Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet was made four years after his rousingly patriotic Henry V (1944), and is a very different proposition. Unsurprisingly, given the tone and content of the play, the overall mood is that of brooding introspection – tellingly, in a phrase not in Shakespeare’s original, Olivier opens by telling us that it is “the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind”, foregrounding the film’s central theme, a neat metaphor for the uncertainty of the immediate postwar years. He also largely eliminates the play’s political intrigue: Fortinbras is banished, and so too are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – the three characters most indelibly associated with the world outside Elsinore. These cuts focus attention on the play’s central theme: the relationship between Hamlet, his lover Ophelia, mother Gertrude and stepfather Claudius.
