Page 130 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

I Know Not Seems / 119

between two sets of beasts. Even as Hamlet confronts his enemies,
Gade crosscuts to young Fortinbras and his troops, hurrying to enact
a last-minute rescue not unlike the one that concludes Griffith's
monumental 1915 movie. Hamlet's often erratic behavior, perversely
feminine for a supposed macho man, makes sense in this different
context.
The impact of this widely seen film was to further the image of
Hamlet as an essentially feminine figure, whether woman or man.
So the romantic stage convention of (in one critic's words) "delicate
dreamers" deepened in the public consciousness despite the fact that
no significant filmed Hamlet appeared for three decades.

The Undiscovered Country
Hamlet
Rank of England, 1948; Laurence Olivier

In 1948, Laurence Olivier, basking in praise for his resounding
wartime success Henry V, announced that he and Arthur Rank
would join forces again. Their Hamlet would be shot in black and
white on Denham Studio's soundstages, forgoing the detailed on-
location work basic to their previous collaboration. "I see Hamlet
as an engraving," Olivier said, "rather than a painting." Olivier's
approach derived from his sense of this play as an intimate charac-
ter study. Moreover, he was strongly influenced by current vogues in
filmmaking, which had drastically altered since the war's end. In
Hollywood, a style emerged that expressed the difficult tenor of the
times: film noir. French critics dubbed it—"films of the night," grirn
stories of confused characters disillusioned to find everything
changed for the worse.
Simultaneously, movies were becoming more psychological. The
general population ceased to conceive of analysis as something for a
few mad undesirables, but rather as a necessary medical treatment
for the walking wounded who composed a "lonely crowd." Holly-
wood reflected this by providing Freudian variations of traditional
genre pictures: The gangster (Raoul Walsh's White Heat), the cowboy
(Howard Hawks's Red River), and the thriller (Alfred Hitchcock's
Spellbound) film now featured inwardly troubled heroes suffering
neurotic impulses owing to some deeply felt, if consciously