Page 132 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

I Know Not Seems / 121

plex, while the royal bed becomes a visual key that unlocks the
movie's meaning, much as the Rosebud sleigh does at the end of
Citizen Kane.
As in 1930s horror classics by James Whale (Bride of Frankenstein)
and Todd Browning (Dracula), Olivier slowly tracks down the castle's
gloomy corridors. This technique enabled him to create a sense of
narrative continuum (basic to the cinematic experience) rather than
the short, separate scenes of a play. The traveling shots take up so
much time (some lasting three minutes) that the text of Hamlet had
to be cut more drastically than Henry V. Fortinbras, essential to
Shakespeare's view of civil order restored, had been dropped from
many stage productions, as had the second gravedigger. Olivier also
eliminated Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet's betraying
schoolmates. Some famous speeches (the self-loathing "O what a
rogue and peasant slave am I" ; the paranoid "How all occasions do
inform against me") were excised; other difficult lines, modernized.
("Recks not his own rede" here becomes "Minds not his own
creed.")
Conversely, Olivier depicted sequences only reported in the play,
including the drowning death of Ophelia, here inspired by Millais's
rightfully famous painting. This provides a successful fusion of sight
and sound, where the speech is pruned so that image and words
compliment rather than repeat one another. Conversely, the weakest
is (as Professor Robert A. Duffy noted) Ophelia's report to her father
of Hamlet's private visit; the image merely illustrates rather than
adds to what she says. Professor Duffy also delineated Olivier's use
of mise en scene and lighting for Ophelia. Whenever Hamlet
approaches her, an open window allows a view of the greater world
outside, behind the girl who was played as highly intelligent by Jean
Simmons, then nineteen years old. Olivier makes visually clear that
his Ophelia is not part of the conspiracy; if Hamlet only realized
this, she might offer him escape from the suffocating enclosure the
castle has become for him. Other people appear guileless but are
guilty; Ophelia seems part of the plot but isn't. The inability of
Olivier's character to grasp this seals Hamlet's tragedy. He falls
victim to the discrepancy between appearance and reality.
Olivier transposed the order of scenes, in some cases improving on
the original. Hamlet's legendary "To be or not to be .." occurs
.
after, rather than before, his harsh confrontation with Ophelia.
During their meeting, he comes to believe that she is in on the plot
and berates her badly. It stands to reason that Hamlet would con-