Olivier's Hamlet

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The 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.

The answer is yes. The screen is indeed adequate to Shakespeare at his greatest--and Director-Actor Olivier's Hamlet is the proof. With this admirable filming of one of the most difficult of plays, the whole of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry is thrown wide open to good moviemakers.

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.

The New Picture. The man who dares to bring Hamlet, his friends and his antagonists to life has tackled one of the most fascinating and thankless tasks in show business. There can never be a definitive production of a play about which no two people in the world agree. There can never be a thoroughly satisfying production of a play about which so many people feel so personally and so passionately. Very likely there will never be a production good enough to provoke less argument than praise.

It can be said of Olivier's version--purely for the sake of argument--that it contains no single unquestionably great performance, but a complete roll call of fine ones; that it is worked out with intelligence, sensitivity, thoroughness and beauty; that it has everything which high ambition, deep sobriety and exquisite skill can give it.

Henry V was all simple, engaging action, and Olivier gave it a clarion confidence and sweetness. Hamlet is action in near-paralysis, a play of subtle and ambiguous thought and of even subtler emotions. Olivier's main concern has been to keep these subtleties in focus, to eliminate everything that might possibly distract from the power and meaning of the language. He has stripped the play and his production to the essentials. In the process, he has also stripped away a few of the essentials. But on the whole, this is a sternly beautiful job, densely and delicately worked.

The 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, against his sounding boards.)

There is little novel interpretation of character: even that might distract from the great language, or distort it. There is no clear placement in time, no 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, as Henry V was profuse and ingratiating. Only the wild, heartfelt, munificent language is left at liberty.

Scissors & Paste. Olivier was determined to make the play clear in every line and every word--even to those who know nothing of Shakespeare. For the most part, he manages to elucidate even the trickiest turns of idiom by pantomime or a pure gift for thought transference. But wherever it has seemed necessary, old words have been changed for new. Recks not his own rede becomes Minds not his own creed. In all, there are 25 such changes. Some are debatable, but the principle is sound. It is equally sound, of course, to cut the text. There are purists who will yell bloody murder at the very idea that Shakespeare can possibly be "improved" on in any way at all. Nonetheless, Olivier has treated him to some shrewd editing.

In the process of cutting a 4 1/2-hour play to 2 1/2 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, Alan Dent, have gone out of their way to save a small jewel (The bird of dawning singeth all night long). But now & then, apparently for the sake of pace, they needlessly throw something overboard.

Unkindest Cuts. Olivier and Dent are neither vandals, boobs nor megalomaniacs. They knew what they were doing. They felt, mostly with very good reason, that they had to do it. 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.

Unluckiest of all, the audience is allowed to know less than it might about the Prince himself (nobody can ever know enough about him). It sees too little of his dreadful uncertainty, his numbed amazement over his own drifting, his agonized self-vilification. It understands too little of him as "passion's slave." Between the cutting and the conception of the role, it is small wonder that when, early in the play, Olivier comes to The time is out of joint; 0 cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right! he all but throws the crucial couplet away.

But 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, 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 with acute, immediate reasons for contemplating suicide.

Elegance of Line. The play-within-a-play is handled with high elegance and tension, in sinister dumb show, accompanied by the snarling archaic charm of the music William Walton composed for the occasion. The camera, always holding the 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.

The Graveyard Scene gets down to earth as it never can on the stage. The whole dueling sequence is splendidly shaped, dipping from the high quietness of Hamlet's great words with Horatio (The readiness is all) into the steely clamor of as slashing a piece of swordplay as the movies have offered since the prime of the elder Fairbanks.

Ordinarily the stage, at the close of Hamlet, is so heavy with corpses that it looks like a hold full of haddock. But Olivier's camera threads among the dead & dying with special tact.

As for the asides and soliloquies, Olivier gives them on the sound track but plays them as mental monologue. His lips move with the words only when he would think 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 on it.

Tradition & Invention. Any production of Hamlet stands or falls, in the long run, by the quality of its leading actor. Most productions have little to recommend them except a good Hamlet; few have that. This one, in every piece of casting, in every performance, is about as nearly solid as gold can be. It is hard to imagine better work, along traditional lines, than that of Felix Aylmer, snuffling and badgering about as Polonius; or of Basil Sydney (who 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 27, has some trouble looking old enough to be the beauteous Majesty of Denmark. But her performance is a profoundly exciting job of tragedy in the grand manner.

