No John-a-dreams, this

In 1964, just as he was about to reach the heights of gossip notoriety, Richard Burton starred as Hamlet on Broadway, in a production directed by John Gielgud, whose own performances of the role stressed the beauty of Shakespeare's line. The production immediately sold out, so the producers decided to enact what passed for "pay-per-view" in that day: one live performance was filmed, and presented simultaneously in movie theaters across the U.S. on one night. Then all the prints were to be destroyed. However, Burton kept one print for himself, and, of course--and thankfully--it's made its way to DVD.



The film was shot in black-and-white, on a stage devoid of scenery, with the minimum of props (and those used are ratty in the extreme), the actors wearing casual contemporary clothes. Gielgud wanted the words to shine forth, so he called it a "final run-through" Hamlet, with nothing to distract the audience from the text--most of which he used. The cast, besides Burton, was mainly American, with the notable exception of the Ghost, which was shown as a monstrous shadow with Gielgud's voice. Alfred Drake, normally a musical lead, played Claudius, and not too badly (except he died like a punk, as Samuel L. Jackson might put it); the most famous American was Hume Cronyn (pictured in the still), who got quite a few laughs as Polonius.

That fact points out the strength and weakness of the film. It is a performance, with a live audience, and thus is one of the few presentations on film of Hamlet as an actual drama on a stage. Unfortunately, the film is directed more like a film, in that during Hamlet's soliloquies, Burton is shot in various forms of close-up; scenes with two characters are done in a two-shot, with the entire stage shown only to establish a scene or when absolutely necessary (as during the final duel). An audience sees Hamlet in the theater as an entire image, as it were; if an actor is alone on stage, it is up to him or her to make us look and make our own mental close-ups.

And Burton does this chiefly with his voice, although at this stage of his life he was surprisingly graceful, and had not entered that degree of alcoholism that prevented him from holding a gun steadily in Where Eagles Dare, thus prompting co-star Clint Eastwood to do volunteer to do all the shooting. As I've mentioned a few entries ago, Hamlet is a role well suited to Burton's strengths, particularly his voice, with a superlative control of range both in loudness and pitch, biting the words off: "to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets," delivered in throaty growl, for instance. A friend of mine saw this performance in New York, and said Burton was amazing, which I can well imagine. His Hamlet is angry, intelligent, and witty.

My students generally do not like this version, but it provides magnificent examples of stage acting to contrast with movie acting, as well as a performance that some have called one of the two best Hamlets of the second half of the twentieth century. The other? That's for next time.