Macbeth (1948) - film review

Triumphant in battle, warriors Macbeth and Banquo return to their home in Scotland and are greeted by three strange hags who offer them prophecies of future glory.  Macbeth shall be crowned King of Scotland, but it is Banquo’s descendents who shall inherit the throne.  Whilst Duncan, the present king, is lodging in Macbeth’s castle, the ambitious Macbeth, encouraged by his wife, performs the terrible act of murder that will ensure the first prophesy will come true.  His attempt to thwart the second prophesy fails – Banquo is killed but his son Fleance escapes.  Macbeth summons up the three witches and insists on knowing more of what the future offers him.  He is assured by what he hears.  No one born of woman can harm Macbeth…

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing...  These immortal words surely do not apply to one of the most famous works in the English language, nor to Orson Welles’ haunting film adaptation.  Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth!...  Like the indellible blood spot on Lady Macbeth’s hand, Shakespeare’s darkest play continues to stain the collective consciousness of the educated English, to the extent that barely a day passes without some connection being felt, some line recalled or seen, bastardised, on the cover of a book, in a newspaper or on a billboard.   It is a vivid story centred on the twin follies of ambition and desire for mastery over one’s destiny – a story of ruthless cruelty and bloody revenge.  Shakespeare’s most accessible play is also his most spectacular and chilling, and it’s not surprising that so many film makers have been tempted to reformulate it for the big screen.  Macbeth is a play which – like the Bard’s other great piece, Hamlet - holds an eternal fascination, as though it were some great Oracle of human experience.

Orson Welles is not a man known for moderation and his take on Macbeth is by no means a wishy-washy affair, the kind of thing you watch and then forget about straight afterwards.  Yet, neither is it a work of unqualified genius, and some have described it as being amongst Welles’ weakest films.   The film has been praised for its bold cinematographic style and condemned as a grotesque, self-indulgent travesty.  Welles apparently had no qualms about changing Shakespeare’s text – moving speeches around, pruning dialogue and even adding new dialogue here and there (horror!).  No less controversially, the director presents Macbeth less as a morally flawed man whose thirst for ambition brings about his own destruction, but more as a victim of supernatural forces that cannot be resisted.   (This has similarities with a theatrical version – referred to as "Voodoo Macbeth" – that Welles staged in 1936, with a cast composed entirely of black actors.)

Purists would argue that this radical re-interpretation of Shakespeare’s work is thoroughly misguided, since it exculpates Macbeth of his part in the evil that he perpetrates. Welles seems to regard Macbeth as a mere plaything of celestial forces - he has no active part in the events that take place, and therefore is blameless of his crimes.  Whilst this does seem like an unwarrantable sacrilege of a great work, it does perhaps provide an insight into how Welles (and others) saw the world in the aftermath of World War II.  Was it possible that mankind alone should be held responsible for the destructive forces that had ravaged the world for six years, ruining nations and bringing the human race to the very brink of annihilation?   For those who had lived through this terrible time, surely it was at least possible to think that events were being driven by forces beyond our understanding – amoral spirits (or some invisible hand of history) for whom man is merely a painted toy, a thing to be played with and tormented, as a child might play and torment the worms it finds in its garden?  Rather than slavishly adapt the work of a greater artist, Welles uses this as a pretext for exploring some unsettling philosophical ideas on human existence.  Consciously or otherwise, he inverts the irony in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and suggests that our sense of free will is entirely illusory.  As Macbeth himself states (when he realises the game is up), we are mere players on a cosmic stage, speaking only what has already been written for us, living only what has been pre-determined.

Whatever Welles’ real intentions were, it cannot be denied that the result is an errie, timeless and startlingly original piece of cinema.   Lacking the resources he needed to realise his creative vision, Welles was compelled to make drastic economies, and in so doing conjures up a world that has an unnatural, dream-like feel – redolent of Jean Cocteau – but filmed with the raw primitiveness of Eisenstein, an approach that emphasises the supernatural elements of the story and the brutal time in which it is set.  As in a German expressionist film, characters are dwarfed by their surroundings, angled shots and aggressive cutting create a disorientating sense of a world in turmoil and moral decay.  And everywhere there is a cold lingering mist, dark menacing shadows, an all-pervading sense of doom, and sounds, shrill and stark, that echo deep within our conscious thought.

Few devotees of Orson Welles would regard this as the director’s finest hour, however.  Brilliant as the cinematography is, it is constantly undermined by the characterless reportory-style acting and some obvious penny pinching on the set design.  Welles could have done far better than to cast himself as Macbeth – his performance lacks any real passion or human feeling and his portrayal takes away much of the power and pathos which Shakespeare’s dialogue gives him.  Even before the film was released, it succumbed to the curse which (supposedly) befalls every production of the Scottish Play.  The distributors objected to Welles’ (bizarre) decision to have the dialogue spoken in an authentic Scottish accent, and insisted that the film be redubbed so that it would be intelligible to an American audience.  The film was also deemed to be too long (and 107 minutes) and so was cut to 89 minutes.  It wasn’t until the 1980s that the film was restored to its original (and vastly superior) form.  Undeterred, Welles would subsequently make two further film adaptations of Shakespeare plays – Othello (1952) and Falstaff (1965).

© James Travers 2007


I owe Orson Welles a great deal - seeing his Othello at age 13 made me a lifelong Shakespearean.  I think Othello and Chimes at Midnight are terrific films.  However, to watch his miserable Macbeth is to give oneself up to a perfect example of Coarse Acting at its worst.  Where to start... well, with the witches, with a transposed speech that opens the drama but manages to cut the rhyming line that gives "there to meet - with Macbeth!" which cripples the whole opening.  Then we have Banquo and Macbeth entering in funny hats, Banquo’s unsourceable but Macbeth’s definitely that of a Mongol prince.  Later, the Scottish ’feel’ of the play enters Macbeth’s wardrobe; his first crown has a plaid scarf draped from it, as if he’s afraid of the cold.  As for the crowns, they become weirder than the sisters.  

The original distributors were quite right to worry about the Scottish accents, because they are a bizarre selection that wobble between Ireland, Yorkshire, Scotland and quite a bit of my-Canadian-granddad- talked-like-this. The best by and large of the Scots is Lady Macbeth, who does sound a bit like a Scottish landlady warning one against too much use of the soap (’a little water...’).  Macduff has two very, very long blond plaits. Lumps of rock make up the Macbeths’ home, even as royalty. The problem is that when you’ve got all this hilarity going on for eye and ear, it’s almost impossible to judge the overacting fairly.

Welles has his moments, as always, but even then it’s impossible not to be distracted by his costume, the scenery or the mixed bag of peasants in the background.   There are some striking moments of filming: the monstrous baby produced from the cauldron at the opening, the murderers perched like raptors in the tree at twilight (speaking well, too).   But, sadly, it’s a case of one embarrassing moment following another.

© Su Barkla (Topsham, Devon, UK) 2012 

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