Hamlet has been relatively well-served on film, with credible adaptations by such noteworthy directors as Laurence Olivier (1948), Tony Richardson (1969), Franco Zeffirelli (1990),Kenneth Branagh (1996) and Michael Almereyda (1999). I think this is because the play's many challenges--particularly for the lead actor--both fire the imagination of ambitious artists and tend to scare off sometime Shakespeareans, who usually settle for seemingly "easier" plays like Othello and Macbeth. (This is in no way to belittle directors such as Welles and Polanski, of course.) While Hamlet's inexhaustible vein of poetic language would seem to make it the exclusive property of the English-speaking world, one of the most wholly satisfying adaptations is actually Grigory Kozintsev's 1963 Russian-language production, which Facets has recently released stateside on DVD.

Grigori Kozintsev (1905-1973) was a major Soviet filmmaker of the silent era who worked together for many years with Leonid Trauberg as part of the avant-garde FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor) theatrical group during the Twenties. They combined a mechanized performance style with a provocative stew of "low brow" entertainment forms such as the circus and melodrama, and undisguised enthusiasm for American popular culture. This aesthetic is clearly on display in The New Babylon (1929), a satiric vision of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. They adopted a much more conventional style after the rise of socialist realism as the official Soviet aesthetic in the Thirties. This is especially evident with their popular "Maxim" trilogy. After 1945, the two parted ways and Kozintsev went on to direct a series of literary adaptations. While his choice of literary adaptations might seem on the surface like a retreat to artistic safety compared to the more "daring" productions of the Twenties, any such notion is belied by the passion and skill that goes into a film like Hamlet.

Kozintsev and his collaborators are above all concerned with creating an effective piece of cinema, though in no way at the expense of the play itself. Kozintsev's staging of the actors works together beautifully with the editing, Jonas Gricius' arresting black-and-white cinematography and Shostakovich's score, gripping the viewer throughout the film's two-and-a-half hour running time. In contrast, Zeffirelli's version, though well-acted and beautifully photographed, is not as distinctive as a piece of cinema. Laurence Olivier's version could be criticized for its overly reductive Freudian interpretation of the play and for a certain visual monotony that creeps in with all the low-key lighting. Michael Almereyda's film is lean and visually dynamic, but Ethan Hawkes is not quite up to the challenge of the role, especially compared to the great Russian actor Innokenty Smoktunovsky. Kenneth Branagh's version is lavishly mounted and contains the full text of the play--unlike any of the other adaptations mentioned above--but his use of the camera isn't as nimble and sophisticated as Kozintsev's.

For those who understand spoken Russian, Boris Pasternak's now-classic translation into modern Russian works surprisingly well. It inevitably looses some of the distinctive flavor of Shakespeare's language, but it manages to convey the thrust of the drama and provides a strong verbal foundation for the actors, who give uniformly excellent performances. For English-speaking viewers, the subtitles simply reproduce Shakespeare's original text.

Shostakovich's orchestral score deserves special mention, for it is not just a good film score but a fine piece of music in its own right, and one that is wholly characteristic of Shostakovich's mature compositional style. It's also integrated thoughtfully into the film as a whole. For example, the menacing orchestral tutti associated with the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet's father (music that really grabs you by the throat!) is repeated during Hamlet's confrontation with his mother. Here Kozintsev doesn't need to show us the ghost--simply repeating the music cue makes it clear that he has returned to remind Hamlet of his duty. In that way, the music becomes an organic part of the drama. It's also particularly effective during the scene of Ophelia's madness. If I have one criticism in this regard, in a couple places the orchestral texture seems overly heavy and busy when a simpler approach would have had greater impact. Still, this is one of the classic film scores, period.

It appears that Facets has used the same transfer and subtitles as the Russian Cinema Council disc, only with the subtitles embedded in the image and the 16X9 anamorphic transfer switched to a 4X3 letterboxed format. They have also squeezed the 2 1/2 hour film onto a single layer disc, which necessarily increases the amount of digital artifacts. As a consequence, the picture also looks softer and flatter, though it's still acceptable for viewing on an ordinary picture tube. The mono track may sound thin by today's standards, but it's certainly acceptable. Those who already own the superior Russian Cinema Council version, with its generous special features, will want to stick with it. Those who need to go the Facets route should find this disc workable, if not exactly ideal. While the presentation on DVD could have been stronger, Kozintsev's Hamlet is a terrific film that, if anything, improves with repeated viewings. It's great to see this title on DVD at last.

For more information about Hamlet, visit Facets Multi-Media. To order Hamlet, go to TCM Shopping.

by James Steffen