Cinema: Olivier's Hamlet

  • Share
  • Read Later

(6 of 8)

She is a sweet-natured, spirited, unaffected girl, and unquestionably a talented one; she also has the makings of a big, popular movie star. She already gets 2,000 fan letters a week. Among them there have already been twelve proposals of marriage, and a proposition from an Indian chiropodist which is the ultimate sort of accolade a movie star must get used to. Would Miss Simmons be so kind, the Indian fan asked, as to send him a photograph of her feet, and a sliver of toenail?

Sidelights & Silences. If Miss Simmons had gone along quietly to Bristol, she could doubtless continue to call her soul—and even her toenails—her own. She might even, in time, become such an artist as Olivier is today. The most moving and gratifying thing in this film is to watch this talented artist, in the prime of his accomplishment, work at one of the most wonderful roles ever written.

In its subtlety, variety, vividness and control, Olivier's performance is one of the most beautiful ever put on film. Much of the time it seems a great one. But a few crucial passages will disappoint some people. There is hardly a line that he speaks, or a gesture he makes, which falls short of shining mastery, in the terms in which he conceives the role. But the conception is in some important ways limited. It is clear that Olivier has a laudable distaste for the pompous, the pansy and the pathological Princes who have so often dishonored the poem. He sees—and plays —Hamlet as a brave, resolute, delicate-souled man who was required, as Goethe said, to do the one thing on earth which happened to be impossible for that particular man to do. But Olivier hardly begins to suggest why (nobody has ever done more than suggest it), and he does not richly enough suggest the sidelights and terrifying silences within the greatest of the music Hamlet speaks.

Once or twice, as in the dancelike shouting of The play's the thing, he verges on hollow flamboyance; and he may fall to the floor once too often. But such excesses are rare and disarming; mostly, insofar as he errs, he errs nobly on the side of restraint. He pours out the marvelous liquids of the first soliloquy (0! that this too, too solid flesh would melt) very tenderly and melodiously, but with little of the anguish which lies half-awakened beneath the bitter mildness. To be, or not to be is spoken in a stoical quietude and levelness, but the subtler possibilities are not very clearly realized in those definitive, eroded lines; and with that insufficient realization their deepest humanity, along with their deepest art, slips away, much as the suicidal dagger slips from his hand and slants into the sea. In the terrific scene with the Queen, magnificent as he is, Olivier seems to stop at the brink of the cyclic, self-devouring, sadistic desperation which Shakespeare so clearly wrote into that page.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8