Hamlet (1960)

D. Joseph L. Mankiewicz

B&W

It’s frequently forgotten that every year of his cinematic career, Elvis turned out his version of a literary classic. As the biographies tell us, they were an attempt to keep up his pretence of being a serious actor, and – because they were made so cheaply and all Elvis product made money – were not a bad little investment. However, much like everything else in the realm of Graceland at this time, ‘quality control’ was an unknown phrase and an alien concept. As such these adaptations reside in an odd place even in fans’ minds. They generally aren’t good enough to stand earnestly in their own right, but lack the brio and campy sunshine of Elvis’s best films. Indeed, some of them are downright awful. As such they stand apart as neglected orphans.

 

This blog exists to put its arm around neglected orphans.

 

First off, remove that sneer from your face and ask yourself: is Elvis as The Prince of Denmark such a terrible idea? At the time he had the requisite youth and callowness for the part, looked striking in doublet and hose and was guaranteed to attack the role with great sincerity. What’s more, a few years’ earlier another very American performer, Marlon Brando, had given us his Shakespeare for the same director in ‘Julius Caesar’. And yet, from the moment Elvis’s Memphis drawl drags out his first line: “The air bites shrewdly, Horatio, and it is mighty cold” a sinking feeling will seize at the spine of even the truest believer.

 

It’s Elvis’s inability (or unwillingness, apparently) to even stab at the accent which makes for a truly jarring viewing experience. Whereas John Gielgud (Claudius), Deborah Kerr (Gertrude) and Claire Bloom (Ophelia) lead the audience to believe that the Danes of Elsinore speak in a very received pronunciation, BBC way; the presence of Elvis makes us wonder where on Earth The Prince went to University to pick up that accent. I love Elvis, but even I find it a tortuous experience. Imagine some enthusiastic American teen on stage at the RSC, making no effort to marry his performance to that of the great English actor next to him, or grasp the rhythm of cadences of the language, or understand that when performing Shakespeare you’re supposed to have some kind of idea as to what these lines actually mean. Whether you’re thinking of Elvis as Hamlet or, say, Justin Bieber as Hal next to Michael Gambon’s Falstaff in some mad hypothetical production – none of it works together, none of it gels, none of it makes any sense whilst sober.

 

And that’s before we get to the fact that no Elvis film can exist without a musical number. To be fair, when Mankiewicz had his brainwave and decided that the way to deal with this need for songs was to insert them organically, it probably seemed like the best available idea. However, when watching Elvis deliver ‘To Be or Not To Be’ staccato while wiggling his hips to a salsa beat, the average viewer begins to wonder whether there are such things as good ideas. Although this may be unique in Hamlet adaptations in introducing a second ghost, as surely that spectral bongo player who appears behind Elvis’s left shoulder as he sings isn’t in Shakespeare’s text.

So what we have is a film Elvis felt embarrassed by, and rightly so. Everyone connected with this film should feel embarrassed. Those who watch it certainly do. And yet it’s a film in which you can see Elvis trying, a gifted performer struggling against his own limitations and the wrong-headed ideas of those around him. To see the wide eyed, full of repressed hurt, way he delivers: “O! that this too solid flesh would melt; Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew; Or that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon against self-slaughter!” one can only wish that someone had taken the care and time to make this whole mad enterprise – somehow and against all probability – actually work.