After making this film, Welles took a 10-year break from Hollywood. A low budget adaptation with cheap sets, a three-week shooting schedule, lots of mood, and an attempt at Scottish accents. In Britain The Observer branded it “uncouth, unscholarly, unmusical.” Only in 1980, when Wilson restored the excised footage and Scottish dialogue for a re-release, was Macbeth judged as Welles had intended it, as “a violently sketched charcoal drawing of a great play. Shakespeare's classic tragedy is performed with a celebrated lead performance by Welles, who plays the tragic king as a demonic leader of a barbaric society. Released in the US in September 1950, this version made Republic a small profit. Republic executives so hated Welles’ original cut that they obliged his assistant, Richard Wilson, to hack it to 86 minutes, with redubbed American accents. Jeanette Nolan’s Lady Macbeth, with a Bride of Frankenstein hairdo and shrill voice, lusts after husband and power with equal fervour, though her inexperience in front of the camera explains her stiff performance. The impression that Macbeth is enduring a nightmarish, out-of-body experience is strongest when Welles, in a fine burr, delivers the most important soliloquies in voiceover and, as in Welles’ radio Shakespeare, his thoughts belong as much to the audience as to the speaker. Welles’ Macbeth towers above his co-stars in low-angle close-ups (as he would in Othello), murders Duncan in a virtual trance and as King, deadens reality by remaining perpetually drunk sobriety returns only when he faces death. This is '.103Min.mp4' by SHU Community Theatre on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them. Welles could only afford abstract sets: The jagged walls of Macbeth’s castle resemble quick-dried volcanic lava its courtyard has the unmistakable smoothness of a studio floor.Ĭopious thunder, lightning and wind effects enhance the artifice, and yet there is great visual poetry when the camera closes in on Macbeth’s feverish face as he sees a crowded banquet table suddenly empty, save for Banquo’s ghost, or when a ten-minute take follows the build-up to and aftermath of Duncan’s murder (Welles could shoot such long takes without worrying about off-camera interruptions because the cast had pre-recorded their dialogue in Scottish accents and acted to playback). Macbeth (1948) Director: Orson Welles Orson Welles’s eccentric, Expressionist adaptation of The Scottish Play varies marginally from the text of the original play in that certain sections of the Shakespearean dialogue are revised or eliminated, and in one instance a Holy Man character is wholly introduced.
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