1948 Hamlet

“This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” – Narrator, dumbing down the plot of Hamlet

Hamlet, 1948’s Best Picture, is an unusual case among Oscar winners. Although many Best Pictures are adaptions of plays or books, Hamlet is the only one that is an adaptation of a classic renowned piece of literature you are most likely required to read in high school (there’s never been a Dickens adaption that won Best Picture, for example) (I suppose All Quiet on the Western Front now falls into the required high school reading list, but it was a relatively new book when it was made into a movie). Also because it’s Shakespeare, Hamlet is one of the most “play-ish” movies to ever win Best Picture although director Laurence Olivier employs many of the popular noir film techniques of the day to spruce things up.

Since I assume everyone’s read Hamlet, I will give only a brief synopsis of the plot. Hamlet (Olivier), the prince of Denmark is depressed following his father’s death and the subsequent remarriage of his mother, Gertrude (Eileen Herlie) to his father’s brother, Claudius (Basil Sydney). Hamlet’s father’s ghost reveals to his son that Claudius, in fact, murdered the king and charges Hamlet with getting revenge. Hamlet, in a quandary about the situation, opts to feign madness in order to ferret out the truth, leaving a trail of havoc and death in his wake, mostly focused on his on-and-off again girlfriend Ophelia (Jean Simmons) and her father, Polonius (Felix Aylmer), the king’s pompous advisor.

I’m 82% sure Olivier dyed his hair for the role, and if so, it looks TERRIBLE

So anyway, if you can remember Hamlet from high school or college English, you probably know what you are getting into here. Of note to English majors, is Olivier’s decision to cut three major characters – Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Fortenbras – from the story as part of an overall slimming down of the story. The actual play runs four hours (!) (Kenneth Branaugh made a full version of it in the 1990s) and this movie clocks in at a trim(ish) 2.5. As noted, Olivier is also greatly influenced by the popular noir style of the time, with lots of shadows and low angles.

Olivier transforms many of the soliloquies from spoken words into overdubbed thoughts, with mixed results. Sometimes this effect is unintentionally laughable, especially when the actor is trying too hard to react to what they are thinking.

Olivier also focuses a lot on the relationship between Gertrude and Hamlet. While the exact nature of their relationship is one that has captivated lit majors for centuries, Olivier definitely has an opinion on it, including highlighting sequences where Hamlet is obsessed with Gertrude and Claudius getting it on and even having the mother and son give VERY tender kisses at a couple different times in the movie.

A cool shot with Claudius in the foreground and Hamlet in the back, as if haunting the King’s thoughts

Olivier’s Hamlet is considered a pinnacle of acting achievement, but the truth is it has not aged well. I found much of Olivier’s performance to be pretty hammy and very emotive. Today’s audiences are more attuned to a natural performer like Daniel Day Lewis, I think. I actually thought Simmon’s Ophelia gave a better performance as the batty Ophelia. Also, for whatever, reason, Olivier delivers the very famous “To Be or Not To Be” speech in a half repose, so that he looks utterly bored while reciting the single most famous speech in the history of English literature.

This is a fine production of Hamlet, but it’s not exceptionally notable or blows away other Hamlets. As noted, I liked the direction and sets a lot – the big empty castles are marvelous, the tracking shots that follow the characters up different flights of stairs or show different characters doing different things simultaneously are cool. But I think the reason there’s never been another Shakespeare movie to win Best Picture or very few adaptions of English Lit’s classical cannon have won is that these classical stories are so ingrained in our conscious they don’t have any surprises to offer us. They give us what we expect. Hamlet is a good production of Hamlet but it’s not going to blow you away.

Trivia: Laurence Olivier is one of only two directors to direct himself to the Best Actor award (the other was Roberto Benigni for Life is Beautiful in 1998).

