7/20/2023 0 Comments Hamlet full movie wisnletWhat links the film memorably to Stanley Kubrick’s is the way that Hamlet’s battle with his incipient savagery takes place not in the usual murky catacombs but right out in the open, in the ”objective” glare of what could almost be a surgeon’s operating theater. Shot on huge, bold, dazzlingly well-lit sets (the royal court is a hall of mirrors dominated by a hypnotic chessboard floor), it too is about a man led to dementia - and murder - by a ghost preying on his demons. Branagh’s Hamlet is also reminiscent of a horror film, but a very different one: It’s like an Elizabethan version of The Shining. It had the Freudian gothic atmosphere of a ’40s horror film, and Olivier himself seemed to draw the power of his performance right from the shadows, a neurotic viper slithering through the corridors of Elsinore. ![]() Olivier’s Hamlet, filmed in black and white, was a quicksilver nightmare drenched in paranoid gloom. Having invited the comparison, Branagh ensures that any similarity between the two versions ends with the bleach job. ![]() ![]() ![]() Olivier, the greatest Shakespearean actor of the century, is, for Branagh, mentor and rival, an artistic father figure to compete with and ultimately overthrow. The shockingly blond platinum-Nazi hairdo Kenneth Branagh wears in Hamlet makes teasing reference to Laurence Olivier’s shimmery locks in his movie version, released in 1948.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |