Of our time...For our time.

Wow. I was doing a random Hamlet image search and found this. From 1969. I'm netflixing this. Looks like Hamlet is a vampire, like this could've been a poster for a Hammer film--Hammer studios in England churned out lots of vampire flicks in the 60s & the women were always shagadelic-Brit-chicks in diaphanous wench-type-dresses. With cleavage for days. Like in this poster.

I found one review through imdb, from Time Magazine. The review is hilariously gushing.

On Williamson: "His eyes sear the viewer. He is not speaking to the air; he is speaking to you. As far as Williamson is concerned, elocution be damned. Poetry be damned. Meaning is all. Never has Hamlet been rendered with more clarity or more biting timeliness, and that includes Gielgud, Olivier and Burton. Shakespeare held the mirror up to nature. Williamson holds a mirror up to the soul."

On Marianne: "Marianne Faithfull's Ophelia is remarkably affecting. She is ethereal, vulnerable, and in some strange way purer than the infancy of truth." (ed. note: ummmmmmm)

I have to say, though, I love the opening paragraph of the review. The guy who wrote it obviously just loves Hamlet and is effusive from the start. This is lovely:

"Hamlet has obsessed the Western mind for 369 years. Why? It is not because most people love great works of art. On the contrary, most people find great works of art oppressive, since such works invariably center on the nature of human destiny, and that destiny is tragic. Quite simply, Hamlet is a world, and like the world, it cannot be ignored. Every man has lived some part of the play, and to be a man is to be inextricably involved in the play. Hamlet probes and grips the profound themes of existence—death, love, time, fidelity, friendship, family, the relationships of a man and a woman, a son and father, a mother and son, murder and madness. Above all, it probes the value of existence, man's most anguishing question put in the form that every man knows from the time he first hears and ponders it—to be or not to be."