Macbeth (Charles K. Feldman Productions, Mercury Productions, Republic Pictures, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After we watched the Lifetime movie Sisters for Life I ran us a movie I’d been curious about ever since our cinematic excursions into Hamlet via our viewing of the 2019 Blu-Ray of Ambroise Thomas’s opera version (with its happy ending) and then Laurence Olivier’s 1948 adaptation of the original play (with the bloodbath at the end Shakespeare wrote). The film was Orson Welles’ version of Macbeth, filmed in 1948, tinkered with in the editing and sound-recording rooms for a year or two and finally released in Europe in 1949 and in the U.S. a year later. Olivier’s Hamlet and Welles’ Macbeth were released more or less around the same time, and a lot of critics cited Hamlet as a model of how Shakespeare should be filmed and Macbeth as an example of how he shouldn’t be. I first saw the Welles Macbeth in 1978 as part of a film class I was taking at San Francisco State University and I wanted to use it as a case study in the art of adaptation, comparing it not only to the original play but also to the opera Giuseppe Verdi composed on it (writing his first version for Florence in 1847 and then rewriting it for Paris in 1865; most of the revisions involved making Lady Macbeth more of the prime mover in the story and fattening the star soprano’s opportunity for villainy). At the time the only version of the Welles Macbeth that was available was an 86-minute cut-down version the producing company, Republic Pictures (usually a studio specializing in cheap “B” Westerns but with occasional ambitions for something more; for years they had John Wayne under contract but most of his famous films were made on loan-out to other companies) had virtually sneaked out in 1950. In 1979, long after Republic Pictures had stopped making new films but were still reissuing their old ones, the studio’s management discovered a longer version that lasted 107 minutes (still 40 minutes short of Welles’ original cut) and included the original soundtrack with the characters speaking in modern-day Scottish accents.

Welles had been a devoté of Shakespeare for well over a decade when he filmed Macbeth; he had edited a series of cut-down versions of the plays in the 1930’s called Everybody’s Shakespeare and had produced some of the plays in his days as a New York stage Wunderkind in the late 1930’s. Welles’ first go at Macbeth was under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project, a branch of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) set up under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to put the unemployed to work at government expense. Welles was given a grant to produce Macbeth at a theatre in Harlem but he had to use an all African-American cast; rather than try to pass off a bunch of Blacks as Scottish people, he decided to relocate the setting to Haiti and turn the Three Witches whose prophecies to Macbeth and his friend Banquo kick off the play into voodoo hougans. Welles’ next go-round on Macbeth was a production he was invited to do at a theatre festival in Salt Lake City in 1947, for which he cast himself as Macbeth and Agnes Moorehead as Lady Macbeth. He did a quick adaptation of the play for his production with an eye towards selling himself, his cast and the simple, stylized sets he wanted to use to a movie studio. When the major companies turned him down he sold the project to Republic with the promise that he could shoot the film in three weeks – after all, the cast was already assembled and had just performed their roles on stage.

Welles also wanted to experiment with a technique he’d been interested in ever since making The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942: instead of the standard way of shooting a sound film – having the actors both move and speak simultaneously on stage while both cameras and sound recorders took it down – Welles had the idea to produce a film soundtrack in a recording studio, like a radio play, and then have the actors lip-synch to their pre-recorded voices during shooting. He had abandoned the technique in Ambersons after two days because the actors never spoke their lines well enough to maintain lip-synch to their pre-recorded voices – pre-recording had been the standard way to shoot musical numbers since 1929 but it had almost never been attempted in a dialogue film – but Welles decided to try it again in Macbeth on the ground that Shakespeare’s dialogue was in regular poetic meter and it might be easier for the actors’ on-screen lip movements to match their pre-recorded voices. Some of the scenes worked acceptably but for others he still had to fall back on the standard technique of having the actors record their voices “live” during shooting. Also, since Welles had been given only three weeks to shoot the film, he decided to hire a cinematographer, John L. Russell, who was well known for doing quality work on quick schedules – a reputation that over a decade later would get him the job shooting Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, another film made by a major director on a deliberately limited budget and schedule.

At least Welles had the advantage of shooting Macbeth for an established studio with state-of-the-art facilities and the ablity to finance the film in one continuous stretch of production time – a luxury he wouldn’t experience again in his directorial career until Touch of Evil (1958) – instead of having to make his film in bits and pieces with whatever money, actors and sets he could pull together at the moment. He also had his stage cast except for Moorehead, who for some reason was unavailable for the film and was replaced by a radio actress Welles had worked with on that medium, Jeanette Nolan – whose performance as Lady Macbeth is good but still seems like it should be accompanied by a note in the printed program, “Miss Agnes Moorehead is indisposed tonight. Her part will be played by Miss Jeanette Nolan.” (And I’m going to make my husband Charles laugh his head off when I write this, but I can think of an actress who would have been better than either Moorehead or Nolan: Barbara Stanwyck. The reason that would make Charles laugh is it’s become a running joke between us when I say that such-and-such a film would have been better with Barbara Stanwyck in it. But the woman who played the femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity and etched that character in sheer acid would have made a wonderful Lady Macbeth. Ironically, while Welles was filming Macbeth Stanwyck was at Paramount doing Sorry, Wrong Number, a story originally done on radio with Moorehead.)

