So you can’t exactly call Johnny Hamlet a tragedy and there are moments of playful absurdity and pure fun that would never surface in a Shakespearean drama. And anyone expecting a reasonable facsimile of Shakespeare’s rich language should look elsewhere because the dialogue is crude and unsubtle in the manner of most subtitled or dubbed spaghetti westerns.Ī dream sequence from Johnny Hamlet (1968), directed by Enzo G.
Probably the most radical change is the finale : Johnny survives and rides off into the sunset with his pal Horace. The gravedigger is played for comic relief and is one of the few survivors at the film’s fadeout.
The brief appearance of Emily (Gabriella Boccardo), the Ophelia character, is probably the most faithful to the original source. There is no equivalent for the character of Laertes but there are new characters introduced – a traveling band of performers and an outlaw gang led by Santana. Johnny’s mother, Gertie, transitions from a deceived, weak-willed woman into a gun-toting defender of her son. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as Ross and Guild are not former student friends of Johnny (as they were in Hamlet) but Claude’s hired gunmen who stalk him every step of the way toward a final shootout. Plot details are also fair game for creative makeovers. Castellari and his co-scripters Tito Carpi, Francesco Scardamaglia and Bruno Corbucci have expanded or reduced the roles some of these figures played in Shakespeare’s original and, in some cases, changed their motives completely. Those familiar with Hamlet will notice the obvious similarities between the names of the main characters in both versions but director/screenwriter Enzo G. Purists may find it ridiculous but there is something refreshing and entertaining about seeing the play’s classic storyline cannibalized and retold as a spaghetti western. Castellari ( The Inglorious Bastards, 1978), but this extremely loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s play is full of imaginative touches which often capture the dark, gothic spirit of the original. Outside of a handful of genre enthusiasts, most American movie buffs probably don’t know about Johnny Hamlet, which is directed by Enzo G. Leave that to the Italians, who during the heyday of the spaghetti western, created Quella sporca storia nel west (1968), which was released in an English-dubbed, U.S. Hamlet would seem an ideal choice for a western remake but, apart from a sequence in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine where a drunken actor (Alan Mowbray) recites a soliloquy from the Bard’s play, the brooding Prince of Denmark has not been repurposed by Hollywood as the hero of a frontier revenge drama. Alan Mowbray reciting Hamlet in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine
0 kommentar(er)
