Customer Reviews

Macbeth (Import PAL) [VHS]

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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?

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...

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

I own this film on VHS and on Laserdisc and I am hoping that it will soon come out on DVD. Certainly there are some technical problems with the production, but it is a 1948 film so some of that can be excused.

Welles vision of MacBeth has the texture and feel of a nightmare. The backdrops are unfinished, muddy charicatures of the objects and places they represent. Scotland is an eerie, nightmarish landscape that is constantly misty and partially unformed. The use of the b&w medium superbly creates a feeling of dread and foreboding in the audience who is drawn ever deeper into the madness of the story. This is vintage Welles, who loved to make the tone, timbre, hue and texture of every part of the movie relate to and support the story he was filming. Certainly the work of a genius.

Most people know the basic story. MacBeth (Which literally means "Son of Life"), is given a prophesy that he will become king of Scotland and tells his wife of the prophesy. Lady MacBeth then uses MacBeth's insecurities to manipulate him into murdering the true king and assuming his throne. Guilt-ridden and paranoid, MacBeth begins a reign of tyranny and sinks into madness. Finally, the English invade and end his reign of terror. MacBeth, who is shown as no more than a pawn in this story, finally gains a measure of grace and dignity when he faces MacDuff in combat. We finally see in death the couragous man MacBeth could have been - indeed was before he allowed his and his wife's greed to corrupt him - MacBeth rises above his fate and becomes master of his own destiny by crying-out the infamous phrase "Lead on MacDuff, and damn the man who first cries hold - enough".

All in all, I have been impressed with this film from the first time I viewed it and I do hope it comes soon to DVD.

A note on the soundtrack - In 1949 the studio refused to release this movie until Welles overdubbed the original Scottish Brogue with more traditional Shakespearian English-accented speech, arguing that the Scottish was unintelligible. I think the most important part of the reconstruction of this film is the return of the original Scottish soundtrack - It adds so much to the grittiness and the darkness of the movie. After two or three viewings, most of the dialog comes clear, so in the first viewing the accent is just a bit of an inconvenience.

Many have cited "Macbeth" as a horror story, and whether or not that's exactly true, Orson Welles' superior production is certainly an excursion into nightmare that even a Murnau would have envied. The sets and camerawork create a world of wet, windswept badlands and dark stone mazes in which it is difficult not to believe in witches and omens and where bloodletting indeed seems the order of the day. Though a low-budget production, Welles' movie never looks cheap and his mileu never less than convincing. Welles' own portrayal of the doomed protagonist is dead-on, and while Jeanette Nolan's performance as the scheming, hard-hearted Lady Macbeth is often harshly criticized, in many ways her vampiric interpretation of the character is unsurpassed. Likewise Roddy McDowall (Malcolm) and Dan O'Herlihy (Macduff) are definitive in their roles, and Alan Napier is strong as a "Holy Friar" who is the movie's conscience. An enrapturing cinematic experience from the Weird Sisters' mesmerizing invocation to the climactic siege of Macbeth's castle (featuring a great sword fight between Welles and O'Herlihy), Welles' "Macbeth" is classic moviemaking that will endure as long as darkness moves the hearts of men and women.

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.

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.

This film is actually fun both visually and audibly. Welles has a great voice to begin with, so when he's voicing Shakespeare (in deliciously over-the-top fashion?!) his delivery is even more captivating. Also, the brooding/hellish set design is perfect for this play, which is filmed in exquisite B&W. No colors to distract here: this film is ALL MEAT.

Despite the claim in another review here this very free adaptation of the Tragedy of MacBeth is not at all faithful to the Bard of Avon, including the introduction of a new main character, featured for his great face and braids. In fact it leaves out several scenes and condenses many others. As MacBeth walks out to his death, we finally see Lady MacBeth wringing her hands. Nevertheless, there is much that is indeed recommendable, including the interpretations by the mainly excellent actors (MacBeth and Lady). MacDuff simply posed like a California beach boy.

The major difficulty with this production and the studios lay in their cutting out twenty minutes and erasing the Scottish accents. You will find the listing of a dialogue director her, apparently for the accent alone. I find the application of the accent rather inconsisten, with Welles at times speaking Scot and at other times MidWesterner. Perhaps the dialogue was not fully restored in this presentation.

One thing to note about this adaptation: it really gets pretty boring about a third of the way through, mainly due to the adaptation and unfaithfulness to the bard and showing us things like horsemen in the distance and bad acting. Up to that point we feel very much and very strongly an influence much later on Kurasawa's excellent and powerful and moving adaptation Throne of Blood - Criterion Collection. In fact many of the images, including the warriors and witches, appear directly reflected in that later film. Then Welles goes south and I go to sleep. We have yet to find an excellent and true production of MacBeth for film. Even Macbeth / McKellen, Dench (Thames Shakespeare Collection) falls short and from the beginning does not ring true. Welle's opening is on the other hand spectacular and true.

One interesting point upon which Welles makes us dwell is the execution of the fist Thane of Cawdor. MacBeth at first protests that Cawdor is a fine and honorable gentleman. The others say he confessed under torture. Knowing as we now do of the unreliablility of forced confessions, in which anyone will admit to anything at all just to ease the pain if only for one moment, perhaps MacBEth's madness began at that point: knowing that Cawdor is innocent yet forced to confess to what he did not do and thus put to death. For this insight alone we owe much to WElles.

One further point: the back of the box indicates a return to Welles's ghost story with Peter Bogdonavitch but I could not find it.

Except for "Touch of Evil", made a decade later, "Macbeth" was Orson Welles' last directing job for a major studio. Just seven years after wowing the movie world with "Citizen Kane" he cranked out this practically unwatchable Shakespeare howler that looks as though it were edited with a Veg-o-matic. It's part of the "modernist" conceit that an artist should completely disregard his audience, and Welles sure followed the letter of that law here. Between the indistinguishable sets, garbled dialogue, bad lighting, troglodyte costumes, mismatched shots and jumbled continuity, even someone who knows "Macbeth" by heart will have a hard time following what's going on. If you're a Welles fan it's worth a once-over; if you're a Shakespears fan there are plenty of better versions.