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Unluckiest of all, the audience is allowed to know less than it might about the Prince himself (nobody can ever know enough about him). It sees too little of his dreadful uncertainty, his numbed amazement over his own drifting, his agonized self-vilification. It understands too little of him as "passion's slave." Between the cutting and the conception of the role, it is small wonder that when, early in the play, Olivier comes to The time is out of joint; 0 cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right! he all but throws the crucial couplet away.
But within his chosen limits, Olivier and his associates have done excellently—from grandiose poetic conceptions (e.g., the frightfully amplified heartbeats which introduce the Ghost) to clever little captures of mood (e.g., the cold, discreet clapping of gloved hands which applaud the half-drunken King). The film is built with a fine sense of form and line, and some of the editing worked out very well. Hamlet's big scene with Ophelia (Get thee to a nunnery) comes immediately before, rather than after, his most famous soliloquy (To be, or not to be). Thanks to this transposition, and to the manner of playing, the possibility of Ophelia's madness is planted early, its causes are enriched, and Hamlet soars to his soliloquy with acute, immediate reasons for contemplating suicide.
Elegance of Line. The play-within-a-play is handled with high elegance and tension, in sinister dumb show, accompanied by the snarling archaic charm of the music William Walton composed for the occasion. The camera, always holding the mimes at distant center, steals in a lordly semicircle past the enormous heads of the guilty, the guileless, and the pitilessly watchful; and rising whispers, like leaves in a storm-foreboding wind, underline the shock and horror of this deadly piece of court satire. From there on, the film arches in unbroken grandeur and intensity.
The Graveyard Scene gets down to earth as it never can on the stage. The whole dueling sequence is splendidly shaped, dipping from the high quietness of Hamlet's great words with Horatio (The readiness is all) into the steely clamor of as slashing a piece of swordplay as the movies have offered since the prime of the elder Fairbanks.
Ordinarily the stage, at the close of Hamlet, is so heavy with corpses that it looks like a hold full of haddock. But Olivier's camera threads among the dead & dying with special tact.
As for the asides and soliloquies, Olivier gives them on the sound track but plays them as mental monologue. His lips move with the words only when he would think aloud. This device is worked even more deftly in Hamlet than in Henry V, and has already become as standard in movies as the closeup. Shakespeare's descriptive and narrative speeches are pictured on the screen, and by this device, Olivier sometimes even manages to enhance the language. Ophelia's description of Hamlet's "madness" (As I was sewing in my closet) gives the two of them a lovely passage of pantomime, never played before. Ophelia's drowning (There is a willow grows aslant a brook) is derived from the Millais painting, and improves on it.