Hamlet (1948): Eitan's Take

The four adaptations of Hamlet from the 90’s – Kenneth Branagh’s, Mel Gibson’s, Ethan Hawkes’, and The Lion King – cannot hold a candle to Laurence Olivier’s, which is forever enshrined as the sovereign version of Shakespeare’s (and, probably, humanity’s) greatest tragedy. Among the chief reasons are the cinematography, the color (or the lack thereof), and the beyond belief performance of Olivier in the title role. Swathed in deep blacks, the print is a wonder to behold; each inky frame carries with it the pall of existential dread that a color version, and even a great stage version, could not capture. Scenes such as Hamlet’s first encounter with his father’s ghost and Ophelia’s elegantly twisted death are shot with such an attention to detail and the complexity of human emotion that they are almost surreal. The whole film is rather ethereal, and several of Olivier’s directorial decisions, such as his excision of most of the supporting cast (even beloved stalwarts like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are shockingly nowhere to be found) and the elimination of redundant or obvious soliloquies, do incredible justice to the overall mood and theme of the play by simplifying the whole proceeding. This serves to make it more accessible to new audiences of Hamlet, and also to make it tauter, more macabre, and more twisted and shocking. While it’s easy to watch it and, at some points, to shout out “Hey, he just edited out the ENTIRE monologue about how he will ensnare the conscience of the king,” it’s equally easy to watch it and admire the way Olivier pares down the familiar story to its most essential plot elements and move a four-hour story along at a speed fast enough to enjoy, but slow enough to allow reflection; I can even see how its camerawork, thematic explorations, and composition inspired the work of filmmakers like Bergman and Resnais.

And then, of course, there’s Olivier’s performance, which might be one of the best in cinema’s history. Having seen him in the throes of bizarre obsession just a few Oscar seasons earlier in Rebecca, it was interesting to see him assume a younger and more naïve role. He takes on Hamlet with incredible skill, and never slips into the comically-overdoing-it pit that so many Shakespearean actors fall prey to. He is simultaneously morbid, thoughtful, angered, heavy-hearted, and light on his feet. Olivier is definitely not reinventing this character from scratch; he merely plays it so true to the source material, and so thoroughly and emotionally, that you feel as though new life has been breathed into tired and overused lines (“To be or not to be,” “Alas, poor Yorick,” etc.). Modern actors revere Brando and Hepburn for their camera-ready simmer, but they should probably look further back to Olivier for a lesson in approaching complex and overwhelming roles with subtlety and ingenuity. I had seen this film once before, in an English class, but seeing it again in this more unique context has lent me an even more sincere appreciation for the dark and powerful form of this almost perfect Best Picture winner. 9/10.

Hamlet (1948): Shira's Take

What an empty interpretation of Hamlet. The castle had very little furniture, and the only thing visible onscreen aside from people throughout the movie was mist. It felt like its emptiness was intended to make the audience fully understand how rotten the state really was in Denmark. Also, Laurence Olivier played Hamlet so numbly. His performance was completely different from any other Hamlet I've seen. Most people play him angry and crazy, but Olivier's subtleties were really the best thing about the movie. My serious problem about it was Olivier's editing job of the play. I'm sorry, but it is NOT acceptable to cut ANY portion of the "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy, and Hamlet just yelling, "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king!" was totally pathetic. And instead, they gave us 15 straight minutes of insane Ophelia, and the "Speak the speech I pray you" scene in entirety. I didn't like Polonius. Beyond just being an annoying character, I think of him as a pompous jerk, but in this he was more clueless and bumbling.

Two memorable shots: 1. The gravedigger casts aside Yorick's skull, and Hamlet's shadow approaches to engulf it. 2. The camera slowly revolves around the room during the play within the play, showing the audience members' reactions, finally ending on Claudius freaking out.

