Macbeth (1948 film)

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Macbeth

Directed by	Orson Welles
Produced by	Orson Welles Charles K. Feldman Richard Wilson
Written by	Orson Welles, William Shakespeare (play)
Starring	Orson Welles, Jeanette Nolan, Dan O'Herlihy, Roddy McDowall
Music by	Jacques Ibert
Cinematography	John L. Russell
Editing by	Louis Lindsay
Distributed by	Republic Pictures
Release date(s)	October 1, 1948
Running time	107 min
Country	USA
Language	English
IMDb profile

Macbeth is a 1948 film adaptation of William Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth made by Orson Welles.

The film marked Welles's return to Shakespearean interpretation, following his departure from Hollywood. He had planned to take his company and stage the play at the Utah Centennial Festival in Salt Lake City. With costumes and props at his disposal, Welles rehearsed his company and shot the film in 21 days.

The film was made on a very small budget. It utilised stylized sets in the manner of German Expressionism. While some consider it hammy and overacted, its admirers argue that it is notable for revealing the idiosyncrasies of each character as the movie progresses.

The film was a critical and commercial disaster in both the USA and the UK. It had been filmed with the actors speaking the lines in Scottish accents, which were largely responsible for the bad reviews - critics complained that the Shakespearean verse could not be understood. After its premiere, the film was withdrawn and partially re-dubbed by the same cast, with the actors speaking in English and American accents. Then, it was edited to 89 minutes from its original 107-minute length, thus eliminating some of the most famous lines from the play, and several entire scenes. This was the version that eventually opened in New York, once again receiving devastating reviews. However, it was a huge success in many non-English speaking countries, especially France, where critics could not understand how the American and British press had failed to appreciate the highly stylized and surrealistic approach Orson Welles took to the play. In the 1980's, the original "Scots" sound track and the edited footage, long thought lost, were re-discovered, and the film was restored to its original version. Many critics and Shakespeare buffs now consider it a classic, though it is not shown as often as some of Orson Welles' other great films. As of 2006, it has been released on DVD only in Europe, not in the U.S.

The film has many unusual touches. Among the most notable is that the witches fashion a clay bust of Macbeth, and place what seems to be a voodoo spell on him through the doll. This apparently sets in motion the progress of Macbeth's way to the throne. This touch was undoubtedly influenced by Welles' 1936 production of the play at the American Negro Theater, often referred to as the Voodoo Macbeth.

In filming Macbeth, Welles took greater liberties with the play than had ever been taken in sound films adapted from Shakespeare. He transposed speeches, switched scenes around, showed a death onscreen that takes place offstage in the play, and even created a new character, called the Holy Father (Alan Napier), who is given most of the lines that the soldier Ross speaks in the play. While it is now common in a film such as Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990 film) to encounter extensive transpositions of scenes and speeches, such tinkering was unheard of in Shakespeare films in the 1930's and '40's. The most tampering that Laurence Olivier had done up to then was to show the death of Falstaff in Henry V (1944 film) and to switch around Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech and Ophelia's nunnery scene, as well as to omit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern completely from his film version of Hamlet. MGM's Romeo and Juliet (1936 film) had been so respectful of the text that almost nothing was changed, and although Max Reinhardt had inserted ballet sequences into his 1935 version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935 film) and used actors who had never acted in Shakespeare, the adaptation of the play was, on the whole, faithful.

But Welles's adaptation of Macbeth outraged many critics at the time, and very likely contributed to the critical failure of the film, although it is very likely that, had the play been adapted in a similar fashion today, no eyebrows would be raised.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Macbeth at the Internet Movie Database

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Orson Welles
Citizen Kane (1941) • The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) • The Stranger (1946) • The Lady from Shanghai (1947) • Macbeth (1948) • Othello (1952) • Mr. Arkadin (1955) • Touch of Evil (1958) • The Trial (1962) • Chimes at Midnight (1965) • The Immortal Story (1968) • F for Fake (1974)