Word: film
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...question used to be: Can Shakespeare's plays be made into successful movies? With his film production of Henry V (TIME, April 8, 1946), Sir Laurence Olivier settled that question once & for all. But Henry raised another question that it could not answer: Can the screen cope with Shakespeare at his best? Olivier undertook to answer that one, too. One evening next week, at simultaneous previews in Manhattan and Hollywood,* the first U.S. audiences will see the result...
There is also a strong suggestion, in this film Hamlet, that the movies have more than an enlarged medium to give to Shakespeare. A young (19) actress named Jean Simmons, who plays Ophelia, is a product of the movie studios exclusively. Yet she holds her own among some highly skilled Shakespeareans. More to the point, she gives the film a vernal freshness and a clear humanity which play like orchard breezes through all of Shakespeare's best writing, but which are rarely projected by veteran Shakespearean actors...
...film is black & white, not Technicolor; color feeds the senses and cloys the mind, and this is not a poem of sensuousness, but of sensibility. There is something approaching, if not quite achieving, absolute depth of focus. There is no pageantry and no ornament; the great, lost creatures of the poem move within skull-stark El-sinore-like thoughts and the treacherous shadows of thoughts. (Roger Purse's sets, as nobly severe and useful as the inside of a gigantic cello, are the steadiest beauty in the film. Next best: the finely calculated movement and disposal of the speakers...
...outside world except blind sky, faint landscapes, ruminant surf, a lyrical brook. The camera, prowling and peering about the cavernous castle, creates a kind of continuum of time and space. Such castles were almost as naked of furniture as the Elizabethan stage; Olivier uses both facts to the film's advantage. Not even the costumes are distracting; they are close to the simplest mind's-eye image: a King & Queen like playing cards; Hamlet in black & white, with a princely silver chain; Ophelia, a flowering draught of white. The production is as austere, and as grimly concentrated...
...process of cutting a 4½-hour play to 2½ hours' playing time, the editing has also been very drastic in places. The soliloquy 0 what a rogue and peasant slave am I, which is cut in the film, is about as happily dispensed with as half the forebrain, for in it Hamlet tries more desperately than at any other time to come to terms with himself. How all occasions do inform against me is important self-revelation and great poetry as well; but that, too, had to go-along with Fortinbras. Sometimes Olivier and his co-editor...