Word: shakespeareanly
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...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...
...once played a memorable Hamlet, in modern dress) as the corrupt, tormented usurper; or of Norman Wooland as a gentle, modest, steadfast and wise Horatio. Stanley Holloway, as the Gravedigger, is blessedly out-of-tradition;* he seemed to have learned his lines from the earth itself, not from "Shakespearean" pseudo-rustics. Terence Morgan, as Laertes, is the quintessence of an old aristocrat's fine, somewhat spoiled son. For once, Queen Gertrude is young enough, and beautiful enough, to explain all the excitement she generates in the Ghost, his murderer and her son. Indeed, Eileen Herlie, who is only...
Young Miss Simmons has an unspoiled talent for speaking with an open voice or, in an old Shakespearean phrase of Robert Benchley's, from the heart rather than the roof of the mouth. She has an oblique, individual beauty and a trained dancer's continuous grace. As a result, she jerks genuine tears during scenes which ordinarily cause Shakespeare's greatest admirers to sneak out for a drink. Compared with most of the members of the cast, she is obviously just a talented beginner. But she is the only person in the picture who gives every...
Died. Dame** May Whitty, 82, peppery, untiring stage-&-screen actress, wife of onetime Matinee Idol Ben Webster, mother of Shakespearean Actress-Director Margaret Webster; in Hollywood. She made her name in England in the '80s with Richard Mansfield, in the U.S. with the Sir Henry Irving-Ellen Terry company in 1895. In later years she turned to the cinema, made an immediate hit in Hollywood's Night Must Fall, another in Britain's The Lady Vanishes...
Boston's Little Theater, the Tributary, has opened its annual Shakespearean Festival with a presentation of "Othello" that is regrettably poor by all critical standards. To cast such an obviously aged man as Edward Finnegan in the role of the powerful and Jealous Moor is the grossest error in the production and one that grows increasingly ludicrous, despite the determined effort of both the friendly audience and Mr. Finnegan to rise above his handicap...