Hamlet
Williamson as ‘Hamlet’:
New York Times, 22nd
December 1969, Roger Greenspun
Despite
the text in the newspaper ad, “To think own thing be true …,” the Tony
Richardson ‘Hamlet,’ which opened yesterday at the Cinema Rendezvous, makes no
particular claims to modernity or to
contemporary relevance. And despite the illustration for the same ad, showing
Hamlet (Nicol Williamson) about to nibble the
up-slung shoulder of Ophelia (Marianne Faithfull) it
isn’t a sexy ‘Hamlet,’ either. The ad wins my vote for the most tasteless of
the year in its field (always a very hot competition). But the movie upon which
it is based is a traditional and bowdlerized version of Shakespeare’s play.
The
text has been cut to ribbons. Although Nicol
Williamson talks very fast, this version, running 114 minutes – as against 153
minutes for the 1948 Laurence Olivier film of ‘Hamlet’ – eliminates some of his
role, much of everybody else’s role, and
almost all of what serves to locate physically and to amplify the action. As a
result, Hamlet’s presence is magnified out of all proper relationship to the
world around him.
And
since the film is shot perhaps 95 per cent in fairly extreme close-up, it is
not so much as his presence as his head that continually dominates the screen. ‘Hamlet’
from the neck up (with the occasional Ophelia from the neck down, to
acknowledge Miss Faithfull’s charming cleavage)
offers less, even to the mind’s eye, than you might imagine.
The
production is full of ideas.
However,
the production only succeeds in making it look as if all of ‘Hamlet’ took place
at night. And at certain moments, for example the appearance of the Ghost (who
does not appear, but is represented by particularly bright light, some
science-fiction movie flying-saucer music and Nicol
Williamson’s pre-recorded voice), it achieves, for all its gestures towards
spare efficiency, a kind of square theatrical ridiculousness.
People
whose opinion I greatly respect tell me that the Williamson-Richardson stage
production of ‘Hamlet,’ which I did not see, was both vital and moving. I can
believe that, because the one piece of outright stage business in the movie,
the play within the play, is handled with great style and intelligence. But in
his approach to film,
Except
for Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet and Mark Dignam’s very fine sly Polonius, the major players range
from the nondescript to the unspeakable. Williamson talks with what sounds like
an intentional lower-class accent; Claudius seems to have immigrated
from
Williamson
has never seemed to me a good actor for the movies (just as Tony Richardson has
never seemed a good director of movies), working always with a kind of projected intelligence that may carry in
the theater but that in film merely screens the person
from the camera. There is nothing especially distinctive about his face, he is further hampered by having to act with a Horatio
(Gordon Jackson) whom he more closely resembles than, in this production,
Rosencrantz resembles Guildenstern. Nevertheless, the mind that informs the
performance reads the lines, and at its pleasantest the production is
distinguished by many original and right-sounding decisions about speeches.
Playing
on the same bill is a 5-minute animated short by Ryan Larkin, called ‘Walking,’
in its imaginative spaciousness and fine observation – literally, of people
walking across or up and down the screen – it offers a reasonable clue to the
quality of the nine-tenths of life
excluded from the Tony Richardson ‘Hamlet.’
Return to
Production Information