Coming August 14:

[list]Hamlet 2-Disc Special Edition (1996)

In this first-ever full-text film of Shakespeare's greatest work, nominated for 4 Academy Awards®, the power surges through every scene. The timeless tale of murder, corruption and revenge is reset in an opulent 19th-century world, using sprawling Blenheim Palace as Elsinore with much of the action staged in shimmering mirrored and gold-filled interiors. The luminous cast includes actor/director Kenneth Branagh, Kate Winslet, Derek Jacobi, Julie Christie, Robin Williams, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal and Charlton Heston.

The excitement of the Bard's words and Branagh's adventurous filmmaking style lift the story from its often shadowy ambience to fully-lit pageantry and rage. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle said, “In the 80 years that works of world literature have been adapted for the screen, few filmmakers have attempted so much and with such success.â€

Thanks for that post!

I can wait a year....

or 10.......

Looks like a 2007 release.

Btw, the film can be rented at Amazon Unbox for $2.99, but don't bother. The film is CROPPED, and is hardly DVD quality, as these screencaps show:

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It's a 4GB download that takes forever. No 5.1 audio. Can only be played on the very feature-poor Unbox software player. File cannot be copied to another PC. You must re-download it on another PC to view it there.

The lousy video quality combined with the not-ready-for-primetime Unbox service made me give up on my first-time viewing of the film and wait for the DVD instead.

WOW!!! this news is... completely uninteresting. Complete squandering of a wonderful cast on a Branagh vanity project.

Hamlet as George Michael?

Don't wake me up before you go-go....

It's a magnificent, slick, sumptuously decorated film, but to its own detriment. I'd much rather see Philip Saville's 1964 version with Christopher Plummer, Robert Shaw, Michael Caine and Steven Berkoff which was actually filmed at Elsinore, Denmark - the second of two versions shot there (in addition to the 1910).

I'd agree although there are passages of the film that are, by themselves, quite remarkable. I particularly enjoyed the scene in which Charlton Heston is actually asked to act (and of all the celeb cameos, his is my favorite by far); unfortunately, in typical Branaghian fashion, he cuts away from Heston's performance (making Heston, somewhat ironically, a Biblical epic style narrator) to John Gielgud and Judi Dench writhing about, half-naked, in agony. Likewise, his "to be..." speech is quite good, but he later gives us the "my thoughts be bloody..." speech in such a grandiose, over-the-top fashion that it comes off like camp instead of high art (not that camp can't be high art).

It's big, it's messy, it has way too many cameos to the film's own detriment, but it should have been available on DVD years ago.

For the record, I prefer the 2000 version with Ethan Hawke. I particularly loved it when Sam Shepherd (as the ghost of Hamlet's father) disappears into a Pepsi One machine.

That is a good moment.

However, for me, the very best Hamlet moment on film is Paul Scofield's turn as the ghost in the Gibson-Zefferelli version. Not a wholly successful adaptation, but not the fiasco it might have been. And Morricone's score is very good for it -- particularly his cue for the opening titles.

As for Branaugh's version, I too was pleasantly surprised by Heston's performance. But I think the best part of that film is Ophelia's burial. Branaugh may be over-the-top in many other scenes, but there his emotion really gets me.

I also love Paul Scofield in Gibson's Hamlet. He does eternal torment incredibly well in that early scene. Gives me the willies.

On Morricone's score for the beginning of the film, check out the original source material: Stravinsky's "Symphony of Psalms" (first movement) with a dash of Orff's "Carmina Burana." Not outright theft, but damn close.

Ah, I'd always suspected the Orff influence, but I am not familiar with that particular Stravinsky piece. Will definitely have to check it out. Thanks for the recommendation.

As for Scofield, he's just amazing in nearly everything he does. His performance pushes The Crucible from the merely good into the, at times, transcendent.

As do I. I really dig the scene where Hawke is wandering through the Blockbuster...

I absolutely loved this when I saw it on the big screen. I hope it didn't have to do with the fact that I was the only patron in the theater.

Gargh! Don't mention that film around Gordon, man! A classic example of a potentially great film ruined by an overbearing score and unnecessary camera moves if ever there was one. Brilliant script and acting, though. Scofield is, indeed, a joy to watch in any film.

Herm, HD version coming in 2007? Or will that take until the next format to be released...

Officially announced. Thanks to tavernier for the specs in the first post.

Finally. Now I can get all these English professors asking "why don't we have this DVD" off my back.

sounds great. more norma shearer!!

the box artwork is pretty ugly.
Can criterion just design the box cover?

That version of MSND sounds like a hoot. Is it? Never heard of it until now.

It's pretty wild. And, of course, the child who would grow up to be Kenneth Anger is in it.

MSND is the main attraction to this set, imho.

That makes perfect sense, as strange as it may sound at first. But not if you think about something like Rabbit Moon.

Try as I might I can't get into filmed versions of the Bard's plays. I always miss what has been cut out of the text (lines and/or characters). For this reason I prefer TV versions like the mammoth BBC collection box set available in the UK. Some of the plays in this series still have to have minor cuts in the text but this is what happens even with stage versions. At least the integrity of the play is maintained (in terms of text). I know that no one version of HAMLET will please everyone. We all have a subjective view of any particular version (as with classical music). I like watching various film versions of the plays but in terms of collecting I would stop at the BBC versions.

The quality of the BBC cycle varies enormously, and some of the most famous plays got the dullest adaptations (As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest) - so I really wouldn't recommend stopping there! Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth were better, but both were massively overshadowed by Trevor Nunn's RSC productions, which were adapted for television in the 1970s (the Nunn Macbeth, with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, is available on DVD, and for my money is the best television adaptation of any Shakespeare play).

The year of production often makes a difference - the first two BBC seasons (1978-80) were produced by Cedric Messina, who firmly believed in a conservative "bring the Bard to the masses" approach, with texts generally cut to about two hours and resoundingly conventional staging. By general consent the worst productions date from that era, though there are a few gems - Measure for Measure was terrific, as was the rarely-staged Henry VIII, while the Richard II/Henry IV/Henry V cycle was very watchable.

Things improved significantly from the third season onwards when Jonathan Miller took over, and completely reversed Messina's policy by openly encouraging his directors to be adventurous (albeit within some fairly strict bounds dictated by the co-production agreement with Time-Life Television). His regime was also marked by unconventional casting - John Cleese as Petruchio, Bob Hoskins as Iago.

The three primary directors of the Miller era were Miller himself, Elijah Moshinsky and Jane Howell, who collectively made some of the cycle's strongest adaptations - Miller did The Taming of the Shrew, Troilus and Cressida (a personal favourite of his), Timon of Athens, a contentious Othello (though Anthony Hopkins was a last-minute substitute for James Earl Jones, banned from appearing by Equity) and a King Lear that was essentially an extended version of his 1975 BBC production with many of the same actors, as he didn't believe he'd changed his view of the play.

Moshinsky often made significant changes to the text (heavy cuts, reshuffled scenes), and sometimes his extraordinarily lush visuals worked against the original (A Midsummer Night's Dream), but his most successful productions (All's Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, Coriolanus) were sometimes thrillingly ambitious. Howell arguably went even further, with her ultra-stylised Winter's Tale, children's adventure playground restaging of the Henry VI/Richard III cycle and an admirably restrained and sober Titus Andronicus.

I covered the cycle for BFI Screenonline a couple of years ago - more details here