Macbeth

Macbeth
Blu-ray
Kino Lorber
1948
Starring Orson Welles and Jeanette Nolan
Written by Orson Welles and William Shakespeare
Photographed by John Russell
Directed by Orson Welles

In 1948 Orson Welles went to toe to toe with fellow Shakespearean Laurence Olivier and it didn’t take long for critics to declare the winner. Olivier’s new film was a lavish production of Hamlet produced by Two Cities Films, a venerable institution lauded for prestige entertainments like David Lean’s Blithe Spirit and Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out. Welles was trumpeting his latest effort, an adaptation of Macbeth financed by Republic Pictures, a frugal outfit best known for bargain basement cowboy pictures. Both films were slotted to debut at the Venice Film Festival later that same year. Herbert Yates, the penny-pinching owner of Republic, may not have been an artiste but he was a connoisseur of the bottom line, and he knew when he was beat; no matter how many tricks Welles had devised to disguise the impoverished nature of his movie, Macbeth wore its low budget like a white flag.

Filmed in just 21 days on sets usually inhabited by Wild Bill Elliott and Smiley Burnett, Macbeth‘s primal power had fascinated Welles for decades—he was 21 when he first staged it in 1936 as Voodoo Macbeth and its macabre story of a man cursed with unholy ambition appealed to both the director’s genius and his arrogance. Welles not only ignored the “curse” of Macbeth, a play plagued by bizarre accidents and death, he grabbed Republic’s fog machines and rode into the fray, leaning on the story’s supernatural elements to fashion a 17th century horror movie with witches, beheadings and backstabbings—an Elizabethan film noir for the literary set.

Welles prepared for the film by returning to the stage; on May 28 1947, he mounted a production of Macbeth at Utah’s Centennial Drama Festival using a mix of local drama students and the actors he would direct in the film version. The New York Times praised the effort—Welles had cut Shakespeare’s tragedy down to a lean hour and forty five minutes and they were particularly enthused by the director’s own “humanized” performance. As for Welles’s staging, the Times thought his lighting effects “impressively eerie” though the darkness was “overdone.”

The Marx Brothers honed many of their routines on stage before filming the results. But this is Shakespeare, not S.J. Perelman, and Macbeth‘s journey from that Salt Lake City theater to the Republic soundstage was rocky at best; minimalist sets that were convincing on a dimly lit proscenium look slipshod and tacky on the big screen. And there were glaring technical flaws, some self-inflicted, like Welles’s penchant for pre-recorded dialog which made the actors seem detached from their own body. There is also much to admire, Welles’s mastery of the frame was second to none and Macbeth is nothing if not a carousel of bold compositions that dazzle the eye while revealing the character’s motives; when Macbeth soliloquizes in extreme close-up, a figure can be seen plotting in the distance (imagine Jedediah Leland typing out his pan of Susan Kane’s performance while her enraged husband looms in a doorway just out of earshot).

Macbeth is at best a rough sketch for the director’s magnificent version of Othello which began shooting immediately after Macbeth in 1949, a triumph that was produced under even more egregious circumstances than the “Scottish play.” Shot over three years, Welles dealt with multiple cinematographers and post production obstacles that would drive most people mad. Othello remains a great film, a near miracle.

It was more than the budget and the director’s mercurial nature that brought down Macbeth, the film suffers from Welles’s uneven portrayal, at times he is in full command, in other moments he seems disinterested. Jeanette Nolan’s performance as Lady Macbeth may be the film’s fatal flaw, she comes off as a single-minded social climber lacking passion and mystery, her mad scenes are devoid of terror and, as the Times might have noted, humanity—it was a quality which Welles could not help but espouse himself, so soulful is he even in his most murderous moods.

The film was photographed by John Russell (Psycho, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms) and it’s one of the great pleasures of this severely compromised film. Kino Lorber has done a fine job with their new Blu ray release (using Paramount Pictures’s 4K remasters from 2022) which includes both the original 119 minute version and the 85 minute re-release from 1950.

Among the extras are a new audio commentary from Tim Lucas and an archival commentary by Orson Welles biographer Joseph McBride, author of Whatever Happened to Orson Welles. Also included are interviews with Michael Anderegg (Welles and Shakespeare) and a 2016 interview with Peter Bogdanovich, This Was Orson Welles. There’s also an interview with Robert Gitt about the film’s restoration and a brief look at Yates and Republic Pictures with archivist Marc Wanamaker.