Macbeth (1948)

I wrote a review of the Korean import a few years ago that was all we had available until this year when Olive released a beautiful Blu-Ray edition of Welles' 1948 Macbeth. I thought I'd hop on here, tweak my original review and let you know this blu-ray is AWESOME! Well worth the upgrade.

Be warned, you'll need some tolerance for Brecht-meets-Ed Wood-style details never meant to be seen presumably at this level of clarity -such as dirt on the edges of the sky --you can see the fingerprints of stage techs on the foggy moor sky backdrop, mismatched painting in an upper corner of the set; the rear projection and shadows and so forth all have an extra Guy Maddin / Ed Wood / Godard style unreality, but as a Welles fan you should relish that, and now we can look into the deep shadowed faces and see the full beauty of the characters' beards, mouths, eyes, and so forth. You wont regret it--

as to the film itself, here's my old review --

...if you've never seen it, Welles MacBeth is like a crazy 1930s German Expressionist bad acid trip, with Welles in florid ham actor mode, his Irish brogue soaring like a hawk. If you love cinema though, you will love crazy Welles drunken sweaty rampaging through his cheap papier mache caverns with his weird statue of liberty crown way more than you could ever love similar more "perfect" adaptations like say, Olivier's HAMLET which came out that same year. That film is amazing, but Olivier is just too graceful, too perfect and measured and his horrible blonde bangs. Let's put it this way, Olivier's film is much better, but Welles' is greater. Olivier is the piano prodigy who plays for the old ladies and gets all the grant money; Welles is the rebel down at the jazz joint, tearing it up in a threadbare tux with a wailin' bebop trio. Who would you rather hang out with, even if you didn't know where your next meal was coming from?

This movie is beautifully restored visually and has a fairly good reconstruction of the audio track. A shining counterpoint to the awful vinegar washed copies of "Mr Arkadin" and "The Stranger" you see available from various hack-restoration companies. This edition is a "Director's Cut" that brings the movie back from the mutilation at the hands of Republic Pictures. Its an important piece for people who appreciate the work of Welles, like myself. Welles always liked doing Shakespeare and other classic novels. Some of his unfinished or rejected ideas included "Moby Dick", the "Merchant of Venice" and "Heart of Darkness". Ironically, 35 or so years after Welles's idea to make "Heart of Darkness" into a movie was rejected, it was made into a movie, the classic "Apocalypse Now". Much of what he accomplished was far, far ahead of its time...or perhaps far, far behind the times. Either way, this cut of MacBeth shows the fecundity of Welles vision and not the slashed and burnt profligacy that was attributed to him in his lifetime. For Roddy McDowell fans, you get a glimpse of him years before "Planet of the Apes".

Drawback: No English Subtitles, only Korean ones. I guess its not a drawback if you read Korean well enough. I don't, so...

Buy Macbeth (1948) Now

Any film directed by Orson Welles is engrossing and worth the time. MACBETH is no exception. For those of you familiar with the 1971 Roman Polanski version, Welles brought to the screen a darker, more nightmarish world than Polanski could envision. The lighting is stark and the shadows ominous. Macbeth's madness increasingly pervades the atmosphere of the entire film, making the viewer unwilling to view this film with the lights out. The restored version presents Welles's original conception; the actors speak their lines with authentic Scottish burrs (Welles was forced to redo the soundtrack by the studio brass). A fascinating journey and imaginative interpretation of Shakespeare, Welles's MACBETH remains a major additon to American cinema and reveals the classical literary talents of one of the US's greatest visual artists. END

Read Best Reviews of Macbeth (1948) Here

The good news? For his last Hollywood film of the 1940s, Orson Welles delivered a low-budget, inventive, expressionist Shakespeare adaptation that served as a template for his experimental European films. The bad news? Welles perhaps captures the eerie mood of "The Scottish Play" all too well; the film is an unrelentingly dark and often uncomfortable experience. The lugubrious pacing and indifferent acting offer little respite from the play's fatalism.

