Overview

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.

Top Cast

Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy

Hamlet

Anastasiya Vertinskaya

Ophelia

Mikhail Nazvanov

Claudius

Elza Radziņa

Gertrude

Yuriy Tolubeev

Polonius

Igor Dmitriev

Rosencrantz

Vadim Medvedev

Guildenstern

Vladimir Erenberg

Horatio

Stepan Oleksenko

Laertes

Grigoriy Gay

Ghost of Hamlet's Father

Ants Lauter

Priest

Viktor Kolpakov

Gravedigger