Page 131 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

120 I Shakespeare in the Movies

repressed, childhood trauma. Today that era's strict Freudianism (on
film as in life) seems naive due to its insistence that a single prob-
lem rests at the root of all mental illness. At the time, though,
Olivier was as immersed in reading psychological tracts as he was
busily watching recent film noirs. Not surprisingly, his Hamlet
emerged as a representative work for the postwar years.
Before embarking on the $2 million film's six-month gestation
period, Olivier consulted noted analyst-author Ernest Jones, who had
written extensively about Hamlet as suffering from an oedipal com-
plex; not coincidentally, Olivier played Oedipus onstage to great
acclaim earlier that same year. As Olivier and Alan Dent cut Hamlet
by one-third, Sir Laurence arrived at his own conclusion: "This," he
announces at the film's beginning, "is the tragedy of a man who
could not make up his mind." The movie proceeded from that con-
ception (or, if you will, misconception); general audiences wrongly
assumed the opening words were by the Bard. The mainstream press
responded positively, enjoying the castle's horror-movie appearance
as well as the accessibility achieved by streamlining. Academics,
particularly in the literary field, complained that Olivier pandered to
public taste and misrepresented Shakespeare's meaning by provid-
ing a reductive interpretation which removed the ambiguity that
makes Hamlet great.
No question that his film was, as Robert Hatch of the New
Republic wrote, "overwhelmingly visual—it pours out images and
impressions with a prodigal richness you would suppose exceeded
your capacity to assimilate." Olivier had been highly impressed by
the use of deep focus in the work of Orson Welles, particularly Cit-
izen Kane. By presenting several visual planes with the same sharp
clarity, he thereby brought a new realism to the screen. In fact, Kane
had, in 1941, served as something of a precursor to film noir, as had
Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca of the previous year, in which Olivier
starred. Those directors shared a fascination with long, winding
staircases, which separate the hero's house into upper and lower
levels, suggesting the character's own higher consciousness and
lower Freudian id.
Likewise, Olivier transformed Hamlet's Elsinore into a symbolic
estate on the order of Kane's Xanadu or Max de Winter's Mander-
ley. Olivier opens with a dissolve montage through a mist, toward
the hero's foreboding home,- shots of surf crashing nearby could be
outtakes from Hitchcock's Rebecca, Olivier's hero, a cinematic
second cousin to Kane or Max, emerges as more confused than com-