This means that Claudius has now assumed the throne. And Kozintsev managed to cover all the material in a relatively brisk two hours and twenty minutes.Īt the outset, Prince of Denmark Hamlet (played by Innokenty Smoktunovsky) is shown grieving over (a) the recent death of his father, King Hamlet, and (b) the fact that within an unseemly two months his widowed mother, Gertrude (Elza Radzina), had married his uncle, the deceased king’s brother, Claudius (Mikhail Nazvanov). Kozintsev’s Hamlet ( Gamlet, 1964), which he adapted from Boris Pasternak’s translation of Shakespeare’s play, is an expressionistic tour de force that is likely to enthrall most viewers. Nevertheless, probably the best job has been done, not by an English-speaking creative team, but by Russian filmmaker Grigori Kozintsev and his production colleagues. Capturing this melancholy and thoughtful tone is the principal challenge of anyone who films Hamlet, and this would presumably require someone very sensitive to the nuances of the main character’s moody and pensive soliloquies. And yet Hamlet is probably Shakespeare’s most famous and popular work, which is probably due to the play’s profoundly existentialistic tone and theme. On top of that, most staged versions of the play last four hours, which is a long time for an audience to sit through. There are multiple threads of revenge, and the main character is persistently morose and obsessed with his own futility. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, like many of his works, is rather complicated and has been difficult to film for presentation to general audiences.

Kozintsev hamlet full movie