Fri 17 Feb 2012
A Review by Dan Stumpf: HAMLET AT ELSINORE (1964).
Posted by Steve under Films: Drama/Romance , Reviews[3] Comments
HAMLET AT ELSINORE. TV movie, BBC, 15 November 1964. Christopher Plummer, Robert Shaw, Alec Clunes, Michael Caine, June Tobin, Jo Maxwell Muller, Dyson Lovell. Based on the play by William Shakespeare. Director: Philip Saville.
My annual Hamlet-fest last month had its moments, including the 1964 Hamlet at Elsinore with Christopher Plummer backed up by Robert Shaw as a shrewd, virile Claudius, Michael Caine [a year before The Ipcress File] a sardonic Horatio, and Donald Sutherland essaying a Norwegian accent as Fortinbras!
Quite well done, with some understandable echoes of John Barrymore in Plummer’s performance: he dresses like Barrymore, adopts some Barrymore elocutions, and there are moments in his mad scenes that recall Oscar Jaffe in The 20th Century.
There’s also a wonderful twist on the Nunnery Scene: Ophelia is not aware her dad and Claudius are spying on her and Hamlet till the scene ends. And when Polonius tells her they heard everything, Robert Shaw flashes her a smile so nasty he should have won a prize for it.
I also read Henry Treece’s 1966 The Green Man, a retelling of the Danish legends that formed the basis of Hamlet. It recasts the part as Conan the Barbarian, and has its virtues, including vividly-evoked time and place, but overall I was disappointed.
And you?
February 18th, 2012 at 10:21 pm
This version of Hamlet is one of which I’ve never heard. It sounds fascinating.
British TV produced filmed plays in the 50’s through the 70’s by the hundreds. The few I’ve had a chance to see over the years have been outstanding. It is clearly a huge cultural resource.
February 19th, 2012 at 12:32 am
The good news is that the BBC is releasing a lot of their vintage material on DVD, whatever they have in their archives after dumping or erasing a good percentage of it at the time (or so I’ve read). The even better news is that HAMLET AT ELSINORE is one of the productions that survived, and it was released on DVD last October.
A piece of trivia I spotted on IMDB: “Other than a 1910 silent version, this is the only production of HAMLET (so far) to actually be filmed in Elsinore, Denmark, where most of the play takes place.”
February 19th, 2012 at 7:24 am
About two years ago the US Library of Congress rediscovered a huge stash of classic British TV drama from between 1957 and 1969. BBC and ITV had sent it to them, but the Library staff had forgotten about it! There are some real gems there, including a complete series from 1966 called THIRTEEN AGAINST FATE (adaptions of the best of Simenon’s non-Maigret short stories), which we can only hope will be shown again on satellite or DVD.
For many years Equity, the British actors union, made it much harder for programmes to be shown more than twice. This, and the cost of storing film and video tape, meant that it wasn’t deemed worthwhile to keep them. Thankfully, a lot of stuff was kept, and I we now have the opportunity to see things like Kenneth More’s series of FATHER BROWN, or Hugh Burden as Edgar Wallace’s sleuth J. G. Reeder.