expressionistic world of the 1948 film fits quite well with the internal brooding of Hamlet. The Branagh version is more an epic in tone, and the settings and costumes are more opulent, designed more for spectacle than for realism. The two earlier versions had their own sense of what life might have been like in Denmark in the era of the play, while the Branagh version seems set more in a British vision of royal life than a Danish one. The Zeffirelli film manages to combine a more romantic and a more naturalistic vision at one and the same time, and the director keeps the camera as an observer of the action to a great degree. Olivier is more expressionistic with his camera as with other elements and shapes the action as a film experience. Branagh does the same in a different way and does so in an epic fashion, with massive sets, huge numbers of extras, and star turns even in small parts. Of the three, the Olivier version, for all its filmic elements and selectivity, is still the most theatrical in nature, meaning the most like a stage production. One consequences is that this is also the leanest and the most intensely dramatic of the three, concentrating on the interplay of characters with one another and not with props or setting.
The 1948 version shows a denmark that is stark, cold, and dark. At the beginning of the play, the kingdom is in turmoil, and the nightly appearance of the Ghost underscores rather than causes this turmoil. The disorder in the kingdom derives from the fact that the natural order has been challenged by a regicide, the murder of a king, made all the worse because the king has been murdered by his wife and brother. In the course of the play, Hamlet is to act to restore the natural order by avenging his father. The appearance of the Ghost at the beginning of the play shows the degree to which the natural order has been sundered--the dead do not remain in their graves. Hamlet is told what to do by th...