Page 158 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

I Know Not Seems I 147

Times commented that "Branagh remains a great popularizer of
Shakespeare," and her point is apt. Branagh brings Shakespeare to
the contemporary equivalent of those who first discovered him, the
public itself. That, of course, is our modern moviegoing audience.
Branagh has fashioned not only a Hamlet for the common man but
a commonsense Hamlet stripped of the interpretive layers succes-
sive generations imposed. This is a Hamlet that has returned to its
essential meaning, as discovered in Shakespeare's words, which
prove less ambiguous than scholars and directors have suggested.
"There can never be a definitive production of a play," Time once
noted, "about which no two people in the world agree." That may be
true; still, Branagh's Hamlet comes close to delivering the definitive
film.

Variations on a Theme

The universality of Hamlet allows not only for abstract "rehearsal
clothing" productions but also transference of the play to specific
settings and diverse periods. Literally dozens of films can be traced,
in some respect, to this greatest play in all of Western culture; what
follows is a sampling of the most important and original works.
One approach is to update the basic story line without including
the poetry or depth of purpose that accompanies the Bard's words.
Without this element, the story reverts to what it had been before
Shakespeare: an intriguing tale of personal vengeance. In 1945, cult
director Edgar G. Ulmer (The Black Cat) directed a B-budget film
noir for Poverty Row's PRC studio. While Strange Illusion hardly
rates as a forgotten masterpiece, it was the first postwar attempt to
bring the then-radical concept of psychology to the screen. James
Lydon, previously known as the happily oblivious Henry Aldrich,
was here cast as a troubled youth, a precursor to James Dean. He's a
sensitive, confused, alienated teenager who cannot understand why
his recently widowed mother (Sally Eilers) would have married the
local lounge lizard (Warren William). Bizarre nightmares cause the
boy to look further into this matter while assuming a modern vari-
ation of Hamlet's "antic disposition," where he becomes a juvenile
delinquent but a rebel with a cause.
The sense of general displacement following World War II lent
itself to another notable update, the German film The Rest Is
Silence (1960) by producer-director-writer Helmut Kautner. The
main character, played by Hardy Kruger, is an American-raised intel-
lectual teaching existential philosophy at Harvard; he returns to Ger-