Notes to myself: THE FOP MESSENGER WAS SO GOOD. 9/10

Gentleman's Agreement (1947): Shira's Take

Disclaimer: I'm sick and very tired, so this is probably all jumbly and nonsensical:

Meh. I'm sure this was much more relevant 60 years ago. But now, though I'm sure anti-Semitism exists in New York in one way or another, New York is SUCH a Jewish city. Everyone loves bagels and speaks Americanized Yiddish, and there are kosher delis on every block in Manhattan. To modernize it, instead of thinking about it in terms of anti-Semitism, I instead thought about it in terms of homophobia (probably inspired by the LOGO Presidential Forum we watched earlier this evening). Homophobia is still very relevant, especially in the way anti-Semitism was portrayed in this movie. The classic Seinfeld bit, "Not that there's anything wrong with that," defines the democratic homophobia of today just as, "Some of my best friends are Jewish," was the democratic anti-Semitism of 1947. These people have no problem with Jews. Beyond that, they have a problem with people who DO have a problem with Jews. It's just, they will never express that. And they will still have completely different expectations of Jews than Christians. Hell, I'm Jewish, and I stereotype Jews just the same. It seems silly to get into my political viewpoints on here, so I won't.

It's interesting how Elia Kazan made this progressive movie with a message about how everyone should be treated equally, but he sold out his friends during the Red Scare. It's also interesting how at one point the concept of homosexuality was danced around (I don't remember exactly what was said, but it was something subtle about how all the good men are either married or don't like women). This is the second Kazan movie I've seen that dances around it, the other being A Streetcar Named Desire, which famously ignored Blanche's husband's homosexuality. On another Kazan-related note, I am seriously looking forward to On the Waterfront, which is totally better than Gentleman's Agreement was.

Anyway, Gregory Peck pwned this movie, which gave it extra points in my book. I liked the character of his son, mainly because he showed the juxtaposition of educated adults (who end up prejudiced) against innocent kids (who have no reason to be prejudiced yet). In short, the movie was boring, but fine. Notes to myself: Nobody should ever start a sentence with the word darling. 7/10 (would have been 6, but I just love Gregory Peck so much)

Gentleman's Agreement (1947): Eitan's Take

Looking back on the two decades of films we have watched so far, a clear trend is emerging. About half of them are about characters too laid back to get caught up in the affairs of the world -- the empty souls in Grand Hotel, the lame assholes in Cavalcade, Gable's smarmy and aimless huckster in It Happened One Night, the play-it-cool grandaddy in You Can't Take it With You, the low-key priest in Going My Way, and the domesticated folks of Mrs. Miniver and Best Years. The other half, the more important half, are about frustratingly obsessed, nearly egomaniacal people, driven to madness and extreme behavior by the stirring of a strange part of their souls -- Yancey in Cimarron, Christian and Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, Flo Ziegfeld, Emile Zola, Scarlett O'Hara, Laurence Olivier and the maid in Rebecca, Don Birman in The Lost Weekend, and now Phil Green in Elia Kazan's simplistic but ultimately rewarding Gentleman's Agreement. 1947 was the height of Jewish involvement in Hollywood, and it's no surprise that they picked a scathing and insightful film about anti-Semitism for the big prize. If the film came out today, I have no doubt it would still win. The obsession of Phil Green, played marvelously and with real craftmanship by Gregory Peck (swoon), is in cracking the hidden code of anti-Semitism and driving it out by exposing it not as a bigotry founded on false premises, but as a bigotry perpetuated by false and hypocritical enablers.

The film is too simplistic in its expectation that Mr. Green would automatically become the victim of endless acts and implications of hatred toward Judaism just because he mentions it ever so slightly in front of questionable company, and as a Jew and a longtime scholar of anti-Semitism, I think that the film fails to earn a total suspension of disbelief on my part. For one thing, Green never even comes to terms with potential rationale for anti-Semitism -- even though there really is none, and anti-Semitism is almost 100% irrational, he should have at least questioned this once in the film -- he merely decries it as the hobby of publicly decent/privately despicable white Christians, too comfortable with their own sense of superiority. The film also never mentions the Holocaust, which is just ridiculous. 6 million Jews mass murdered in the name of anti-Semitism just five years earlier, and nary a peep from the lips of any one of the characters (especially the wacky Jewish scientist and Phil's pragmatic Jewish friend David)? Please. Not to mention the fact that this film, which purports to be and often succeeds at being a beacon of hope for a renewal of freedom and equality in America, was directed by a thuggish scumbag who sold out his own friends and colleagues by offering up names by the dozens during Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunt. Kudos to him for crafting a smart and worthwhile script into a classy, humanistic, and insightful film about a religion he didn't even belong to; shame on him for earning an Oscar for it and squandering its noble message for his own self-interest.

