Hamlet at Elsinore (1964)

This TV adaptation of Hamlet by the BBC managed to snag a number of rising stars, helping it to feel much grander than it otherwise might: Michael "Charlie Croker" Caine was Horatio, Robert "Donald Grant" Shaw was Claudius, and Christopher "General Chang" Plummer played Hamlet. Plummer obviously liked Shakespeare so much that he was still quoting it years later when he was a Klingon.

In addition there was Steven "General Orlov" Berkoff and Donald Sutherland in small roles. Roy Kinnear played the Gravedigger - a very famous and significant part despite not having much actual screentime - and similarly David "Napoleon" Swift was the Player King.

For all these great actors, the real star of this is the setting, because it was filmed on location at Kronborg castle at Helsingør (Elsinore) in Denmark, the very castle in which the play is set. This makes it stand out among all the many filmed versions of Hamlet, for all that it results in a slight mismatch between the 16th century costumes and some parts of the castle which are evidently post that period. This is a must-see Hamlet for all aficionados of Shakespeare for this reason alone.

But there's more than just the castle that makes this a unique experience of the play, such as some unusual, experimental directing choices. We never see the ghost of the murdered king, and instead he is a POV monster - we see Hamlet through his eyes, only hear him in voiceover, and nobody is credited with playing him. Spooky.

The acting choices are no less individual. Caine and Plummer play Horatio and Hamlet as being maybe closer than friends - it's ambiguous but reading their scenes that way is definitely possible, and makes this a daring move for the mid-60s. And Plummer's intensity as Hamlet, especially during the scenes when he is pretending to be mad, reminds me a lot of Patrick McGoohan as Number Six, equally capable of sudden bursts of energy (or just shouting), to the extent that I wonder if McGoohan was influenced by this performance, or if the two actors were only drawing from the same set of acting traditions?

At a duration of 2 hours 50 minutes this is somewhat abridged, though mainly by the cutting down of speeches and dialogue rather than the removal of entire subplots. It is longer than the 1948 Laurence Olivier version (a mere 2 hours 35 minutes) but significantly shorter than Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film (4 hours) or the BBC's TV version with Derek "Shakespeare denier" Jacobi (3 hours 30 minutes), and marginally shorter than the more recent BBC adaptation with David Tennant (3 hours).

Not this cat. This cat will purr. Purr.