User Score
5 votes
Made in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Professor Mamlock was one of the first films worldwide to tackle Nazi anti-Semitism openly. Based on a play by a German-Jewish exile in Moscow, Friedrich Wolf, and directed by an Austrian-Jewish exile in Moscow, Herbert Rappaport, the film tells with the story of an apolitical humanitarian Jewish doctor and his politically-aware, fascism-resisting son, an intern, as their lives become entangled with the Nazis’ rise to power in 1930s Germany, where they live and practice. Things come to a head when the Nazi organization takes control of their hospital, and place a rabid antisemitic physician in charge over Mamlock and his staff.
Director
Director
Screenplay
Screenplay
Screenplay
Status
Released
Original Language
RU
Ernst
Shakespeare's 17th century masterpiece about the "Melancholy Dane" was given one of its best screen treatments by Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. Kozintsev's Elsinore was a real castle in Estonia, utilized metaphorically as the "stone prison" of the mind wherein Hamlet must confine himself in order to avenge his father's death. Hamlet himself is portrayed (by Innokenti Smoktunovsky) as the sole sensitive intellectual in a world made up of debauchers and revellers. Several of Kozintsev directorial choices seem deliberately calculated to inflame the purists: Hamlet's delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his back to the camera, allowing the audience to fill in its own interpretations.
