The mood is elegantly Gothic, almost expressionist, with chiaroscuro lighting on the flagstones and battlements of the castle; gleaming turrets; and most effectively, swirling fogs that constantly remind us of Hamlet’s unhinged mental state. And Olivier doesn’t stint on the Shakespearean "shocks," those melodramatic touches that must have made contemporary viewers squirm in their seats. The best of these is the ghostly image of Hamlet’s dead father, a beautifully visualized, credibly ghoulish figure that floats in the swirling darkness above his son on the battlements. One of the most subtly poignant scenes in the film is the ghost’s aching farewell: "adieu, adieu, remember me." Another fine sequence that demonstrates Olivier’s visual panache is the drowning of Ophelia (Jean Simmons uncharacteristically blonde), a poetic image indeed of young Hamlet’s amour floating slowly out of frame in her flower-strewn watery grave.

With its wealth of flashbacks, inventive set-pieces, gliding camera movements, and close-ups, it’s clear that Olivier took his work as a director seriously. But it’s also no surprise that he reserves the most lingering, even idolatrous close-ups for himself, engorging the frame with his handsome visage. In one daring scene he uses a crane shot to swoop from a very high angle into a choker close shot of his sweating angelic face. This works most of the time as a way to (literally) pull the viewer into the character, but it has a problematic element too.

Of course, fans of gay subtext will find much to love in the one relationship that does set off sparks: Hamlet and his devoted pal Horatio (Norman Wooland). Perhaps the latter was dazzled by Hamlet’s arch stares, eloquent hissy fits, and seizures that skirt the grand mal. As campy as this sounds -- and there is a campy edge discernible throughout -- Olivier the actor redeems the melodrama with sudden dazzling bursts of energy while Olivier the director invests the whole affair with enough visual élan to make Shakespeare palatable even to those who may resist him.

Olivier’s performance continues to fascinate decades after its creation. Simmons seems out of her depth as Ophelia, though to her credit she underplays, avoiding the noisy hysterics too few actresses have resisted in taking on this classic madwoman role. Eileen Herlie deftly sketches Queen Gertrude and milks the Oedipal element to the max with lingering kisses with her son and masochistic, spread-eagled collapses under his verbal assaults. Basil Sydney makes a reasonable King Claudius, but better still are the character roles: Peter Cushing as a very fey Osric, Stanley Holloway as a droll gravedigger, and supremely, Felix Aylmer as old Polonius, whose penchant for gossip earns him a knife in the heart.

Some viewers have quibbled with aspects of this version -- for example, the changing of many of the soliloquies to interior monologues (including the "to be or not to be" speech) and the deletion in toto of the two fascinating characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. (One observer has estimated that 40% of the original play was cut, though that seems an overstatement.) And some may prefer the histrionics of Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 adaptation or the cheesy carry-on of Zefferelli’s 1990 film or the contempo corporate setting of Michael Almereyda’s recent update. Interestingly, both Branagh and Almereyda updated the setting, the former to the 19th century, the latter to the present. Part of the charm of Olivier’s version is that it didn’t do that, opting instead for a fully fleshed out period feel (complemented by a beautiful period-derived score by William Walton). The film’s Gothic grimness and formal, stylized acting give it a resonance that seems to come from much farther back than five decades, indeed perhaps from Shakespeare’s own time.