Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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52 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Korea DVD Imports RULE! So does this "Ed Wood Meets Wagner" Macbeth, March 20, 2008
Any Wells lover who may be wondering whether this is a gray market washout and worth avoiding in favor of some Criterion future thing or other, relax and trust in the power of Korea to do a good job. The subtitles are removeable and the soundtrack is the original and amazingly clear. I had the old Republic VHS tape and it was rough going understanding around 30% of what was said, but I could hear every luscious shakespearean syllable this time around, and the picture is mighty fine, not Criterion level, but maybe old Criterion level, or old Kino level, and even better than some of the big studio's more lazily transferred film noirs, like BODY AND SOUL or SUDDEN FEAR. In short, dear Welles fan, pounce!
And 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?
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Orson Welles Fan Who wasn't Disappointed, January 20, 2008
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...
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Film Noir Shakespeare, March 1, 2009
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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