I remember reading years ago an article about Welles which pointed out that all the movies he directed between Journey into Fear in 1943 and Touch of Evil in 1958 were film noir except the Shakespeare adaptations (Macbeth in 1948 and Othello in 1952), and I would argue that even his Shakespeare films were noir prototypes: Macbeth is about a basically decent but weak man who’s led into a life of murder by an ambitious and greedy woman, while Othello is about another basically decent but weak man who’s led by a male comrade into suspecting his wife of infidelity and killing her. Both Macbeth and Othello were used as the basis for modern-day thrillers in the late 1940’s or early 1950’s: Macbeth as a gangster movie called Joe Macbeth in 1955 with Paul Douglas and Ruth Roman, and Othello as the basis for the 1948 film noir A Double Life, in which Ronald Colman plays an actor who gets so obsessed by his long-running role as Othello he picks up a woman and kills her. Oddly, the Olivier film of Hamlet and the Welles Macbeth are quite a bit more similar than the late-1940’s critics would have had you believe: both are shot on relatively simple, stylized sets, both often seem to have drawn their visual looks from 1930’s horror movies (especially the ones from Universal), and both use the gimmick of making the soliloquies work on film by giving us the actors’ voices delivering them while we see them on screen, but with their lips not moving to indicate they are merely thinking these words, not actually saying them. At the end of the film I told Charles, “Olivier’s Hamlet is better Shakespeare, but Welles’ Macbeth is a better movie.”

For all the usual Sturm und Drang of a Welles production – after it was turned in Republic decided Welles’ original soundtrack, with the actors speaking in Scottish accents (though, as Charles pointed out, these are 1948 versions of Scottish accents and we really don’t know how the Scots of Macbeth’s time or the actors playing the roles in Shakespeare’s own production talked), would be incomprehensible to modern American viewers, so in addition to shortening the film by 20 minutes they also had Welles call back his cast to redub the film in American-accented English. (This adds Macbeth to that short but peculiar list of films which had to be dubbed or subtitled for English-speaking audiences even though they were in English originally. The 1971 Jamaican film The Harder They Come, which more or less introduced reggae music to American audiences, needed subtitles in the U.S. because our audiences wouldn’t have been able to decipher the Jamaican accents; and the first Mad Max movie, shot in Australia with an all-Australian cast, had to be redubbed in American English for its U.S. release. Mel Gibson, who was American-born but had lived for years in Australia and knew its dialect, did his own dubbing but everyone else had a voice double.)

I didn’t particularly care for Macbeth the first time around but I liked it a lot better when the 107-minute version came out on home video and I got to see it in the late 1980’s (and again when I ran the VHS tape for Charles, who thought it was overwhelming but not always in a positive way; I remember him commenting afterwards, “Unalloyed genius is sometimes hard to take”). The longer version made the stylization of the sets and gimmicks like the clay figure of Macbeth made by the Three Witches (and, in their final scene, decapitated to indicate Macbeth’s impending death) seem more credible, more part of a coherent whole, and it’s occurred to me that if this film has an antecedent outside of Shakespeare it is the 1919 German masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. That film became famous worldwide for its use of stylized sets, costumes and actors’ movements to communicate the delusions of a madman, and Welles was one of its biggest admirers. In his immediately previous directorial effort, The Lady from Shanghai, he set the climactic shoot-out between the characters in a fun house as a deliberate homage to the carnival setting of Caligari, and the Welles Macbeth seems to me a similar film in its use of stylization to indicate the character’s increasingly demented state.

It’s curious Macbeth and Hamlet were both filmed in the late 1940’s and were seen as opposite poles in the art of filming Shakespeare, since the plays themselves are in some ways mirror images of each other: Hamlet is called upon by a supernatural force to commit murder (albeit morally justified murder), but is too indecisive to do it; whlle Macbeth is told by supernatural forces that his destiny is to rule but is unwilling to wait for his time to come, and forces the issue by committing murder. It also occurred to me this time around that, embracing Macbeth as a story both on stage and film so soon after World War II, Welles might have been intending to make Macbeth an analogue of Adolf Hitler, particularly Hitler’s descent from evil but still rational goals into wholesale bloodshed and dementia, getting crazier and crazier as he gets lonelier in his redoubt, his forces desert him, and he takes refuge in a bunker-like castle with the handful of people left in his orbit. (Welles would make a Hitler analogy again in his last Shakespeare film, Chimes at Midnight, in which he would rewrite the two Henry IV plays and flip the dramatic meaning of the final scene by using visual quotes from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will: in Shakespeare’s original Henry V’s determination to conquer France is seen as fulfillment of his grownup destiny and an indication that he has finally shed his wastrel past and assumed the responsibilities of kingship. By quoting Triumph of the Will Welles essentially taps us on the shoulder and says, “Wait a minute. He’s assembled an army to invade another country and impose his will upon it by force. We know where that leads.”)

