Word: film
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Mostly as a result of cutting, their Hamlet loses much of the depth and complexity which it might have had. Hamlet is a sublime tragedy, but it is also the most delightful and dangerous of tragicomedies. Some of the tragicomedy remains and is the best thing in the film. But some of the best went out with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern...
...within his chosen limits, Olivier and his associates have done excellently-from grandiose poetic conceptions (e.g., the frightfully amplified heartbeats which introduce the Ghost) to clever little captures of mood (e.g., the cold, discreet clapping of gloved hands which applaud the half-drunken King). The film is built with a fine sense of form and line, and some of the editing worked out very well. Hamlet's big scene with Ophelia (Get thee to a nunnery) comes immediately before, rather than after, his most famous soliloquy (To be, or not to be). Thanks to this transposition...
...mimes at distant center, steals in a lordly semicircle past the enormous heads of the guilty, the guileless, and the pitilessly watchful; and rising whispers, like leaves in a storm-foreboding wind, underline the shock and horror of this deadly piece of court satire. From there on, the film arches in unbroken grandeur and intensity...
Sidelights & Silences. If Miss Simmons had gone along quietly to Bristol, she could doubtless continue to call her soul-and even her toenails-her own. She might even, in time, become such an artist as Olivier is today. The most moving and gratifying thing in this film is to watch this talented artist, in the prime of his accomplishment, work at one of the most wonderful roles ever written...
...subtlety, variety, vividness and control, Olivier's performance is one of the most beautiful ever put on film. Much of the time it seems a great one. But a few crucial passages will disappoint some people. There is hardly a line that he speaks, or a gesture he makes, which falls short of shining mastery, in the terms in which he conceives the role. But the conception is in some important ways limited. It is clear that Olivier has a laudable distaste for the pompous, the pansy and the pathological Princes who have so often dishonored the poem...