does suffer from a few ideas which drain some of the passion and large-scale emotions from the play. The interiorized “To be or not to be” speech has its defenders, but I am not amongst their ranks. I find that interiorizing that soliloquy drains it of much of its power. Or maybe it’s just that Olivier didn’t emote enough in his line readings to really punch it all home. He does a interesting bit of busyness in which he loving, borderline romantically, places the skull next to his face, holding it tenderly, like a lover. And since nearly two hours was removed from the play, some characters naturally got the short-end of the stick. The removal of any humor works, but Ophelia’s descent into madness feels slightly abrupt. But Jean Simmons’ creepy speak-sing after the break from sanity works effectively.
Sometimes experimenting with the camera and its various tricks just got the better of him. No matter, this is still one of the better filmed Shakespeare adaptations to come along. If this is any indication, I’m probably going to greatly enjoy Olivier’s versions of Henry V, Richard III, and Othello, which he may not have directed, but it was based on his stage version.
