Word: kozintzev
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Graceless, monotonous, unfaithful to its source, Hamlet is less tragedy than catastrophe in the hands of Grigory Kozintzev. This is far inferior to the Olivier and Burton filmed Hamlets, and it is less relevant to Shakespeare's art than both Orson Welles's diced-up Othello, which took its script from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and Sergei Youtkevich's Othello, which like the present film could display its poetry only in subtitles...
...where did Kozintzev pick up his pretentious way of dealing with objects? After human beings have deserted the frame his camera hangs on chairs, clock parts, a fire. These gratuitous images are less irritating then his heavy-handed roping-in of the elements, the ocean he begins and ends with, the hills that his pan zigzags across after Hamlet talks to the ghost of his father...
...politely avoid mentioning that Mr. Kozintzev composes for wide-screen as if it were small, sometimes filling the side quarters with people or walls so that he's left with a small screen to compose on in the middle. But let us land on three of his gross blunders--one frequent. That one is the swerving track inward, which he uses as an illiterate uses exclamation points. It makes you feel like a lame third-baseman charging a bunt...
...more simple errors: when Hamlet says, "But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue," the image shows his hairline, and drops to his face only as an after-thought; then, when horsemen are galloping through the Pampas, one of those frame-corners Kozintzev has been ignoring (the lower left one) picks up the highway the camera's trucking along...
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