Reviews

Imprimis: J.G. Correa's critique contained an error--"Nota Bene that the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre was NOT re-enacted in this Abel The Abel Gance/Jean Dréville version." My memory of the film disputes that error in the critique It most indubitably WAS "re-enacted".

I saw the film in 1954 in a village named Yatchi near Sendai in Honshu, Japan when I was a mere stripling of ten years. I fled the movie house when the massacre of St. Bartholomew was enacted, traumatized by the sight of Huguenot women being stripped of their shifts and then put to the sword by the Catholic subjects of Charles IX. As a young American film-goer I had never seen female nudity on the screen. Earlier in the film, Jeanne Moreau as Queen Margot wears a see-through chemise where one's voyeuristic sense was aroused by the sight of her nipples et al. In comparison, American historical films were sanitized and the McCarthyite atmosphere of the time would have not allowed such a film to be shown on American soil. Nevertheless in post-war Japan it was screened along with other French films noires featuring the great Jean Gabin in a primitive movie house with wooden benches to sit upon. An excellent film which I truncated by not waiting to see it to the end.

"You take Sir Laurence Olivier, for example. I saw him in Hamlet. D.B. took Phoebe and I to see it last year. He treated us to lunch first, and then he took us. He'd already seen it, and the way he talked about it at lunch, I was anxious as hell to see it, too. But I didn't enjoy it much. I just don't see what's so marvelous about Sir Laurence Olivier, that's all. He has a terrific voice, and he's a helluva handsome guy, and he's very nice to watch when he's walking or dueling or something, but he wasn't at all the way D.B. said Hamlet was. He was too much like a goddam general, instead of a sad, screwed-up type guy. The best part in the whole picture was when old Ophelia's brother--the one that gets in the duel with Hamlet at the very end--was going away and his father was giving him a lot of advice. While the father kept giving him a lot of advice, old Ophelia was sort of horsing around with her brother, taking his dagger out of the holster, and teasing him and all while he was trying to look interested in the bull his father was shooting. That was nice. I got a big bang out of that. But you don't see that kind of stuff much. The only thing old Phoebe liked was when Hamlet patted this dog on the head. She thought that was funny and nice, and it was. What I'll have to do is, I'll have to read that play. The trouble with me is, I always have to read that stuff by myself. If an actor acts it out, I hardly listen. I keep worrying about whether he's going to do something phony every minute." I had seen a preview of the movie in Galveston, Texas when I was a mere stripling of five or six years of age. I recall a blond-haired guy dressed in black wandering about the battlements of Elsinore while the soundtrack played ominous music. When I viewed the Amazon-ordered DVD later on, I could not spot the bit that "old Phoebe" liked when Hamlet patted the dog on the head. Perhaps, it was cut out by the Amazon vendors which is really a pity. I don't recall if Marcellus' perception that "something is rotten in the state of Denmark" is attributed to Marcellus or Hamlet. Anyway, to Holden Caulfield Denmark equates to him with Pency Prep, where something is 'phony' in the...etc., etc. If anyone has a VHS or DVD version of Olivier's Hamlet which includes the dog-petting scene, I would like to know--if only to validate Salinger's take on Hamlet in "Catcher in the Rye".