Three Film Versions of Hamlet
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Film critics point out from time to time how much the director brings to a film and that if two directors were given the same script to shoot, the results would be very different. Filmmakers are almost never given the same script to shoot, but an exception can be found in plays based on Shakespeare where the same essential script is indeed used and where decisions regarding such elements as costume and set design along with visual style can produce works with very different attitudes based on the same initial material. This can be seen in three versions of Hamlet, the Laurence Olivier version from 1948, the Franco Zeffirelli version from 1990, and the Kenneth Branagh version from 1996. The films have very different "looks" as well as giving emphasis to different aspects of the plot, the characterizations, and other elements, and watching the three shows how many interpretations are possible on material as rich as the shakespeare play and how those interpretations can be developed by changing different elements of a production. The most obvious difference among the three is the overall look of each film and the tone of the direction. Of course, the Olivier version is in black and white and the Zeffirelli and Branagh versions in color, and this is more than a surface difference. The Olivier film is dark, brooding, and truly theatrical, with sets that are suggestive rather than realistic, expressionistic rather than precise. The darkness of the image is matched by a dark
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eflecting the state of the state, as it were, and the more lush score offered by Zeffirelli is in keeping with the way he "prettifies" much of the story.
Zeffirelli sees his version as an updating of the olivier film in a sense, and he expressed what he wanted from the work when filming began:
"I wanted a new kind of Hamlet," he declares. "We haven't had one on the screen since Larry Olivier played him in 1948. Mel is a vigorous masculine presence, an image the kids can identify with. He has enormous energy and that old fashioned movie star magic. He's vibrant but elusive, hard to define. When I saw the 'to be or not to be' scene in Lethal Weapon, I knew I'd found a Hamlet for the nineties" (Darrach 36).
Actually, director Tony Richardson and actor Nicol Williamson produced a Hamlet on film in 1969, but it is clear that Zeffirelli had the Olivier example on his mind and that he may have been more interested in developing a movie-star image of Hamlet than in letting the text decide issues of design.
The Zeffirelli film was shot in a real castle in Dover (Darrach 37), and this reality undercuts the heightening of the drama that comes with the illusion of a castle rather than the real thing. The soliloquies are delivered in th
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Approximate Word count = 3422
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
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