Page 138 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

I Know Not Seems / 127

formance of the Prince that, as Howard Taubman put it in the New
York Times, was marked by "sweeping virility"; that did much to
restore Shakespeare's intended notion of Hamlet as a thinking man's
action hero rather than an ineffectual dreamer. Richard L. Coe of
the Washington Post added that Burton's "superb" Hamlet was
"imaginative, stirring, and wholly sane ... far from a weak man, far
from a mad one. [Burton] has had the perception to see what our age
so self-consciously neglects, sensitivity in virility." We need not nec-
essarily choose between the Elizabethan Hamlet and the Romantic
one; the two conceptions could (perhaps should) coexist in one
frame.
Gielgud had staged the production in "rehearsal clothes," actors
wearing sneakers and sports coats or suits and ties while carrying
swords. So the Bard's concept of anachronistic dress as well as the
universal notion of a play altogther out of time were conveyed via
film. Perhaps most important, due to the new freedom of the swing-
ing sixties, the Oedipus complex could at last come out of the cine-
matic closet. Considering the tight censorship in 1948, Olivier had at
best been able to suggest such a situation via visual focus on the
"royal bed," which, in Prof. Peter Donaldson's words, was "immense,
rumpled, and suggestively canopied . . . female anatomical symbol."
Olivier (forty years old at the time) had played opposite the attrac-
tively youthful Eileen Hurlie. She, a mere twenty-seven years old
then, appeared more likely to be cast as leading lady than mother. As
the New Yorker nervously noted in 1948: "In some of their affec-
tionate scenes together, there is a hint of incest." When Burton
kissed his Queen (again played by Eileen Hurlie, now more
matronly) square on the lips, lingeringly and lasciviously, audiences
gasped in amazement at what was more than a mere hint. Finally,
they understood the perverse nature of this rugged Hamlet's true
problem.

Not to Be
Gamlet
Lenfilm, 1964; Grigori Kozintsev

Gamlet (1964) was likewise created specifically as a contribution to
the worldwide Shakespeare quadricentennial. Russians have always
admired the Bard's plays, and at any one time, a dozen stage pro-