A little background helps one better appreciate this film. After a string of box office failures (including "The Magnificent Ambersons" and "The Lady from Shanghai"), Welles signed on with Republic Pictures to do a low-budget "Macbeth," hoping that he could popularize Shakespeare on film as he had done on radio and in the theatre. His actors rehearsed the play on tour, and painstakingly pre-recorded their dialogue in Scottish brogues. Welles then shot the film in 23 days, some kind of record for him. Well, you can guess what happened: The studio hated it. They forced Welles to cut 20 minutes from the film, and made the actors re-dub their dialogue with "normal" accents wasting all that time they spent in pre-production. The film bombed on release and Welles spent the next 10 years working in Europe.

Years later, the original prints were found and released as another "Lost Welles Classic." Unfortunately, time has devalued that label; "Macbeth" doesn't quite meet the standard set by "Othello" or "Touch of Evil," two other films that were restored after Welles' death. While the Scottish accents are a nice touch, the extra running time actually robs the film of some momentum. Welles did wonders with the cheap Republic sets; the film is a masterpiece of expressionist set design. The same can't be said of the costumes, which make Welles look like the Statue of Liberty at one point. Constrained by having to sync their movements to pre-recorded dialogue, the actors deliver wooden performances (only the soliloquies, delivered in voice-over, resonate). Fortunately, the last twenty minutes are visually captivating and offer enough Wellesian moments to make the viewing worthwhile.

If Welles fails to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear as he would later do with "Othello" and "Chimes of Midnight" he succeeds in developing an expressionist style that he would later perfect with his bizarro masterpiece "The Trial." "Macbeth" isn't exactly an enjoyable movie experience; indeed, "returning were as tedious as go o'er." But for the Welles aficionado, "Macbeth" provides an essential link between Welles' Hollywood years and the independent style of his European work.

Want Macbeth (1948) Discount?

Bloated budgets and smooth edges are not prerequisites to good filmmaking. No one knew this better than the perpetually money-strapped Orson Welles. Once he'd been ostracized from the studio system, the faded Wunderkind spent the majority of his career making pseudo-masterpieces from funds scraped together by the odd acting job. Despite the monetary constraints, Welles proved that a little imagination and visual verve can make up for a tight purse.

"Macbeth" was produced on the relative cheap (about $500,000), filmed at a breakneck pace (about twenty days), and the result is a haggard, stylized tone poem. This is Shakespeare as lurid film noir. The messy quality somehow makes it more compelling, mostly because Welles' unsurpassed visual imagination compensates for the low-end production values. He embraces the supernatural aspects of the play: stylized sets serving for blasted heath and dank castles are blanketed in fog and lit in high contrast B & W. Askew angles and Welles' signature deep-focus photography make for bold, innovative compositions. Gothic flourishes like the silhouetted Weird Sisters seem fever-dream induced. Plenty of sound and fury to be found here. Even a master stylist like Kurosawa borrowed liberally from Welles for his own Macbeth adaptation, "Throne of Blood." Check out both films' "Not 'Til Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane!" sequences and see how Kurosawa compared notes with Welles.

The performances follow Welles' film noir aesthetic. Jeannette Nolan understands Lady Macbeth is among drama's ultimate femme fatales, and plays her like a vampish shrew with a boot of a face but a killer body. She always seems to tower over her whipped husband in the early portion of the film. Welles proceeds to diminish her place in the frame as her power wanes and she descends into despair and madness. Nolan's strong performance and Welles' equally solid turn in the title role are the foundation of this movie. Their theatrical Scottish brogues are occasionally cringe-inducing, but the intense love their characters have for each other is palpable.

Though both leads are solid, the main interest here lies in the hallucinatory intensity of the images. The nightmarish world Welles creates, a world of overt nihilism oddly coupled with doomed fate, makes the skin crawl. Though the text is gutted and some of the acting too shoddy to make this anywhere near a definitive version of "Macbeth", Welles' endless sense of invention carries him through. This is a must-see for anyone with more than a passing interest in Orson Welles or Shakespeare's most feverishly intense play.

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