Macbeth (1971 film)
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| Macbeth | |
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 original movie poster |
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| Directed by | Roman Polanski |
| Produced by | Andrew Braunsberg, Timothy Burrill, Hugh M. Hefner, Victor Lownes |
| Written by | William Shakespeare (play), Roman Polanski, Kenneth Tynan |
| Starring | Jon Finch, Francesca Annis, Martin Shaw |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
| Release date(s) | October 13, 1971 |
| Running time | 140 min. |
| IMDb profile | |
Macbeth (also known as The Tragedy of Macbeth) is a 1971 film directed by Roman Polanski, based on William Shakespeare's play of the same name, concerning the Scottish lord who becomes the king through deceit, treachery and murder. It stars Jon Finch as Macbeth and Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth. Because of the transition from play to movie, some passages from the original play had to be cut out for time constraints, and some soliloquies have been changed to inner monologues for the sake of realism.
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[edit] Ending and its implied themes
In the most significant departure from Shakespeare's text, the film's ending is unremittingly bleak. While Malcolm is indeed crowned as Scotland's rightful king, his final speech is omitted entirely in favor of an abrupt, wordless scene which shows his envious, crippled brother, Donalbain, returning from exile and entering the witches' lair. The implication is that Donalbain will now seek the witches' counsel to usurp Malcolm through murder and treachery just as Macbeth had usurped Duncan, thus beginning the cycle of internecine bloodshed all over again.
This peculiar ending recasts the events of the play within a closed circuit of action—a spiraling circular narrative framework (mise en abyme) —which suggests that the tragedy we have just witnessed will repeat itself again and again ad infinitum to the end of history.
Such a nihilistic conclusion effectively renders the action of the play—and Shakespeare's hopeful suggestion that virtue and justice will ultimately prevail—as altogether meaningless and absurd. In doing so, Polanski considerably alters and diminishes the psychological complexity and emotive grandeur of Shakespeare's story. Instead of a high tragedy and cautionary tale about the devastating effects of corrupt ambitions put into action, Polanski presents a melodramatic and profoundly cynical illustration of how power normally changes hands in a hostile and meaningless universe.
The end result is an irredeemable nightmare vision of a Hobbesian world engulfed in a permanent state of suicidal barbarism. Much like Peter Brook's film of King Lear, which was made the same year, Polanski's radical revisionist interpretation of Macbeth was influenced by the Polish drama critic and theoretician, Jan Kott. In his landmark critical treatise, Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, Kott argued that the bleak spirit of Shakespeare's great tragedies such as Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth, were in fact a precursor to the existential angst, metaphysical desolation, and absurdist worldview found in the plays of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco.
The excessive violence in the film has been attributed to the fact that Polanski's pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, had been savagely murdered by members of the Charles Manson cult in August 1969. For many viewers, Polanski's explicit and unsparing depiction of the massacre of Macduff's entire household recalled all too well the senseless brutality and intoxicating horror of the Manson killings. Nevertheless, the attitude of the film remains consistent with that of Polanski's work as a whole, especially in its concern with the unstable dynamics of power and sexuality as well as the cynical questioning of conventional notions of heroism and redemptive action.
[edit] Technical style
The film is composed of single-camera establishing shots and subjective point-of-view shots, whereby the audience is made a vicarious (and voyeuristic) participant in the on-screen action. Much of the film's dialogue lacks the emotive subtext of a traditional musical score. In many scenes all that is heard is the sound of the actors' voices in sotto voce accompanied by curious atonal wails and drones on the soundtrack. Similar to his 1965 film, Repulsion, Polanski also employs ominously unnatural silences and strange amplified sounds to create an enveloping sense of discomfort and dread.
The important scene in which Macbeth confronts the witches a second time, and is invited to gaze into their enchanted cauldron to glimpse his future, is realized as a cryptic, hallucinatory set piece montage. It begins with a vision of Macbeth's Doppelgänger warning him of the dangers at hand and finally culminates in a surreal visual allegory showing the eventual dynastic triumph of Banquo's heirs.
Banquo is seen as a king holding a mirror which contains an image of a "future" Banquo as a king holding a mirror, and this mise en abyme effect is repeated eight times until young Fleance is ultimately seen grinning and wearing a crown in the final mirror. This symbolic use of mirrors to illustrate a proleptic vision of death may have been inspired by Jean Cocteau's 1949 film, Orphée.
[edit] The characterization of Lady Macbeth
In Polanski's film, both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are played by much younger actors than has been the tradition. In the person of 26-year-old Francesca Annis, Polanski's Lady Macbeth is a softer and tamer character than is usually seen in most productions. Although willful and seductive, this Lady Macbeth is a rather capricious and perversely child-like young woman, almost a Lolita type, who controls her husband by persistently cajoling him and playing upon his frustrated sense of masculine pride.
