Go See 'Macbeth' Tuesday Night

For the 11th feature in our screening series with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation at Nitehawk Cinema, we present Orson Welles’s Macbeth, a Shakespeare adaptation completed at a time of financial and career uncertainty for the legendary director, but one that is made stronger through its limitations with B-movie sets and Welles’s trademark compositions.

To get you prepped, we have an excerpt from noted Welles scholar James Naremore from The Magic of Orson Welles, along with thoughts from Maxine Doyle, one of the directors behind Sleep No More: the dazzling, Macbeth-inspired theater experience that has enthralled New Yorkers for years.

-Introduction by Greg Eggebeen

JAMES NAREMORE– Author, The Magic World of Orson Welles

Welles had always wanted to bring classics to a popular audience, and for over ten years, on and off, he expended creative energy on this particular play. In 1936 he achieved major theatrical success with the Voodoo Macbeth. A few years later he performed the play on radio with Agnes Moorehead. When he brought the Mercury Theater to Hollywood, Macbeth was on his list of proposed films. Then, in 1947, his fortune declined and he staged Macbeth at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Under an arrangement with Herbert Yeats of Republic Pictures, he turned the Utah production into a film, taking two and a half weeks for the shooting and spending around $700,000. He said later that he had set out to prove that worthwhile work could be done on a shoestring. He was correct, but the film was not so cheap by Republic standards, and if one counts the Utah stage show as production time, it was not quite such a quickie as it seems. The haste and cost-cutting show through in many ways, and yet the film remains both exciting and revealing of its director’s interest in a radical style…

Macbeth is a completely stylized film that rejects the usual Hollywood standards of realism. It makes very little attempt to conceal the fact that it was shot on a soundstage and is so ahistorical that it gives Lady Macbeth lipstick, 40s-style shoulder pads, and a dress with a zipper. The setting is like the primordial landscapes of popular fantasy; as Joseph McBride has observed, the long shots of horsemen approaching the castle early in the film are probably a reference to King Kong. Macbeth as Welles conceives him is almost a mini-Kong himself—a stubby, bearded fellow clad in animal furs, often photographed from below with a wide-angle lens. Against this image, Welles opposes a handsome, relatively fair Macduff (Dan O’Herlihy), who has a blonde wife with Shirley Temple curls (Peggy Webber, who doubles as one of the witches). On every level, the film is built out of simple contrasts which have been emptied of precise historical reference. The major visual motif of the picture is a contrast between the Celtic cross and the satanic forked staffs of the witches. These two emblems are introduced in the opening scenes and run through the movie until the final battle, when the attacking armies are represented as a sea of crosses. In the last images, as the camera retreats Kane-style from Dunsinane, the staffs of the witches rise once more out of the mist, symbols of brutality and the lust for power that seem to be overtaking Malcolm’s new rule…

Everywhere the movie is characterized by a deliberate, “stagy” artificiality, as in the scene where Macbeth climbs a hillock and rages at the top of his voice while nature storms around him: The studio lights are turned up and down to represent lightning, a tiny backstage rumble simulates thunder, and on the “sky” we see shadows cast by artificial trees in the foreground. Welles is quite willing to let these effects stand because he is striving for an expressionistic cinema that alludes to theater and to the 1920s German cinema’s preference for studio sets and technical effects rather than location photography. Raymond Durgnat has said this of the German style:

The relationships of the characters are all reduced to broad, primal attitudes and urges. The acting concentrates, not on the ebb and flow of people’s behavior, but on broad, forceful postures and gestures. Thus the film is reduced to a series of basic movements each of which is then emphasized and “accordioned out”—giving the characteristic “heaviness” of German silent films.

At one level Macbeth is the purest example of expressionism in the American cinema. It begins with a few highly effective outdoor shots and then grows progressively less naturalistic. It makes use of all the expressionist urges that were characteristic of Welles’s style from the beginning of his career: the deep-focus photography, the distortions of the fish-eye lens, the deep shadows, the snaky movements of the camera; but to these it adds an obviously staged, constructed, symbolic environment, to say nothing of a theatrical acting style and a stripped down version of the play that slashes away lines, speeches, and entire scenes, meanwhile inventing a new character. All this might sound like a travesty, but in fact Welles’s Macbeth is an extraordinary cinematic experiment. This restored version of the film uses the Scottish accents Welles originally wanted, and gives back to us the great “porter” scene that Republic Pictures had cut, which is the first ten-minute take in movie history.

Excerpted with permission from James Naremore’s book, The Magic World of Orson Welles, published by Southern Methodist University Press.

_MAXINE DOYLE– Co-Director / Choreographer, _Sleep No More__

When shall we three meet again…?

It is a dark day for Macbeth when he stumbles across three craggy old women—the witches—on the moody, tempestuous heath. When they reveal to him in a prophecy that he will be king, he is catapulted into his own inner battle of good verses evil. It’s a great story and juicy fodder for Punchdrunk.

In Sleep No More, the witches are the most powerful characters who live in our world of noiresque shadows. As in the play, they are creatures of the night who propel Macbeth into this place of immoral indecision unleashing his “deep and black desires” and whose frivolous mischief ends up in bloody chaos. The imagery at the heart of act four, scene one, which sees Macbeth come face to face with the three apparitions—an armed head, a bloodied baby, and a crowned child holding a tree—offers us a provocative, theatrical gauntlet. How do we do that, create an atmosphere, loaded with perpetual and imminent threat? How do we portray the destructive violence at the heart of Shakespeare’s witches and protagonist?

In Sleep No More, Macbeth becomes a tortured, drug crazed rock star, junked up on power and pumped up on paranoia. His blood lust morphs into a blood orgy during a hedonistic witches sabbat. As he cradles a dead, bloody fetus in his arms, he realizes he is no longer in control of his world. There’s no going back.

Preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive in cooperation with Paramount Pictures with funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the Film Foundation.

Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.

For tickets,_ click here_. Complimentary drinks will be available from Larceny Bourbon after the screening in Nitehawk’s downstairs bar.

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