Word: ophelia
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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...
...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, as Henry V was profuse and ingratiating. Only the wild, heartfelt, munificent language is left at liberty...
Tear-Jerker. Ophelia is not an easy role, nor is it any too clearly written. Most actresses who try it (besides being old enough to spank Polonius) are likely to play the sane scenes like mad scenes and the mad scenes like a little-theater production of Ring Lardner's Clemo Uti, or the Water Lilies...
...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, and to the manner of playing, the possibility of Ophelia's madness is planted early, its causes are enriched, and Hamlet soars to his soliloquy...
...aloud. This device is worked even more deftly in Hamlet than in Henry V, and has already become as standard in movies as the closeup. Shakespeare's descriptive and narrative speeches are pictured on the screen, and by this device, Olivier sometimes even manages to enhance the language. Ophelia's description of Hamlet's "madness" (As I was sewing in my closet) gives the two of them a lovely passage of pantomime, never played before. Ophelia's drowning (There is a willow grows aslant a brook) is derived from the Millais painting, and improves...