If you thought "Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt" was a slogan from a Jenny Craig commercial, then Columbia Tri-Star films are here to set you right.
Their publicity flyer for Kenneth Branagh's new film version of Hamlet comes fully equipped with a collection of top ten (minus one) familiar quotes from the play. The idea, presumably, is to reassure us about venturing into the realm of high culture, but this isn't really necessary. Shakespeare isn't foreign territory for film goers and Hamlet in particular has been a staple of the cinema ever since movies began.
We had the great French tragedian Sarah Bernhardt in duel scenes back in 1900. Comedians Jack Benny and Mel Brooks did the "to be or not to be" bit in the 1940s and the 1970s, and even Arnold Schwarzeneggar packed out a pair of tights and talked to a skull a few years ago in his Last Action Hero. Countless pictures world-wide have adapted the play's story-line, such as Aki Kaurismaki's 1989 black comedy from Finland, Hamlet Goes Business, in which a son seeks vengeance for his father's death in the context of a takeover bid in the rubber ducky industry. Recently we've even been offered a 30 minute animated version of the play made in Russia.
Yet film companies still seem to think we need to be reassured that Hamlet won't bite us. "More macho than melancholy" says the cover of the video edition of Franco Zeffirelli's version. Zeffirelli made it in the 1980s as a kind of Lethal Rapier 1 by adopting the shooting style and narrative conventions of the action movies that had brought his star, Mel Gibson, to fame. But all the film versions of Hamlet have been made in keeping with the style of their times.
In the first relatively full length commercial film of Hamlet, Laurence Olivier not only cut out characters, speeches and scenes, he rearranged it to make Hamlet more like the sort of movie a 1948 audience would feel comfortable with. Olivier's Hamlet broods and vacillates until the big conclusion. He wins his sword fight with Laertes, then swashbucklingly sails down from a rampart to skewer Claudius. (Olivier delayed making this leap until the last day of shooting and did it himself, rendering Claudius's stand-in unconscious and knocking out a couple of the poor man's teeth as well.) It's a bit like a western where the guy in the white hat takes most of the movie to make up his mind to strap on his six-guns and blow away the bloke in black.
Dying, Hamlet occupies for a brief time his rightful place on the throne of Denmark while Gertrude, knowingly drinking the poisoned wine, at once punishes herself, redeems herself and makes a sacrifice to help her son. Hamlet and Laertes have made peace, and Hamlet's friend Horatio is left to rule. All very neat: but the sense of waste we get from Shakespeare, the ambivalent blend of triumph and defeat, are sacrificed to an upbeat ending.
Olivier's psychological interpretation of an Oedipus complex as the defect underlying Hamlet's lack of action was very much in keeping with the themes of 1940s films; Freud and psychoanalysis were in vogue, a fashion that found cinematic expression in films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). Playing the prince, Olivier is isolated in a timeless expressionist rendering of his own troubled mind.
By contrast, the Russian Grigory Kozintsev's Hamlet, informed by the Marxian sensibilities of mid-1960s Russia, is set in a fully populated Elsinore. We are never allowed to concentrate on Hamlet alone. His isolation here is political rather than psychological and he is subject to problems other than being a member of one of the most dysfunctional families in dramatic history. With memories of Stalin fresh in his mind, Kozintsev depicts Denmark as a prison full of spies.
This theme is underlined in the casting of Hamlet. Russian audiences at that time would know the actor in the title role, Innokenti Smoktunovski, had endured imprisonment by the Germans during World War II and then at the hands of his countrymen in the Gulag. Scenes of guards mingled with close-ups of large, slavering dogs: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - excluded from the Olivier version - net like a couple of graduates of the KGB academy.
And when Hamlet dies, Denmark is not changed for the better by his sacrifice. His death is followed immediately by the arrival of Fortinbras and his new but equally oppressive regime, and Hamlet's corpse is soon lost sight of in the crowd outside the castle's walls.
Four years later, Tony Richardson's Swinging 60s version of Hamlet had a youngish Claudius and Gertrude (Anthony Hopkins and Judy Parfitt) holding court from their nuptial bed, just like John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Pop singer Marianne Faithfull, famous at the time as Mick Jagger's girlfriend and as the star of Jack Cardiff's 1968 erotic fantasy Girl on a Motorcycle, was cast as Ophelia. She and Laertes fondle each other incestuously while Nicol Williamson's Hamlet holds himself aloof from the Renaissance love-in, not even getting it on with Gertrude: mother complexes were no longer trendy.
Just as all these other Hamlets are of their time, so too is Branagh's, but it's time is our postmodern age and its contemporaniety is revealed by referencing of earlier movie genres and styles, especially those of Hollywood. Like most of us he probably gets his movie literacy from TV and watching his Hamlet is like channel surfing late at night when the old movies are let out. (Significantly, one old film it doesn't recall is Olivier's Hamlet, Branagh's prince is one of the least introspective of the movie Hamlets and Freud would find few customers.)
In his introduction to the published screenplay, Branagh says that when he first saw Hamlet on stage he thought it was a terrific thriller. (His first exposure to the play was as a child when he saw a BBC TV movie starring Richard Chamberlain, TV's Dr. Kildare.) And from the very beginning we're plunged into the suspenseful atmosphere of a thriller, with a couple of nervous sentries standing guard in the dark outside the castle.
Ominous music and "something is stirring in the bushes" - but although this heralds the advent of the ghost, it could just as likely be anything that has gone bump in the cinematic night, from Lon Chaney Junior's Wolf Man and The Creature from the Black Lagoon to Hannibal the Cannibal. It's not just a thriller; it's all thrillers. And when Brian Blessed as the Ghost does appear and then lumbers off through the woods, he's Boris Karloff's Frankenstein monster (or Robert de Niro in Branagh's Frankenstein) with, thrown in for good measure, something of The Golem's statuesque monster of 1920s German expressionist cinema.
When Derek Jacobi and Julie Christie as Claudius and Gertrude hold court in a spacious ballroom, rose petals rain from the ceiling. It's just like a Vincent Minnelli MGM musical extravaganza: you expect them all to start dancing. Kate Winslet's Ophelia gone mad with her padded cell, straitjackets and somewhat radical hydrotherapy is a version of Olivia de Havilland locked in the Snake Pit's lunatic asylum back in 1948. Finally, when Hamlet and Laertes duel here, it's Errol Flynn's Robin Hood, thrusting and parrying with Basil Rathbone's Sheriff of Nottingham.
This Hamlet doesn't just refer to old movies, it uses actors from old movies. In the play within the play, Charlton Heston seems typecast as the Player King (does he realise what disgraceful old hams actor-managers are supposed to have been?) and it's no wonder Denmark was so easily invaded, with a geriatric Jack Lemmon as Marcellus on guard duty.
From the new generation of Hollywood stars represented here, Billy Crystal is an excellent Second Gravedigger. But it's Robin Williams, who, in a perverse way, gives the most pleasure. Apart from the seedy unfrocked shrink in Branagh's Dead Again, he has played such nauseatingly sweet and cuddly characters throughout his TV and movie career that you just want to smack him. Seeing Williams as Osric, the smug, toadying courtier, subtly humiliated by Branagh's Hamlet, is sweet revenge indeed.
The four hour director's cut of Hamlet opens nationally tomorrow, with a two hour version released on June 12.