This worthwhile film, which mostly hits the mark, earns an 8/10

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946): Eitan's Take

The Best Years of Our Lives blows the lid off of "The Greatest Generation" in two profound and contradictory ways: first, it shows us that the generation -- long known to be obsessed with its own stature and role in history -- was filled with mundane and shortsighted little folks just like you and me, lost in the world, dealing with typical challenges like finding jobs, falling in love with the right and wrong people, and approaching the future with both caution and excitement. And, secondly, it shows us that these people were not like my generation at all; tortured by the global inhumanity of war, they focused inwards, too caught up in their own selfish interests to engage with the world in a progressive or intellectual way. The film, following intertwining lives of three men -- one from the Air Force, one from the Navy, and one from the Army -- in the months after their return from the not-so-front-lines of WWII is an ambitious project, in that it tries to capture the entire essence of a certain place and time (the foreplay leading up to the reproductive madness of the Baby Boom), but it's crippled by how dated its ideas, characterizations, and central issues have become.

Of course, there are wars in every generation, and I understand the plethora of great Vietnam films more than I understand The Best Years of Our Lives because our country is still fighting demons dating back to that war (see: 2004 Election), and we still see its aftershocks in film, art, literature, politics, and war. I went into this film with a great load of hype surrounding it, and on an artistic level, I was truly not disappointed -- the performance of Harold Russell as amputee Homer Parrish is particularly great, with its dark subtlety and deep pathos, the cinematography and writing is uniformly excellent, and scenes like the assault in the ice cream shop and Al's drunken speech to his banking partners were laden with both curiosity and frustration about the new role of Americans in the global community -- but I felt oddly unmoved by the whole exercise, as though all of these events were just too far back for me to even grasp, let alone appreciate. It's great art, no doubt, and as an icon of its generation (it is to the 40's what The Graduate and Easy Rider are to the 60's, Coming Home and Nashville are the the 70's, American Beauty is to the 90's) it is a towering representative of all that the Academy must have wanted to reward in the crucial rebuilding years following WWII. Because I admire its rich characterization and powerful exploration of the psyches of new and unwilling veterans, I feel compelled to like it. Nevertheless, I have to admit that it just didn't click with me the way I expected it to. I will leave this film to a bygone generation and award it a respectable 7/10.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946): Shira's Take

Another William Wyler WWII movie. Unlike Mrs. Miniver, though, Best Years followed the intertwining stories of three men who fought in the war (one by sea, one by land, and one by air) coming home to their very different lives. Homer Parrish (played by Howard Russell, who truly was a double-amputee and who Wyler recruited after seeing him in an army training film) has lost his hands, and with them, he assumes, any possibility at a normal life. Frederic March won an Oscar for best actor as Al Stephenson, and my only complaint about that fact is that he was such an underdeveloped character. Aside from telling the viewer he is a drunk and doesn't want his daughter to be a homewrecker, the film really doesn't allow us inside Al's head. The only really great Al-related scene was one in which he is being honored at work (a bank) for being a veteran soon after being criticized for having given a loan to a man with no collateral. He has (according to a tally taken by his wife, Milly, played by Myrna Loy) five drinks under his belt when he gives a speech, saying that a Major during the war told his platoon to take a hill, and Al said in response that the risk is too sufficient to take without the proper collateral. "So we didn't take the hill and we lost the war." Seeing the change in Milly from disappointment at his public drunkenness to pride at his strong morals is really great.

Now we acknowledge the most prevalent, and, in many ways, most annoying plot within the movie. Teresa Wright (also in Mrs. Miniver and still very cute with a smart-beyond-her-years charm) plays Al's daughter, Peggy. She falls in love with the third man coming home from the war, the married Fred Derry. Fortunately, he's married to satan in blonde hair, so we get to see their marriage unravel and Fred and Peggy end up together. But the real problem is, though in the war Fred truly earned everything adorning his air force jacket, he comes home and is still just a soda jerk or construction worker at best. I don't mind, of course, that the nice girl with the rich father marries the guy who got fired from his job at the local pharmacy. I do mind that their interest in each other seems completely fabricated and lame. Still, this was an all-around good movie. Very entertaining throughout, with good acting all around. 8/10