 

Other notable movies in 1948: Johnny Belinda*, The Red Shoes*#, The Snake Pit*, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre*, Red River, Easter Parade, Key Largo

* Best Picture Nominee

#Top Grossing movie of the year

1938-1947: Oscar’s Second Decade – A Look Back

World War 2 was a major driver of Oscar Best Pictures in the 1940s and continues to be so

Following the lead I started WAAAAAY back after completing the first ten Best Pictures, I thought it would be interesting to look at the second decade of Oscar Best Pictures and see what made them “Best”. First here’s a chart to remind us about each movie and look for some commonalities.

	World War II	Social Problems	Epic	Modernity	Evil Bankers	Total Nominations
1938 -You Can’t Take it With You					X	7
1939 – Gone With the Wind			X		X	13
1940 – Rebecca			X			11
1941 – How Green Was My Valley		X		X	X	10
1942 – Mrs. Miniver	X					12
1943 – Casablanca	X		X			8
1944 – Going My Way	X	X-ish			X	7
1945 – The Lost Weekend		X				7
1946 – The Best Years of Our Lives	X	X				8
1947 – Gentleman’s Agreement		X				8

 

Two themes dominated the second decade of the Academy Awards – World War II and addressing social issues. Every movie from 1941 onward (probably not coincidentally the point where the U.S. entered World War II) can easily be categorized under one or both of these subject matters.

While it is certainly easy to dismiss the trend of World War II movies as merely an update/reboot of the popular World War I movie trend that dominated the Oscars’ first decade, it must be noted that the World War I movies popular from 1927-1938 were being made more than a decade after WWI’s end. The World War II movies were being made while the War was going on. Thus these movies aren’t the somber reflections of war’s horror seen in All Quiet on the Western Front or Wings, but more invested in creating a rousing can-do, let’s-win-this-thing sort of spirit.

My favorite of the batch – and one of my favorite movies EVER

World War II clearly holds a special place in the nation’s conscious, even 80 years later. No subsequent war movie would win a Best Picture Oscar while being about a war that’s still ongoing until the Hurt Lock in 2009! Most winning war movies – The Deer Hunter, Platoon – are about wars that have been finished for several years, if not more. In fact, the majority of “current” war movies have been box office duds. But the World War II movies of the 40s were huge hits and World War II movies examining every aspect of the war continue to be churned out – and win Best Picture Oscars – to this day! Clearly the black-and-white nature of World War II – the last true “Good vs. Evil” battle PLUS the nationalistic ideal of America as the heroes – holds a special appeal that will likely never be broken.

The socially conscious trend in the last half of the decade is harder to pin down. During the 1930s, when the country had arguably significantly worse problems of greater scale with the Great Depression, no movie explicitly about the Great Depression won an Oscar and only one – The Great Ziegfeld – even directly acknowledged the Great Depression. Movies were seen as a key to escapism from hardships during the 30s. During the post-war 40s, America prospered like never before. Whether that prosperity unleashed a liberal guilt in filmmakers or just freed them to make statements about issues they’d always been concerned about but seemed insignificant in light of the Depression’s overwhelming despair is hard to say. The Great Depression’s effects were felt indirectly in a number of films that cast bankers and taxmen as villains, although evil taxmen weren’t exactly a new phenomenon in the 1930s.

Epics, while toned down compared to the all-out spectacles of the 30s, still held a powerful sway on Academy voters. Of course, the grandest epic of them all, Gone With The Wind, won huge and several other movies with an epic feel (and/or epic lengths) like Casablanca and Rebecca also took home the gold. But as noted in the Academy Award Handbook, the emergence of the social problem movie also brought about the first real opportunity for smaller films to get in on the action. The Best Years of Our Lives combined the best of both worlds with an all start cast and an epic story focusing on domestic problems of returning soldiers.

You Can’t Take It With You winning is as perplexing as this scene from the movie

You Can’t Take It With You remains a great outlier not just of this period but of the Oscars in general. A smallish, low-stakes moral comedy with a basic message of “Just relax” doesn’t seem like Oscar bait in any time period and is hardly one of the best remembered films of its director or star.