Hamlet

Hamlet (1964)

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.

Director: Grigori Kozintsev

Casts

	Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy as Hamlet
	Anastasiya Vertinskaya as Ophelia
	Mikhail Nazvanov as Claudius
	Elza Radziņa as Gertrude
	Yuriy Tolubeev as Polonius
	Igor Dmitriev as Rosencrantz
	Vadim Medvedev as Guildenstern
	Vladimir Erenberg as Horatio
	Stepan Oleksenko as Laertes
	Grigoriy Gay as Ghost of Hamlet's Father
	Ants Lauter as Priest
	Viktor Kolpakov as Gravedigger
	Aleksandr Chekayevsky as First actor

Crew