However, it proved controversial among Shakespearean purists, who felt that Olivier had made too many alterations and excisions to the four-hour play by cutting one-and-a-half-hours' worth of content.

When the court has left the Great Hall, Hamlet fumes over the hasty marriage, muttering to himself the words "and yet, within a month!"

Hamlet then hires a group of wandering stage performers, requesting that they enact the play The Murder of Gonzago for the king.

On discovering that he has in fact, killed the eavesdropping Polonius instead, Hamlet is only mildly upset, and he continues to confront his mother.

In his absence, however, Ophelia goes mad over Hamlet's rejection and the idea that her own sweetheart has killed her father, and she drowns, supposedly committing suicide.

Horatio, horrified by all this, orders that Hamlet be given a decent funeral, and the young prince's body is taken away while the Danish court kneels and the cannons of Elsinore fire off a peal of ordnance in respect.

However, for many years it was falsely assumed, even in film reference books, that John Gielgud had recorded the voice of the Ghost.

On one he had recorded fifty women shrieking; on another the groans of as many men; a third consisted of a dozen violinists scraping their bows across the strings on a single screeching note.

These various tracks had then to be blended in different volumes and intensity until they produced a noise which seemed to him to resemble – on what authority is uncertain – 'the lid of hell being opened'.

This sound, Olivier remembered, had been used by Jean-Louis Barrault in a stage production in Paris; he made it doubly effective on the screen by bringing the camera in and out of focus to synchronize with the pulsing.

[11]The cinematography by Desmond Dickinson makes use of the deep focus photography previously popularised in films directed by William Wyler and Orson Welles.

[2][14] The film's opening with Olivier's voiceover of his own interpretation of the play, was criticised as reductive: "This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.

"[15] Olivier excised the "political" elements of the play (entirely cutting Fortinbras, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) in favour of an intensely psychological performance, partly to save time.

John Gielgud took much the same approach years later by leaving out Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Fortinbras from his 1951 radio production of the play, broadcast on the program Theatre Guild on the Air.

Gielgud also followed the lead of Olivier's film version by giving the final lines of the play to Horatio instead of Fortinbras.

[17] Olivier heightened the Oedipal overtones of the play by having Hamlet kiss his mother lovingly on the lips several times during the film.

The website's critics consensus reads, "A well-executed labor of love from star and director Laurence Olivier, Hamlet not only proved that Shakespeare could be successfully adapted to the big screen, it paved the way for further cinematic interpretations.

Hamlet was the only film to have won both the Golden Lion and the Academy Award for Best Picture until The Shape of Water in 2017, which was followed by Nomadland three years later.

Over the years, however, it has lost some of its status, especially in competition with the unabridged 1996 adaptation, which many critics now consider superior, as well as the 1994 animated film The Lion King which was also based on Hamlet.

Noted film critic Pauline Kael asserted that even if you feel that certain scenes should be done differently, when has the rest of the play been done so well?

"[29] Hamlet was the second of Olivier's Shakespeare films to be telecast on American television – the first was Richard III, which was given an afternoon rather than a prime-time showing by NBC on 11 March 1956, the same day that it premiered in cinemas in the U.S. ABC gave the Olivier Hamlet a prime time showing in December 1956, but like many theatrical films shown on television during that era, it was split into two 90-minute halves and telecast over a period of two weeks rather than being shown on one evening.