Hamlet
Shakespeare's 17th century masterpiece about the "Melancholy Dane" was given one of its best screen treatments by Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. Kozintsev's Elsinore was a real castle in Estonia, utilized metaphorically as the "stone prison" of the mind wherein Hamlet must confine himself in order to avenge his father's death. Hamlet himself is portrayed (by Innokenti Smoktunovsky) as the sole sensitive intellectual in a world made up of debauchers and revellers. Several of Kozintsev directorial choices seem deliberately calculated to inflame the purists: Hamlet's delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his back to the camera, allowing the audience to fill in its own interpretations.
Release Date
June 24, 1964Runtime
140 minGenres
DramaDirected by
Grigori Kozintsev, Valentina KuznetsovaWritten by
Grigori Kozintsev, Boris PasternakLanguage
RussianBudget
$0Revenue
$0Status
ReleasedCast
Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy
HamletAnastasiya Vertinskaya
OpheliaMikhail Nazvanov
ClaudiusElza Radzina
GertrudeYuriy Tolubeev
PoloniusIgor Dmitriev
RosencrantzVadim Medvedev
GuildensternVladimir Erenberg
HoratioStepan Oleksenko
LaertesGrigori Gaj
Ghost of Hamlet's FatherAnts Lauter
PriestViktor Kolpakov
Gravedigger