Hamlet
Гамлет
Release: 1964-06-24
·Runtime: 140m
·★ 7.1
Drama
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.
Production Countries
Soviet Union
Production Companies
Lenfilm
Trailers & Videos
Cast
Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy
as Hamlet
Anastasiya Vertinskaya
as Ophelia
Mikhail Nazvanov
as Claudius
Elza Radziņa
as Gertrude
Igor Dmitriev
as Rosencrantz
Grigori Gaj
as Ghost of Hamlet's Father
Yuriy Tolubeev
as Polonius
Vadim Medvedev
as Guildenstern
Vladimir Erenberg
as Horatio
Stepan Oleksenko
as Laertes
Ants Lauter
as Priest
Viktor Kolpakov
as Gravedigger