Hamlet

Graceless, monotonous, unfaithful to its source, Hamlet is less tragedy than catastrophe in the hands of Grigory Kozintzev. This is far inferior to the Olivier and Burton filmed Hamlets, and it is less relevant to Shakespeare's art than both Orson Welles's diced-up Othello, which took its script from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and Sergei Youtkevich's Othello, which like the present film could display its poetry only in subtitles.

Opening credits label the enterprise "after" Shakespeare. It is possible that Boris Pasternak's translation aims at rough dramatic paraphrase of the sort Robert Lowell calls "imitation." In any case, it undoubtedly stands on its own merits, none of which, unfortunately, will be intelligible to any but Slavic majors.

I suspect that the subtitles we are given (which quite properly reproduce Shakespeare rather than re-translating Pasternak) are in many cases non-literal. If they are literal, the staging of this film is preposterous beyond belief. As Polonius delivers his parting advice to Laertes, and as we read his banal, senile lines, what we see is a purposeful, vigorous man hustling his son to the door in no uncertain manner. When Hamlet first plays mad for Polonius, his final "Except my life," appears to be addressed to the old man's parting back. It just doesn't add up.

Shostakovich's score swells at all the wrong places. When Hamlet confronts Ophelia "mad," there is a chance for some very sinister stuff: a glaze-eyed Aryan appears, bearing down on her. But up jumps a nervous little Dragnet theme to turn it ludicrous. When Hamlet asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, "Am I easier to fret than a pipe?" the scene is played in heavy silence that exaggerates its portent. But presumbaly that's the director's doing, as, unfortunately, is a lot else.

For a start, why does he cram the sets so full? Courtiers buzz around by the dozens, trailing phrases of French and German. For Russians their faces are remarkably dull; compare them to the beautiful hordes of extras in a Dovshenko. And they get in the way. When Ophelia comes on singing "Hey, nonny nonny," she has to bull her way through a battalion of military types. One thinks of the brave USO girls visiting the front.

And where did Kozintzev pick up his pretentious way of dealing with objects? After human beings have deserted the frame his camera hangs on chairs, clock parts, a fire. These gratuitous images are less irritating then his heavy-handed roping-in of the elements, the ocean he begins and ends with, the hills that his pan zigzags across after Hamlet talks to the ghost of his father.

This is not a silent film, but most crises are followed by melodramatic reaction shots. Count the seconds whenever an interlocutor throws hands in air. One of Hamlet's reactions, after he's thrown down his mother in her chamber, lasts even after a cut. When Hamlet asks Ophelia, "Shall I lie in your lap?" we cut to a bevy of damsels cowering in unison like chorines.

Let us politely avoid mentioning that Mr. Kozintzev composes for wide-screen as if it were small, sometimes filling the side quarters with people or walls so that he's left with a small screen to compose on in the middle. But let us land on three of his gross blunders--one frequent. That one is the swerving track inward, which he uses as an illiterate uses exclamation points. It makes you feel like a lame third-baseman charging a bunt.

Two more simple errors: when Hamlet says, "But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue," the image shows his hairline, and drops to his face only as an after-thought; then, when horsemen are galloping through the Pampas, one of those frame-corners Kozintzev has been ignoring (the lower left one) picks up the highway the camera's trucking along.

There is something to be learned from such grammatical errors, but at heart this film is a long yawn.