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While film festivals and Shakespeare classes regularly screen various versions of Hamlet (most often the Olivier, the Richardson/Williamson, and the Kozintsev Russian versions), it is surprising that the Maximilian Schell German-made Hamlet.^ a fine, coherent film, readily available in 16mm. is relatively little-known, infrequently shown, and has been critically neglected. The black and white film, directed by Franz Peter Wirth for German television about 1 960. is not only taut and exciting cinematically. but has much to offer scholars and students as an interpretation of Hamlet.
Rather than attempting to impose my own gestalt on the film, what I should like to do in this short paper is to set out a Renaissance listing of "faults and beauties," with an admitted bias towards "beauties," and it may be that such an approach will ultimately work in the direction of gestalt.
First: faults. The most sustained criticism of the film has been of the dubbing, which - inevitably - is less than perfect. Maximilian Schell told me in an interview last summer that he would have preferred subtitles, but that the decision to dub was made by Hollywood director Edward Dmytryk. Dmytryk, who had directed Schell in The Young Lions, saw the German version of Hamlet fell in love with it, bought it, and felt it deserved the best he could give it - Shakespeare's language. He hired Philip Burton to work with Schell and a dubbing cast carefully selected for accents that would blend with Schell's. (None, incidentally, besides Schell actually appeared in the film.) The result was an elegant soundtrack with a remarkably high - although certainly not total - degree of synchronization.
Most students - I have found - adjust rapidly to the slightly askew audio, feeling it a small price to pay for the advantage of hearing Shakespeare's words; most students, in fact, tell me that after the first few minutes they do not even notice the synch.2
Other faults are perhaps less defensible: Hans Caninenberg's Claudius is an overacted, one-dimensional, black-garbed villain who regularly displays evil by a narrowing of his eyes. Wanda Rotha's Gertrude, on the other hand, has an opposite tic mannerism: she consistently widens her eyes for "grand" moments in the film when she is called upon to...