Henry V was all simple, engaging action, and Olivier gave it a clarion confidence and sweetness. Hamlet is action in near-paralysis, a play of subtle and ambiguous thought and of even subtler emotions. Olivier's main concern has been to keep these subtleties in focus, to eliminate everything that might possibly distract from the power and meaning of the language. He has stripped the play and his production to the essentials. In the process, he has also stripped away a few of the essentials. But on the whole, this is a sternly beautiful job, densely and delicately worked. (p. 389)

There is little novel interpretation of character: even that might distract from the great language, or distort it. There is no clear placement in time, no outside world except blind sky, faint landscapes, ruminant surf, a lyrical brook…. The production is as austere, and as grimly concentrated, as Henry V was profuse and ingratiating. Only the wild, heartfelt, munificent language is left at liberty.

Olivier was determined to make the play clear in every line and every word—even to those who know nothing of Shakespeare. For the most part, he manages to elucidate even the trickiest turns of idiom by pantomime or a pure gift for thought transference. But wherever it has seemed necessary, old words have been changed for new. (pp. 389-90)

In the process of cutting a 4-hour play to 2 hours' playing time, the editing has also been very drastic in places…. Olivier and his co-editor, Alan Dent, have gone out of their way to save a small jewel ("The bird of dawning singeth all night long"). But now and then, apparently for the sake of pace, they needlessly throw something overboard.

Olivier and Dent are neither vandals, boobs nor megalomaniacs. They knew what they were doing. They felt, mostly with very good reason, that they had to do it. Mostly as a result of cutting, their Hamlet loses much of the depth and complexity which it might have had. Hamlet is a sublime tragedy, but it is also the most delightful and dangerous of tragicomedies. Some of the tragicomedy remains and is the best thing in the film. But some of the best went out with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Unluckiest of all, the audience is allowed to know less than it might about the Prince himself (nobody can ever know enough about him). It sees too little of his dreadful uncertainty, his numbed amazement over his own drifting, his agonized self-vilification. It understands too little of him as "passion's slave." (pp. 390-91)

But within his chosen limits, Olivier and his associates have done excellently—from grandiose poetic conceptions (e.g., the frightfully amplified heartbeats which introduce the Ghost) to clever little captures of mood (e.g., the cold, discreet clapping of gloved hands which applaud the half-drunken King). (p. 391)

A man who can do what Laurence Olivier is doing for Shakespeare—and for those who treasure or will yet learn to treasure Shakespeare—is certainly among the more valuable men of his time. In the strict sense, his films are not creative works of cinematic art: the essential art of moving pictures is as overwhelmingly visual as the essential art of his visually charming pictures is verbal. But Olivier's films set up an equilateral triangle between the screen, the stage and literature. And between the screen, the stage and literature they establish an interplay, a shimmering splendor, of the disciplined vitality which is art. (p. 396)