Hamlet

Last evening on TCM’s “Thirty-One Days of Oscar” was Olivier’s Hamlet. I have this on video but haven’t watched it in years, so I caught the very end of the movie so I could enjoy Walton’s glorious score. British concert composers seem to have a bad reputation for not being terribly good film scorers (as in, the music’s great but the scoring isn’t), but I can’t see/hear where that was justified with Walton. In fact his score helped the movie immeasurably (as it did Henry V, of course). Olivier’s movie is surprisingly snappy, but that’s because he cut and pasted the text all over the place. Oddly enough the last scenes seem almost devoid of tension - I just recently rewatched the BBC Hamlet (with Derek Jacobi) and even though that didn’t have any music at all, that production has such tension in it. (And don’t get me started on Eileen Herlie as Olivier’s mom — yarite.)

On the other end of the cutting-and-pasting spectrum is Branagh’s Hamlet which has been missing in action for lo these past ten years. It’s hard to find the VHS any more, and it’s not out on DVD, although one is in the works — see here — and apparently many extra goodies are being planned. First it was supposed to come out in 2006, then 2008, and now it’s back to 2006 again. May we hope for an iso-score, or at least an interview about the music? Granted, it’s not considered Doyle’s top work, but the reaction to the bright/heroic tone of the score seemed unreasonably negative by some critics and it would be nice to hear Branagh and/or Doyle comment on their approach.

Recently I came across an entire scholarly article which a guy named John Dunn wrote about music for Hamlet films (Walton, Shostakovich, Doyle and Morricone), so if you are for some reason a Hamlet film music devotee, eat your heart out.