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.

Jean Simmons was only 18 when she played Ophelia. She plays the sane scenes with a baffled docility, a faint aura of fey, and a tender suggestion of nascent maturity. All this may go a long way toward persuading 20th Century audiences that a young girl really could so sedulously obey a meddlesome old father, and really could lose her mind when her estranged lover killed him. She plays the mad scenes as if she had never heard that Ophelia is one of Shakespeare's most shameless tearjerkers, and as if her lovely language and her cracked, ribald little songs were drifting out of a broken soul for the first time, rather than for the third century.

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 one of her lines the bloom of poetry and the immediacy of ordinary life.

Was it an advantage to Miss Simmons to have nothing but movie training before this role? She would doubtless have the same freshness and the same talent for heartfelt speech (if not her useful knowledge of movie acting), if she had never heard of movies. But she has had as her constant mentors J. Arthur Rank's excellent dramatic coach, exActress Molly Terraine, and one of the best imaginable teachers, Laurence Olivier.

Girl from the Suburbs. Jean Simmons has lived in Golders Green, a suburb of London, since she was a year old. Rank's publicists like to emphasize this honest supersuburbanity. Jean's grandfather was a music-hall artist who took great care that his children should stay off the stage. Her father won third prize (in Gymnastics) at the 1912 Olympics; the certificate still hangs proudly in the hall. When Jean was 14 her mother started her in a dancing school conducted by a Miss Aida Foster. Miss Foster took one look at the child, and had a little talk with her mother. Lying about her age, Jean promptly landed the first movie role she ever tried for, or dreamed of: as Margaret Lockwood's twelve-year-old sister in Give Us the Moon. (Miss Foster has been collecting an agent's percentage ever since.)

During the next couple of years Jean played small roles in such films as Mr. Emmanuel and Caesar and Cleopatra. Dancing, however, still looked like her real profession, and at 16 she earned her license as a teacher. But just then she got her first big chance, as the haughty young Estella in Great Expectations. Soon after, she appeared as a speechless but physically eloquent native girl in Black Narcissus.

Olivier and his friends began, still half-consciously, to think of her as Ophelia. David Lean, who directed Great Expectations, helped out by telling them how quickly she caught on to direction. But by then Jean was so heavily scheduled for minor movies that Olivier had to wheedle her away from Boss Rank by special dispensation.

Hamlet was the absolute news to Jean Simmons that it is to most people who "had to read it once in school." Olivier and Molly Terraine explained it to her line by line, in terms that she could understand. (When they came to Hamlet's That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs, and asked her if she knew what it meant, she replied, with embarrassment, that she supposed it was like when people are married.) Much of this touching sense of the newness, strangeness and beauty of the over-familiar lines helped Jean to make them sound new and living on the screen.

To Fresh Woods. We know what we are, the mad Ophelia says, in one of the most bemusing lines in the play; but know not what we may be. It is clear to Olivier, as to many others, that Jean Simmons is "an exceptionally bright and promising actress." It is not so clear what she may become. Olivier offered her the chance of a lifetime: a modest and gradual seasoning, first in minor roles, then in larger ones, at the Old Vic in Bristol. There is probably no more propitious training ground for legitimate acting in the English-speaking world. However, Jean has signed a fiveyear, million-dollar contract with J. Arthur Rank. She will next appear in The Blue Lagoon, in which she wears a sarong, and dies, after having an illegitimate baby in a rowboat, somewhere in the South Pacific.

She is a sweet-natured, spirited, unaffected girl, and unquestionably a talented one; she also has the makings of a big, popular movie star. She already gets 2,000 fan letters a week. Among them there have already been twelve proposals of marriage, and a proposition from an Indian chiropodist which is the ultimate sort of accolade a movie star must get used to. Would Miss Simmons be so kind, the Indian fan asked, as to send him a photograph of her feet, and a sliver of toenail?

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.

In its 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. He sees--and plays --Hamlet as a brave, resolute, delicate-souled man who was required, as Goethe said, to do the one thing on earth which happened to be impossible for that particular man to do. But Olivier hardly begins to suggest why (nobody has ever done more than suggest it), and he does not richly enough suggest the sidelights and terrifying silences within the greatest of the music Hamlet speaks.

Once or twice, as in the dancelike shouting of The play's the thing, he verges on hollow flamboyance; and he may fall to the floor once too often. But such excesses are rare and disarming; mostly, insofar as he errs, he errs nobly on the side of restraint. He pours out the marvelous liquids of the first soliloquy (0! that this too, too solid flesh would melt) very tenderly and melodiously, but with little of the anguish which lies half-awakened beneath the bitter mildness. To be, or not to be is spoken in a stoical quietude and levelness, but the subtler possibilities are not very clearly realized in those definitive, eroded lines; and with that insufficient realization their deepest humanity, along with their deepest art, slips away, much as the suicidal dagger slips from his hand and slants into the sea. In the terrific scene with the Queen, magnificent as he is, Olivier seems to stop at the brink of the cyclic, self-devouring, sadistic desperation which Shakespeare so clearly wrote into that page.

Rational Sharpness. Short of such majestic challenges, Olivier is as sure in his work, and as sure a delight to watch, as any living artist. No other actor except Chaplin is as deft a master of everything which the entire body can contribute to a role; few actors can equal him, in the whole middle register of acting. He takes such little words as My father's spirit in arms! and communicates and is worthy of their towering poetry. He can toss off lines like For every man hath business and desire in a way to make Shakespeare congratulate himself in his grave. His inflection of Hamlet's reply to Ophelia's You are keen, my lord, you are keen (It would cost you a groaning, to take off my edge) is enough to make the flesh crawl with its cruelty, the complexity which leaps into view behind the cruelty, and the brilliance of the actor who hides behind that.

That lightning rational sharpness which is among Olivier's surest assets may also account for a weakness. He freezes such a jet of enchantment as Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered with cold irony; but on the words, Are you honest? he is like a scalpel. He is a particular master of the sardonic, of complex reaction and low-keyed suffering, of princely sweetness and dangerousness of spirit, and of the mock-casual. On the invention of business, he is equally intelligent and imaginative. I am glad to see thee well is delivered with a pat on the head to a performing dog; Yorick's skull is poised with piercing ironic grace, cheek to cheek with his own living skull; the lost eyes stare into the audience as Hamlet says, very quietly, Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.

Broad as his range and virtuosity are, it seems possible that Olivier's greatest gifts are for comedy, especially for comedy which works close to the tragic. Like every first-rate comedian's, his sense of reality is strong and cool; his understanding of "the modesty of nature," and his regard for it, are exceptionally acute. Those who venerate the best in acting will easily forgive the rare excesses in this Hamlet, and will easily get over disappointments as beautiful as these; they will not soon forget the lively temperateness, the perfect commingling of blood and judgment, the high grace and spirit, which inform the performance as a whole.

Shakespeare's Audience. It is not likely that Shakespeare will ever again reach the lusty, semiliterate mass audience for which he wrote; today's equivalent fills the neighborhood movie houses. Henry V was seen by an estimated 5% of the people in each U.S. city where it was shown (as against a rough 30-40% who see the average Hollywood movie hit). Some who did see Henry must have gone to see it out of culture-snobbery, or because they were led by the ears. The heartening fact is that the picture better than paid for itself in cold cash, not to mention prestige, in its U.S. run. And for years to come, Henry V and Hamlet will refresh and enchant every moviegoer who has it in him to love great dramatic poetry, beautifully spoken and acted.

A man who can do what Laurence Olivier is doing for Shakespeare--and for those who treasure or will yet learn to treasure Shakespeare--is certainly among the more valuable men of his time. In the strict sense, his films are not creative works of cinematic art: the essential art of moving pictures is as overwhelmingly visual as the essential art of his visually charming pictures is verbal. But Olivier's films set up an equilateral triangle between the screen, the stage and literature. And between the screen, the stage and literature they establish an interplay, a shimmering splendor, of the disciplined vitality which is art.

*General U.S. release will begin in Boston in August.

*The Second Gravedigger is blessedly out of the picture.

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