The setting he navigates gives us clear images of his clouded mental state. Olivier’s horny, cruel, pithy performance-replete with voiceover for any asides-inches along a moral tightrope. Hamlet might not have a cigarette dangling from his lips or be packing heat, but the conflict tearing him apart might as well be wrestling inside a Humphrey Bogart antihero. Released just two years after French critic Nino Frank coined the phrase “ film noir ,” Hamlet smashed moody, muddy post-war psychology into the stark, unreal settings of German expressionism. You can experiment with light and sound on stage, shadowing or fogging the specter and playing his voice from a recorder, but Olivier’s techniques innovate while encapsulating his film’s noirish, horror-filled aesthetic. It’s always been a hit in the play ghosts are cool, externalize inner turmoil, and allow for expressionism in a story anchored by earthly sins.
The phantom of Hamlet’s murdered father dominates the first act, giving Hamlet his mission and planting the supernatural seeds of insanity deep in the loam of his psyche. But the cast’s combined mastery cowers in the face of the adaptation’s most striking feat: The Ghost. Jean Simmons’ girlish Ophelia and Felix Aylmer’s blustery Polonius parse even the densest prose into uncanny whimsy or pompous punchlines. Olivier-directing himself as a venomous, ironic, honorbound hero in the title role-won the Oscar for Best Actor. It was the first time an English-language Hamlet had ever been filmed in sound ( Khoon Ka Khoon, Sohrab Modi’s Hindi/Urdu film, preceded it by 13 years, but never quite made it to Peoria) and the deliveries of Olivier’s players enlivened Shakespeare’s words beyond their static beauty. Wielded by Laurence Olivier, one of Shakespeare’s best performers, and distributed in its most consistent form, that energy ignites us.ħ5 years ago, Olivier’s Hamlet was the first time many had ever heard the play performed. Stuck on celluloid, he is a perpetual motion machine of melancholic madness.
Managing and capturing every minute detail, Hamlet on film allows its Dane to mutter and fester forever. But for so many, the potency of live performance was balanced against its scarcity-and overtaken by the wide-release, perfectionist quality control of cinema. For most of its existence, it carried whatever connotation your local troupe (if you had one) gave it. Knowing about it, maybe even having gone through it in school-glassy-eyed classmates popcorn reading its couplets around the room, stumbling o’er the “o’ers”-but never truly feeling the emotional, sensational breadth of its power.
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