One thing I’ve noticed about the Welles Macbeth is how quickly it moves: events separated by days, weeks or even months in Shakespeare’s play occur right after each other, often with only a jump-cut or pan between them. That’s one of the reasons I think it’s a better movie than Hamlet: OIivier was trying to show us the play Shakespeare wrote (albeit in a version with its own significant set of cuts: Olivier’s Hamlet runs 2 hours 42 minutes and it would take Kenneth Branagh 4 hours and 2 minutes to make a film of the complete, uncut play) while Welles was using Shakespeare’s original to give us a story about ambition, greed, the lust for power and the ways those detach people from their humanity. I remember reading Joseph McBride’s book on Welles and notice that he criticized the film’s actors, except Dan O’Herlihy as Macduff, for not reproducing the beauty and nobility of the language – but I think McBride uncharacteristically missed the point. It was O.K. for Macduff, as the play’s principal force for good, to speak the lines poetically and savor their beauty; but Macbeth, Lady Macbeth and the other evil characters are using the language not to reveal but to conceal their true intentions, so it’s right that the actors playing them cut against the formal beauty of the language, and by so doing reveal to us who and what they really are.

There are certainly problems with the Welles Macbeth – his own performance starts at 11 and gradually works up to 20 (in a review of one of Welles’ previous films as both director and star, The Stranger, one critic lamented that Welles the director wasn’t about to call Welles the actor on his overacting, and the same is true here, though oddly Welles’ approach gives his character more consistency than Olivier gave Hamlet, throwing some lines away while bellowing others at full force); Malcolm, the crown prince who’s restored at the end after Macbeth’s death, seems weak (Roddy McDowall plays him); O’Herlihy’s Macduff is oddly restrained (especially in this larger-than-life situation with so much of the rest of the cast overacting) when he learns that Macbeth has killed his wife and all their children (Macbeth hires the job done in the play but does it personally in the film); and Macbeth’s crown looks like one of those cardboard things they give kids at Burger King. But there are also plenty of directorial triumphs, including the drummers that herald the execution of the Thane of Cawdor for treason that seem to have come out of Welles’ all-Black Macbeth in 1937. Cawdor’s execution indicates that the political situation in Scotland is a good deal more complex than we might think. Audiences for the play might find it hard to believe that Duncan can be murdered in Macbeth’s home while the Macbeths are not even suspected, and they’re able to frame and then kill Duncan’s servants – but with Duncan having just ordered the execution of a traitor it’s clear the political situation is unsettled and a lot of Scots in and around the court would quite likely have regarded Duncan’s murder as another part of the plot the late Thane of Cawdor was engaged in).

Another aspect of the Welles Macbeth is the very odd portraal of the Macbeths’ sexuality, and in particular the reference in Lady Macbeth’s early dialogue that “I have given suck, and know 55How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.” Her reference to having nursed a child, while she and Macbeth have none, indicates that she’s been married before, and even on my first go-round with this film I was convinced Welles intended to depict Lady Macbeth’s homicidal mania and her determination to get her husband to kill as motivated by his inability to satisfy her sexually), which Welles communicates by having Jeanette Nolan writhe in bed as she reads Macbeth’s letter in her opening scene. The final sequence in which Birnam Forest does indeed come to Dunsinane is impressive, especially because the trees Macduff orders his soldiers to cut down so they can carry them and hide behind then to steal upon Macbeth’s redoubt at Dunsinane are the first actual vegetation we’ve seen in the film. Everything else has been all crags and caverns and hallways with windows that look like spikes. Even the concoction of Alan Napier’s character, “A Holy Father,” whose dialogue Welles cribbed from multiple characters he eliminated from the script and who is sometimes the voice of reason but gets so tiresome at the end it’s almost a relief when Macbeth throws his staff at him and kills him just before the final battle, works in a quirky way. (Napier’s career fell from this high point to the low point of The Mole People in 1956 before he reached a nice middle ground as Alfred the Butler in the 1966 Batman TV series.) And, like Olivier with William Walton, Welles recruited a major composer for the music: Jacques Ibert, who was usually identified with lighter music than this (his most famous piece is called Divertissement for Orchestra) but turned in a convincing score even though Welles had to fly with his work print to Paris to get Ibert to add his music. Today we don’t have to choose between Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet and Orson Welles’ Macbeth: we can appreciate and accept them both as equally valid, if profoundly different, ways to film the works of the Bard of Avon.