Russkies

Who, when, how long?
Innokenti Smoktunovsky, 1964, 2¼ hr.

What sort of Hamlet?
Siberian.

What's missing?
Presumably about half the lines of the play, since this version, ten minutes shorter than Olivier's, is marvelously unhurried, stopping to dwell on the waves coming to shore, or Ophelia's maids dressing her for Polonius's funeral, or the makeshift construction--two parallel lances, three swords laid across, a banner draped over--of a pallet to carry dead Hamlet in procession, two or three magnificent minutes of silent film after the delivery of the play's final lines. The translation is by Boris Pasternak, but presumably the credit for the extraordinary pacing goes to the director (looking it up now), Grigori Kozintsev.

The approach is in stark contrast to Olivier's: where O boldly slashed three important characters (or two if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are [fairly] counted as one; maybe two and a half?), this production trims at the margins but hangs onto almost everyone (still only one Clown/Gravedigger; and I don't believe we see the ambassadors to Norway; and the guards who first see the Ghost may not have speaking parts: scene 1 is cut, the film beginning with Hamlet galloping to Elsinore and embracing Gertrude, and his first meeting w/ the Ghost ends with him solo, so no demand for secrecy or sharing of his plan to feign an antic disposition. The result is that while you're aware of cuts--"Neither a borrower nor a lender," e.g. (Communist censorship?), and Ham's entire death scene boiled down to "The rest is silence"--you don't see the film as missing entire plot and thematic limbs, as Olivier's does.

There is almost no theology--this omission almost certainly political: no mention by the Ghost of his purgatorial status, no scene with Ham seeing Claudius at prayers and thus forgoing an easy kill. We do have the canon curtailing Ophelia's funeral rite because of her questionable death.

Oh, also: no pirates.

What's changed?
Very little, distinct from the previous issue. Most notable is that we see several scenes only described in the play. We see Ophelia at her sewing when Hamlet comes into her closet and plays out, in dumbshow, almost a dance, the scene she describes to her father in the play (and thus the description is cut). Oh! And before that, she reads, from the back of a small portrait of Ham, his "Doubt thou the stars are fire."

Incidentally, the subtitles are for the most part simply WS, not an attempt to render Pasternak's rendering back into idiomatic (or non-) English. So, when Claudius asks Gertrude for her opinion of Polonius's assertion that Ham's melancholy is down to thwarted love, the subtitle gives her response as "It may be, very like." What the Russian Gert has actually said is "Da." Magnificently rich language, Russian!

We also see Ham, at sea, steal and counterfeit the death warrant R&G are carrying, with the descriptive speech to Horatio, seasoned with the "hoist with his own petard" line to Gert, as voiceover, following a reprise of the Ghost's "Adieu, adieu, remember me." Similarly, a much-truncated "rogue and petty slave" soliloquy is delivered as interior monologue in the presence of the players.

What's odd?
I recall nothing that seemed to violate the spirit of the play or, as with Olivier's prologue, brand the film as the director's work rather than WS's. Moderately odd: Claudius briefly applauds the play before getting it (there's no dumbshow), then leaves in haste, calling for a light only when he reaches the corridor. Ham, who is in general an even icier version of Olivier's character, laughs maniacally while dragging dead Pol from Gert's closet--then cut to the castle's exterior, where Ham's muffled laughter can still be heard. At the duel, Gert shows up only after the action has begun.

The oddest thing for someone who knows about three words of Russian is the subtitling. I've already mentioned the decision for the most part to revert to the original language--nothing wrong with that. But the titles miss a lot: sometimes in dialogue character A's lines will be rendered but character B's not. Since I'm probably as attuned to the play as at any time in my life, having reread it and seen another film version in the past week, it wasn't a problem, but it might mess w/ someone who doesn't have the text fresh in mind.

Flesh is "too too" what?
It's too too cut from the script. Ham doesn't jump into Ophelia's grave, and, oddly, Laertes jumps in while O is still waiting to be lowered into it. Another oddity of that scene: Ham asks "What is the reason you use me thus? I loved you ever" not of Laertes but of dead O.

Ghost?
Bergmanesque, trailing a long black cape in the wind. We see his human eyes briefly. But his first scene is cut, and his presence in Gert's closet is signaled only by a musical crescendo, Ham's face, and Gert's question about why Ham looks on empty air.

Ham-Gert eros?
I'd say no, or at least much less than in the Olivier. Interesting that between her opening embrace of Ham and the scene in her closet, she makes not the slightest attempt to seem conflicted about her situation. But as in the Oliv, she is completely turned against Claudius after the latter scene.

Other people?
Laertes has a bit more gravitas--there's another nice extratextual scene in which he retrieves a presumably heirloom sword from a casket before storming Elsinore with his cronies after learning of his father's death.

Oph--played by the absolutely luminescent Anastasiya Vertinskaya--is infinitely more interesting here than in the Olivier. In her mad scenes she has none of the manic quality that is routinely (one might say textually) brought to play; instead, she seems to be in a fog, as if she's taken a drug whose effects are unfamiliar to her. As in the Oliv, we have the image of her on her back in the water, but here she's at the bottom of a crystal-clear stream, which is carrying away the herbs from the second mad scene. Where the other scene is a little weird, this one is chilling.

In fine, this may or may not be a better Hamlet than Olivier's; it is most certainly a better, more assured film. I guess I haven't mentioned yet (though perhaps have hinted at) the gorgeous b/w cinematography. Another plus is a score by one Dmitri Shostakovitch--wonderful music, but music in service of the film, not itself; some of the best sound, in fact, is silence. Five Yorick's skulls.