Page 160 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

I Know Not Seems I 149

snickering remarks about the possibility that these two actually got
away with murder. Yvan decides to escape from his waking night-
mare by slipping into a theater, where he can daydream in darkness;
but the film happens to be Olivier's Hamlet, its powerful presenta-
tion convincing Yvan that his own life parallels the legend too com-
pletely for coincidence. To catch the uncle's conscience, Yvan sets
out to make his own movie, a substitute for the play within the
play. To accomplish this, he must talk the family retainer's daughter
(Juliette Meyniel) into playing the part of Ophelia; while shooting
the film, Yvan verbally abuses her offscreen as well as in front of
the camera as reel and real become inseparable.
The film ultimately serves as a cautionary fable about the folly of
living one's life as if it were a movie. At the end, having driven the
uncle to suicide, Yvan realizes too late that the dying man is not
only innocent of any crime but may be his own biological father.
The film's best moments include a modernization of Hamlet's advice
to the players where Yvan argues with the performers about billing
in the credits and Hamlet's sarcastic thrift speech in which he sug-
gests that leftovers from the funeral furnish a cold repast for the
marriage, wordlessly conveyed through such rapid crosscutting
between funeral and wedding ceremonies that the viewer cannot tell
precisely where one ends and the other begins.
Japan's greatest director, Akira Kurosawa, felt the story would also
make sense in the land of the samurai. Whereas Kurosawa would
retell Macbeth and King Lear as costume dramas, he chose to do
Hamlet as a modern critique of Japan's 1963 business world, which
is depicted as a false cover for criminal activities of the type associ-
ated with that land's gangsters, the Yakuza. In The Bad Sleep Well
Toshiro Mifune plays a young executive offered the hand in mar-
riage of a corporate bigwig; however, he cannot forget the unsolved
murder of his own father, whom he suspects was done in by the
company's president (Masayuki Mori). As he uncompromisingly
seeks personal revenge, the hero goes out of control, perhaps even
mad. Kurosawa maintained only the barest element of Shakespeare's
vision, though he did turn out a turgid example of journalistic-
expose cinema in which he pulled no punches in decrying the scan-
dalous situation within the contemporary Japanese business
community.
A considerably less ambitious version appeared in 1972, at the
height of an international craze for spaghetti westerns. Johnny
Hamlet shifted the story to America's old west, though the film was