Hamlet (1969-Nicol Williamson)

Most people have never heard of this version, and the few film and Shakespeare connoisseurs who have genrally either love it or hate it.  I'm somewhere in between.  Nicol Williamson, the guy who plays Hamlet, gives a pretty good performance, which surprised me, considering that I'd never heard of him before and a search on IMDB didn't turn up much of a career for him-guess he was just unlucky.  Anthony Hopkins is also solid as Claudius.  You gotta love his earrings.  The main problem with this casting is that, while Hamlet can be almost any age, Claudius must be old enough to be his father, which Anthony Hopkins quite simply is not.  According to some quick research, Hopkins is less than a year older than Williamson.  Well, maybe Claudius was a lot younger than his brother.  Polonius does look appropriately elderly, though his performance is nothing special.  Ophelia delivers her lines well enough, but she doesn't seem too rattled telling her father how Hamlet scared her-either she's the type who smiles when she's nervous or she can't act.  I suspect the latter.  The ghost is never actually shown, but when it talks to Hamlet, the voice is done well.  Each sentence is followed by an echo of one of the last words-possibly within Hamlet's mind?-which is weird at first, but it works.  The Fortinbras issue is left in the script but a lot of the mentions of him are cut-I don't know how confusing this might be to viewers who don't know the full script.  The play-within-the-play scene begins with the actors wearing some kind of weird vaudeville masks and doing a little dance, which is like what that kind of medieval royal performance would have been like.  Hamlet delivers "Madam, how like you this play?" into the camera, which I liked a lot.   Hamlet seems genuinely upset after the second time he sees the ghost in his mother's room-this is where he begins to really fall apart.  There's no Oedipal complex here-he is a little boy who wants his mother to comfort his and say that everything will be fine more than anything else.  Unfortunately, she cannot.   Many lines and monologues are spoken to the camera, which is effective and is only one example of how this movie is much more theatrical than cinematic.  The sets are vague and clearly are secondary to the actors, but the costumes are elaborate.  There is very little background music, only that suggested by the script.  There's something I can't put my finger on about the acting that also seems theatrical.  At the end the credits are narrated rather than shown, like a radio show.  But however uncinematic it is, it's certainly worth seeing.
I'm not gonna do a seperate fencing review cause there's not much to say.  It's good classical fencing.  There are no parrying daggers, but other than that it's a lot like the Olivier version.

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