Macbeth (1948)

Admirable film.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Back in the days when Hollywood understood that good actors can make or break a film. The film is the telling of the classic Shakespeare play of the same name. It stars Orson Welles and it is also directed by him. Orson is known as one of the greatest actors of all time for good reason, the man can chew scenery like nobody's business, and because this film is a word for word adaptation of the original play, it acts to limit Welles from overacting; which in this case is a good thing because there are some pretty cool closeup of Welles' face as he is delivering a Shakespearean line and you can tell he is hamming up his facial expressions to make up for the fact he could not add lip on top of his lines. But yeah, this version of MacBeth is known for being dark and creepy which is strange because I didn't get that impression. Maybe because future versions of Macbeth borrow heavily from this film's tone? Who knows? I certainly wouldn't. It isn't like I go around watching Macbeth films all day long. I'm half sure that this is my first time ever watching a cinematic version of the classic tale. But yeah, if you are a fan of good cinema and don't mind Shakespeare then you should enjoy this film.

In fog-dripping, barren and sometimes macabre settings, 11th-century Scottish nobleman Macbeth is led by an evil prophecy and his ruthless yet desirable wife to the treasonous act that makes him king. But he does not enjoy his newfound, dearly-won kingship...Macbeth marked the fourth time that a post-silent era Hollywood studio produced a film based on a Shakespeare play: United Artists had produced "The Taming of the Shrew" in 1929, Warner Brothers made "A Midsummer's Night Dream" in 1935, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced "Romeo and Juliet" in 1936. None of these films were commercially successful, but the commercial and critical prestige earned by Laurence Olivier's film version of "Henry V" (which was produced in Great Britain in 1944 but not seen in the U.S. until 1946) helped to propel Welles' "Macbeth" forward.I am surprised that these films were not successful. And then comes Welles, who has such a large personality. This film is excellent, but he is a dominant part of the film -- directing, starring, and it seems he rearranged the sequences to make even the plot his own. Welles... artist or narcissistic dictator?

Orson Welles' first Shakespearean film, it is sadly on nowhere near the same level as either his masterpiece "Citizen Kane" - my third favourite film of all time - or Laurence Olivier's versions of "Henry V" and "Hamlet", which was released the same year. Macbeth has always been my favourite Shakespearean play and it is the one with which I am most familiar while Welles is one of my favourite directors. My hopes were consequently high but I am afraid to say that I was bitterly disappointed with the film.In terms of Shakespearean acting, Welles is himself not on the same level as Olivier - his performance in "Richard III" notwithstanding - or Kenneth Branagh. While he is very good in many of the quieter scenes, he has a tendency to overact in others. The same is true of his Lady Macbeth, Jeanette Nolan. Welles' decision to have the cast use Scottish accents wasn't a very good one as several of them are distractingly bad or just plain distracting. The best ones are probably from future "Batman" star Alan Napier as the Holy Father (a character invented for the film) and my fellow UCD graduate Dan O'Herlihy as Macduff. His papers are in the UCD Archives. I must see what he thought about working on the film! In one of his first adult roles, Roddy McDowall is not great as Malcolm. In spite of the fact that he was of Scottish descent himself, his accent was probably the worst in the film. The film was shot on a small budget over 23 days for Republic Pictures, best known for churning out B-films and serials of dubious quality. In a far from ideal move, the dialogue was prerecorded and it was dubbed in afterwards, leading to occasional synchronisation issues. Nevertheless, the film looks quite good and is suitably moody and atmospheric. The best scene is certainly the approximately ten minute one shot in a single take in which Macbeth murders Duncan. It is beautifully shot, one of the few in the film to demonstrate Welles' great talent as a filmmaker, and features his and Nolan's best acting in the film. The first half an hour is strong but, after Macbeth becomes king, the film goes downhill and never recovers. Although it is only 107 minutes long and is therefore shorter than many Shakespearean films, its pacing is rather sluggish in the last hour and it's hard to get excited about it. It feels rather lifeless. As is usually the case with Shakespearean adaptations, the film makes alterations to the play such as excising the character of Donalbain entirely, conflating several characters into the Holy Father, depicting Lady Macbeth's suicide on screen, shifting dialogue around, etc. Most of these are to the film's advantage or at least not to its particular disadvantage. I didn't have very strong feelings about any of them, if I am perfectly honest about it. Perhaps I would have if I had enjoyed the film more but I doubt it since I thought that Olivier's "Hamlet" was an absolute masterpiece in spite of the fact that it cut huge swathes of that play and several major and minor characters.I saw an interview with Eartha Kitt from the 1980s recently where she said that a major problem in the arts at the time - one which I think has gotten worse since then - was that too few people were artists and too many were just entertainers. She specifically singled out both Olivier and Welles as fantastic artists and two of the best of their generation and I would agree wholeheartedly with that. There are comparatively few actors, directors, singers, etc. whom I would describe as artists either and fewer still who are alive. Unfortunately, in Welles' case, this was one of his lapses in much the same way as "Richard III" was for Olivier.

I personally found this movie quite dull. The commentator at the beginning of this movie described it as being lax it the emotional department and that it did not capture the true essence of the play Macbeth. I am inclined to believe in him. He said at the end that while making this film, Welles said that he would not go over time or over budget. He succeeded in that, but this film was the result.I will not go into the depths of an analysis of the play Macbeth because I really do not think that it is needed here. I would rather wait until I watch the Roman Polanski version, which is far superior to this. What I though made this movie stand out was the sets. Basically the twisted trees and the ruined palace created the scene of a cursed and desolate land. It was a land that was under the curse of an oppressor and it came out well in the end.The most memorable scene here is when McDuff's daughter is talking with her mother about the nature of traitors. She, I think, is by far the best actor in the film, and that was one of the best scenes in the film. Other than that, I found the film to be quite lacking and I was waiting for it to end. The reason that it received such a low score was that it was a complete bastardisation of a classical Shakespearian play. Even though the style of the sets were good, the sets themselves appeared rushed and thrown together, giving no real thought or desire to create a good movie.