| Genre: | Drama |
| Year: | 1964 |
| Rating: | ? |
| Length: | 150min |
| Country: | USSR |
| Cast: | Innokenti Smokunovsky, Mikhail Nazvanov, Elsa Radzin-Szolkonis |
| Credits: | Directed by Carlos Saura/With English Subtitles, b/w, 35mm Cinemascope |
"Perhaps the best film based on Shakespeare," according to the critic Georges Sadoul, and an hor and a half less than Branagh's Hamlet! The Russians filmed Shajespeares most famous tragedy to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the playwright's birth. Shot in Cinemascope, the images enriched by the dramatic Shostakovitch score, are sweeping and powerful. Kozintsev's Hamlet moves through striking visual compositions of towering rocks, turbulent seas, massive portcullisies, and endless corridors of stone. What is memorable is the superb visual detail, notably in the apperance of the ghost on the battlements like a titan striding actrss the sea. At the end of a long film career, begun at the early age of 19, Kozintsev write: "I am certain that everyone of us in the course of his whole life shoots a single film of his own...this film is made in your head, but it lives, breathes, somehow prolongs into age, something that began as existence in childhood."
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