Her strength and sanity crumble at a horrific pace when she at last becomes aware of the inescapable nightmare her actions have created. Polanski explained his reasons for this particular approach to the character by pointing out that "directors always present Lady Macbeth as a nagging bitch. But people who do ghastly things in life, they are not grim, like a horror movie". In an even more audacious departure from convention, Polanski had Francesca Annis perform Lady Macbeth's famous sleepwalking soliloquy in the nude. See still shots here
Polanski also takes the liberty of interpolating a scene that does not even appear in the play, one in which Lady Macbeth, now overwhelmed by guilt for all the bloodshed she has caused, tearfully rereads an old letter from her husband which she had received from him before their decision to murder Duncan. In this missive, he tells her excitedly of the favor and status he had just won from his new benefactor, the king.
This deliberate use of Macbeth's innocent, hopeful letter as an ironic counterpoint to Lady Macbeth's complete mental and physical breakdown serves to index the terminal degenerative effect that their descent into evil and bloodshed has had, and will continue to have, on them unto their deaths. It also underscores a bleak realization of how the two of them have needlessly and tragically destroyed their contented, pastoral life together in exchange for a tortured, wretched existence of ever-increasing violence, isolation and paranoic fear, as they commit murder after murder in continued boundless desperation to safeguard their ill-gotten position as king and queen of Scotland.
[edit] Production
When his pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered, an anguished Roman Polanski gave up on his latest film project Day of the Dolphin and sank into a deep depression, blaming himself for the tragedy. He even had psychics called over to his house where the murders were committed in hopes that this might yield some clue as to the identity of the killers and their possible motives.
Meanwhile, he had set his mind on adapting perhaps the bloodiest work in English literature, Shakespeare's Macbeth, but the major studios in Hollywood refused to finance such a project. His saviour was his friend Victor Lownes, a senior VP of Playboy Enterprises in Britain who persuaded Hugh Hefner to finance the movie. The source of the financing was initially believed to be the reason for Lady Macbeth's nude scene, although it was later disclosed that Polanski and co-scenarist Kenneth Tynan had written the scene into the script some time before the association with Hefner.
The production, which was filmed on location in and around Snowdonia National Park in Wales, was plagued by delays caused by constant bad weather and malfunctioning special effects—as well as Polanski's stubborn insistence on doing multiple retakes of several difficult and expensively mounted scenes, which also used up an excessive amount of costly high-grade color film stock. The shooting time went over schedule, ultimately taking six months to complete, and likewise exceeded its anticipated budget of $2.5 million by about $600,000.
[edit] Reception and effect on those involved
Upon its theatrical release in October 1971, Macbeth received mixed reviews from critics. Some found the picture's relentless graphic violence and sexuality distracting, and complained that the insistent literalness of its depiction resulted in a crude and overly reductive interpretation of Shakespeare's poetry. Likewise, Polanski's deliberate and jarring omission of Malcolm's closing speech in favor of the abrupt, discordant, pessimistic ending was seen to deny the viewer any solace or respite by effectively promising a continuation of all the preceding horror.
Other critics, however, praised the film for its powerful and disturbing vision and for Polanski's rigorously logical, technically brilliant and imaginatively cinematic rendering of the play's action. The U.S. National Board of Review named Macbeth the Best Film of 1971.
During the promotion of the film, Polanski distanced himself from Playboy and in an interview with Sydney Edwards of the Evening Standard, he made cynical remarks about his mercenary reasons for accepting financing from the controversial magazine empire. Victor Lownes felt personally betrayed by these stinging comments and was enraged at the director's apparent indifference to the film's subsequent commercial failure, which ultimately incurred a significant financial loss to Playboy.
Disillusioned and humiliated, Lownes severed his friendship with Polanski on a note of bitterness and rancor. He did not renew his relationship with the director until almost a decade later when both men had fallen from grace. By this time, Lownes had been fired from Playboy, which was now deprived of gaming licenses for its lucrative casinos and threatened with bankruptcy, and Polanski had become a fugitive from justice, having been convicted of statutory rape in Los Angeles in 1977 and then fleeing to Paris before final sentencing.
[edit] Trivia
- Albert Finney was first considered to play Macbeth but turned down the role, as he would only agree to star in the film on the condition that he be allowed to direct as well.
- Polanski originally wanted Tuesday Weld to play Lady Macbeth, however she turned down the role on account of the requisite nude sleepwalking scene.
- Martin Shaw auditioned for the role of Macbeth but was passed over in favor of Jon Finch; Shaw was eventually cast as Banquo.
- Ian Hogg, who appears as one of the thanes, also played the role of Edmund in Peter Brook's film of King Lear, which was made the same year and was similarly influenced by the ideas of Jan Kott.
- The role of Young Siward is played by the film's stunt coordinator, William Hobbs.
- The lyrics to the song that Fleance sings at Macbeth's banquet for Duncan at Inverness are taken from the poem "Merciles Beautè" by Geoffrey Chaucer. In the context of the film this extraneously inserted song is itself an anachronism, as Chaucer lived in the fourteenth century and Shakespeare's Macbeth historically takes place in the eleventh century.
[edit] External links
- Review by Fraser Donald
- Review by Roger Ebert
- Feminism and Roman Polanski's Macbeth, by Peter Balderstone, The Electronic Journal of British Cinema
- Film Notes, New York State Writers Institute
- IMDB entry
