Hamlet on screen
The full conflated text of Hamlet can run to four hours in performance, so most film adaptations are heavily cut, sometimes by removing entire characters.
"[8] In contrast, Jean Simmons' Ophelia is destroyed by Hamlet's treatment of her in the nunnery scene: ending with her collapsing on the staircase in what Deborah Cartmell calls the position of a rape victim.
The camera frequently looks through bars and grates, and J. Lawrence Guntner has suggested that the image of Ophelia in an iron farthingale symbolises the fate of the sensitive and intelligent in the film's tough political environment.
[13] Douglas Brode has criticised the film for presenting a Hamlet who barely pauses for reflection: with most of the soliloquies cut, it is circumstances, not an inner conflict, that delay his revenge.
The film, a departure from big-budget Hollywood renditions of classics, was made with a small budget and a very minimalist set, consisting of Renaissance fixtures and costumes in a dark, shadowed space.
The version proved to be a critical and commercial failure: partly due to the decision to market the film as a tragic love story to teenage audiences who were still flocking to Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet, and yet to cast opposite Marianne Faithfull's Ophelia the "balding, paunchy Williamson, who looked more like her father than her lover.
"[15] Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 film of Hamlet stars Mel Gibson as the title character, with Glenn Close as Gertrude, Alan Bates as Claudius and Helena Bonham Carter as Ophelia.
[a] To this end, he cast the Hollywood actor Mel Gibson - then famous for the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon films - in the title role.
[9] J. Lawrence Guntner has suggested that Zeffirelli's cinematography borrows heavily from the action film genre that made Gibson famous, noting that its average shot length is less than six seconds.
[20] J. Lawrence Guntner has written that the casting of Glenn Close as Mel Gibson's mother (only eleven years older than he was, in life, and then famous as the psychotic "other woman" in Fatal Attraction) highlights the incest theme, leaving "little to our post-Freudian imagination".
[17] and Deborah Cartmell notes that Close and Gibson simulate sex in the closet scene, and "she dies after sexually suggestive jerking movements, with Hamlet positioned on top of her, his face covered with sweat".
[9] In contrast to Zeffirelli's heavily cut Hamlet of a few years before, Kenneth Branagh adapted, directed, and starred in a version containing every word of Shakespeare's play, running for around four hours.
"[23] Branagh chose Victorian era costuming and furnishings, using Blenheim Palace, built in the early 18th century, as Elsinore Castle for the external scenes.
[25] The film makes frequent use of flashbacks to dramatise elements that are not performed in Shakespeare's text, such as Hamlet's sexual relationship with Kate Winslet's Ophelia.
"[37] Kevin Kline directed and starred in a production of Hamlet for the New York Shakespeare Festival which was televised in 1990 as part of the Great Performances anthology series on PBS.
[44] Strange Brew (1983) is a movie featuring the comic fictional Canadians Bob and Doug MacKenzie (played by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas).
As stand-ins for the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they investigate the manufacture of poisonous beer at the Elsinore Brewery where the prior owner has mysteriously died, and is now run by his brother Claude.
[44] Tom Stoppard directed a 1990 film version of his own play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in the title roles, which incorporates scenes from Hamlet starring Iain Glen as the Dane; Douglas Brode regards it as less successful on screen than it had been on stage, due to the preponderance of talk over action.
Based on the novel by Lisa Klein, it stars Daisy Ridley as Ophelia, George MacKay as Hamlet, Naomi Watts as Gertrude, and Clive Owen as Claudius.
It follows the two directors as they stage a production of Hamlet within the video game Grand Theft Auto Online, with characters represented by virtual avatars.
In Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 To Be or Not to Be, the title soliloquy becomes a subtle running gag: whenever Jack Benny's character—the pompous actor Joseph Tura—begins the speech, a member of the audience loudly walks out: usually to make love to Tura's wife, played by Carole Lombard.
[c][51] In the 1955 film Prince of Players, a biography of Edwin Booth, Richard Burton appears in the title role and performs several scenes from Hamlet.
The 1969 Robert Bresson film A Gentle Woman has the wife and husband attending a performance; in which we see the character Elle engrossed in the final scene of the play.
