Hamlet
Williamson as ‘Hamlet’: Richardson Film Based on Debated Version,
New York Times, 22nd December 1969, Roger Greenspun
Despite the text in the newspaper ad, “To think own thing be true …,” the Tony Richardson
‘Hamlet,’ which opened yesterday at the Cinema Rendezvous, makes no particular claims
to modernity or to contemporary relevance. And despite the illustration for the
same ad, showing Hamlet (Nicol Williamson) about to nibble the up-slung shoulder
of Ophelia (Marianne Faithfull) it isn’t a sexy ‘Hamlet,’ either. The ad wins my
vote for the most tasteless of the year in its field (always a very hot competition).
But the movie upon which it is based is a traditional and bowdlerized version of
Shakespeare’s play.
The text has been cut to ribbons. Although Nicol Williamson talks very fast, this
version, running 114 minutes – as against 153 minutes for the 1948 Laurence Olivier
film of ‘Hamlet’ – eliminates some of his role, much of everybody else’s role, and
almost all of what serves to locate physically and to amplify the action. As a result,
Hamlet’s presence is magnified out of all proper relationship to the world around
him.
And since the film is shot perhaps 95 per cent in fairly extreme close-up, it is
not so much as his presence as his head that continually dominates the screen. ‘Hamlet’
from the neck up (with the occasional Ophelia from the neck down, to acknowledge
Miss Faithfull’s charming cleavage) offers less, even to the mind’s eye, than you
might imagine.
The production is full of ideas. Richardson has photographed his film against total
blackness (except for a few dark brick walls and passage-ways to represent the battlements),
with only the most essential properties, often in front of his actors’ faces. He
thus provides a foreground, but very little background. And, because he is at pains
to include among the properties a candle flame of greater or lesser brilliance, we
have the notion of “idea” or, more accurately, an emblem for “idea,” as a metaphor
for the play.
However, the production only succeeds in making it look as if all of ‘Hamlet’ took
place at night. And at certain moments, for example the appearance of the Ghost (who
does not appear, but is represented by particularly bright light, some science-fiction
movie flying-saucer music and Nicol Williamson’s pre-recorded voice), it achieves,
for all its gestures towards spare efficiency, a kind of square theatrical ridiculousness.
People whose opinion I greatly respect tell me that the Williamson-Richardson stage
production of ‘Hamlet,’ which I did not see, was both vital and moving. I can believe
that, because the one piece of outright stage business in the movie, the play within
the play, is handled with great style and intelligence. But in his approach to film,
Richardson has used the medium to close in rather than open up the drama, and the
result, though not without honor, is quite without interest. Because we have so little
of Hamlet’s world, we scarcely have Hamlet. The final deaths, which are shown in
great functional details, offer less for pity or terror than in any other production
I have experienced.
Except for Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet and Mark Dignam’s very fine sly Polonius, the
major players range from the nondescript to the unspeakable. Williamson talks with
what sounds like an intentional lower-class accent; Claudius seems to have immigrated
from Wales and everybody else speaks standard stage English.
Williamson has never seemed to me a good actor for the movies (just as Tony Richardson
has never seemed a good director of movies), working always with a kind of projected
intelligence that may carry in the theater but that in film merely screens the person
from the camera. There is nothing especially distinctive about his face, he is further
hampered by having to act with a Horatio (Gordon Jackson) whom he more closely resembles
than, in this production, Rosencrantz resembles Guildenstern. Nevertheless, the mind
that informs the performance reads the lines, and at its pleasantest the production
is distinguished by many original and right-sounding decisions about speeches.
Playing on the same bill is a 5-minute animated short by Ryan Larkin, called ‘Walking,’
in its imaginative spaciousness and fine observation – literally, of people walking
across or up and down the screen – it offers a reasonable clue to the quality of
the nine-tenths of life excluded from the Tony Richardson ‘Hamlet.’
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