Page 141 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

130 / Shakespeare in the Movies

picture," Sir John's voice could be heard announcing before their
filmed stage play began. Not so Tony Richardson's Hamlet, adapted
from the controversial London production starring Nicol
Williamson. A character actor turned leading man, he offered larger-
than-life (and occasionally over the top) portraits of flawed, angry
working-class men. This was advertised as a true film, whatever its
origins; even those who had championed the stage production admit-
ted that, as such, the result was disastrous.
Richardson failed to create any tangible mood for Elsinore; the
problem is not that we disagree with his interpretation-through-
image but that there is no visual scheme. This is obvious from the
first scene, in which palace guards confront the ghost. Two inconse-
quential men stand against a dull brick wall; Richardson apparently
took his cue from the prologue of Henry V, asking us to fill in, like
an Elizabethan audience, missing details. We are not an Elizabethan
audience but modern moviegoers and expect Shakespeare to be
adjusted for that reality.
Columbia Pictures and Filmways compounded this problem by
attempting to sell Richardson's Hamlet to the very teen audience
that two years earlier had responded to Zeffirelli. The advertising
read: "From the author of Romeo and Juliet the love story of
Hamlet and Ophelia." Although Marianne Faithful, a rock star,
played Ophelia, any hope for young romance dissipated when she
performed opposite balding, paunchy Williamson, who looked more
like her father than her lover.
At 114 minutes, this Hamlet is abridged to the point of embar-
rassment. Claudius falls to his knees, attempting to pray. The scene
allows the villain a guilty conscience and degree of integrity (he can't
force a prayer he doesn't feel), making him three-dimensional. The
moment also reveals so much about Hamlet, who has at last tested
the ghost, finding him honest beyond doubt; yet he still delays.
Unaccountably, Richardson included Claudius's pathetic half prayers
but left out Hamlet entirely. Shakespeare's intent is so distorted that
the scene would have been better dropped.
The mise en scene (a kindness to call it that, so minimalist is the
imagery) was constructed entirely in close-up. This approach worked
well enough for Maximilian Schell, the play reimagined specifically
for television, but this is a theatrical film. Even the pacing of play-
ers was noncinematic, losing the key element of Hamlet as a pre-
Hitchcock exercise in suspense. Claudius's cry of "Lights!" ought to
shock us with an explosion of long-repressed emotion gone suddenly