The Rest Is Silence

Sometimes an imaginative Orson Welles turns out a modern-dress Julius Caesar that amounts to something more substantial than a set of gimmicks tucked into a quilt of comfortably literary allusions. Mostly, though, a director doing modern-dress, colloquial Shakespeare is seduced by the cheap and easy thrills he can tickle out of his audience simply by staging a series of recognition scenes. "Ah," the people exclaim with delight, "the riveter's wife is Lady Macbeth!" And if the director is lucky, no one in the theatre will pause to ask, "So what?"

Helmut Kautner's The Rest Is Silence is an especially futile example of the genre. This heavy-handed German film concerns a young Harvard philosophy professor who returns to a post-war, boom-time Germany, suspecting that his mother has conspired with an uncle to murder his industrialist father.

Mother and uncle are now married, the Claudius family steel plant bulges with orders from the Volkswagen people, and it's time to tip the duller members of the audience off: this is a modern Hamlet.

Hardy Kreuger is competent as the young professor, but severely limited by the narrowness of colloquial Hamlets, who, it seems, are not permitted the exuberant swings of mood of their renaissance ancestors. Director Kautner is a victim of the modern fallacy that complicated people are incapable of being drab and shallow, and his Hamlet--alas for poor Kreuger--is a predictably intricate Harvard Square neurotic.

Similarly, Ingrid Andree's Ophelia speaks no documents "in madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted." She is just a plain old garden variety schizophrenic, and not a good clinical specimen either.

When Hamlet's mother sold herself and the throne for a pair of reechy kisses, all of Denmark trembled and sickened. It is hard to tremble at the revelations of The Rest Is Silence--partly because there was already something rotten in Germany before old Claudius was murdered, but more because these are pathetic, not tragic figures. What remains of the play is a kind of literary parlor trick--there is a certain fascination in trying to figure out what will appear from the real Hamlet in the next scene--and nothing more. To call this film worth seeing would be laying much too flattering an unction on the Brattle's soul.