A Palimpsest for Olivier’s Hamlet

A Palimpsest for Olivier’s H am let Bernice W. Kliman A preproduction script of a film offers a unique opportunity for the critic to probe the creative process of filmmaking. Where script and finished film are consonant, one may admire the acuity of the scriptwriter’s visual imagination; where script and film are dissonant, one may observe the struggle for actualization. Upon a first reading, the preproduction script of Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) strikingly evokes images from the film. Not only are settings, textual transpositions, and cuts already detailed in the script but so are many of the most telling details of camera placement and movement and character action and feeling: for example, the pulses of the camera in and out of focus that accent the heartbeat sounds accompanying the arrival of the ghost;l the zip pans that imitate Marcellus’ eye movements as he sees the ghost (Li); Hamlet’s view of Ophelia turning away from him (I.iii); Ophelia’s hand at her cheek at the close of the closet inset (ILi); her turnings away from and toward the camera, her gestures and emotions in the nunnery scene (Ill.i); the dramatic upward movement of the camera after the nunnery scene leading to the “To be” segment (though the film doubles the sequence); Ophelia’s slidings into sanity for brief moments in her mad scenes (IV.v); the alternating closeups and track­ ings back from Claudius and Laertes during the triple-edged murder plot (IV.vii); the gestures and nuances of the Osric scene (V.ii), and more.2 Exciting as it is to recognize the brilliance of the script­ writer’s achievement, his ability to mold the course of the film through his words, it is even more rewarding to consider the inevitable differences between script and film. These, like the sketch beneath the oil painting, like the palimpsest beneath the BERNICE W. KLIMAN, co-founder and co-editor of the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, has published in Hamlet Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly, Medium Aevum, and other journals. 243 244 Comparative Drama finished poem, point to shaping intentions. A decision to trust the audience (and so avoid obviousness and unnecessary under­ lining), the need to make storyline and characterizations clear, and a desire to heighten—these motives seem to have inspired most changes from script to film. The script instructed the audience unnecessarily, mainly through sound effects and superimpositions. We can be grateful that the ghost segment of the closet scene did not follow the script in having loud heartbeats (representing the ghost) from Hamlet’s point of view and their absence from the queen’s. Rather, the film only once shows the presence for him and the absence for her of a faint glimmer of the ghost. Since the acting itself shows that only Hamlet sees and hears the ghost, the film can dispense with a redundant and contrived bit of business. The sound track also omits the crack of breaking bough and splash that punctuate Gertrude’s words for the inset of Ophelia’s drowning. (In a triumph of good taste over cliché, we are also spared the sight of Ophelia sinking, her hand above the water for an instant before it too disappears. Instead, we see her float­ ing by out of the frame, singing a little song.) More importantly, the film’s last scene omits the final heartbeats called for in the script, ending with William Walton’s death march. Recalling the ghost at the end would have suggested, as does a similar recol­ lection in Kozintsev’s Hamlet, that the ghost has achieved its goal, has won somehow. Omitting these ghost sounds, the film invites us to contemplate Hamlet’s death rather than his father’s triumph, if indeed the end is what the ghost had envisioned. The film fortunately skips several superimpositions called for in the script: of Hamlet’s head while we see the garden inset depicting his father’s death (shot 92), of the ghost’s face to replace the face of the dead King Hamlet right after the garden inset (shot 93), and of Ophelia’s head during the closet scene (shot 106). The audience will not...