Sunday, May 19, 2013

May 19: Macbeth (1948 -- Orson Welles)

★★★
Despite the point that Epstein and Lennon tried to make in The Battle over Citizen Kane, Orson Welles wasn't banned from movies after the Hearst conflict.  Instead, he was part of several bumbled projects and had so much trouble finding directing work afterwards that, in 1948, he ended up working on a project for B-film studio, Republic Pictures.  That’s where he made Macbeth.


This Welles film is an interesting adaptation of the play.  His technique here has some strong echoes of his work in Kane.  There’s the deep focus that Kane is so famous for, and characters’ faces shift in and out of light to reflect their conflicted, changing morality.  And again here, movement attracts attention wherever it is in the frame, even if that’s in the background.  For example, when Macbeth leaves Duncan’s chamber after the murder, it’s a tiny movement in the background, but with the stasis in the rest of the frame, our eye is drawn that way.

Some elements of Welles’ Macbeth also recall Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Pt. 1Macbeth unfolds Ivan is infused with a similar setting and mood.  The clunky royal wardrobe and décor in both is similar, especially the tall, slender staffs that characters carry.  There are even overwrought clergymen in both.  And both films hearken back to a theatrical, silent-film ethos of dark expressionism.  The overwrought, twisted atmosphere of paranoia in Ivan, Pt 1 is not far from that in Welles’ Macbeth.
mostly on a soundstage whose lighting and effects create a claustrophobic sense of psychosis and doom, and

But despite Welles’ using such cinematic elements to create an appropriate atmosphere for Macbeth, the movie remains only partly successful.  The staging is full of tension and psychosis, yet the atmosphere leaves us uninvolved because it’s hard to become invested in Macbeth or his Lady.  Many productions highlight the drama and conflict of the couple’s descent, but in this one, it’s hard to care much about the characters or about the state they rule.  Macbeth is an interesting film to watch, but it is far less compelling than many adaptations of the play are.

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