Page 152 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

I Know Not Seems / 141

Which makes sense, since Branagh, who grew up watching mati-
nee movies (American films at that), came to Shakespeare late in
life. When he did, the budding actor-director sensed that Shake-
speare's plays were intended for Everyman, not the Old Vic's elite.
Quietly, he glowered at a classy men-in-tights approach, secretly fan-
tasizing: Today the Bard begs to be done as a movie-movie. Branagh
held steadfast to that concept. His Hamlet is intentionally big, influ-
enced by Cecil B. DeMille and The Ten Commandments. (That
film's legendary star, Charlton Heston, makes an appearance.)
DeMille, of course, was the greatest showman since . . . well, since
Shakespeare.
There are more cameo performances here (Robin Williams as a
Birdcage-inspired Osric ; Billy Crystal, the First Gravedigger as a
Borscht-belt wise guy, and Charlton Heston as the Player King) than
in any film since Around the World in Eighty Days. Branagh wanted
movie stars, persuading Julie Christie (not a Shakespeare fan) to
come out of semiretirement for Gertrude. Still, he did not overlook
live theater, picking Derek Jacobi for Claudius. Significantly, Jacobi
was the first live Hamlet Branagh ever saw, and he later directed
Branagh in the role onstage. The coupling of Christie with Jacobi as
a married couple can be taken as a key to the film's attitude, where
the best of movie-movies and serious art are married in a single
work.
There are arty influences besides Jacobi. The Russian look for
Fortinbras's troops is reminiscent of the Soviet Gamlet, while the
Norwegian army's final siege of Elsinore brings to mind St. Peters-
burg during the Russian Revolution, as incarnated in Sergei Eisen-
stein's Ten Days That Shook the World. Branagh is as much in love
with cinema as with Shakespeare. In filming each successive work,
he pays homage to cinema as the logical descendant of such plays
and therefore our proper means of expressing them.
Basic to his interpretation is a rejection of the oedipal complex,
returning us to a tragedy of revenge. This is implied in Branagh's
choice of time and place. He sets the film in a European palace
during the late 1800s, just before the world discovered Freud. Thus,
we see the play as it might have been presented one minute before
the birth of modernism, an age that transformed Hamlet into a
mirror for our neuroses. Gone is the gloomy medieval fortress; in
its place, exterior shots of the duke of Marlborough's swank
Blenheim Palace at Christmastime. For interiors, great gobs of gilt,
red carpeting, checkered tiles, multiplane mirrors, and falling