Macbeth’s castle seems hewn out of the very cliffside, its hallways nothing more than slimy caverns. As Citizen Kane leapt back and forth in time, and as The Lady from Shanghai served up a world-sized Crazy House in which Michael O’Hara was perpetually caught at a disadvantage by the shifting, ever-changing camera angles as much as by Elsa’s machinations, so does Macbeth extend Welles’s experiments with a world whose topography and geography puzzles the eye and mind. The whole film serves as a kind of mirror to Macbeth’s own consciousness. The witches appear, plunge their hands into their cauldron, bringing up mud and forming it into a voodoo-like Macbeth doll that will reappear to help convey the dagger scene and the beheading of Macbeth by Macduff as Charles Higham notes in a rare moment of complex apprehension: “In its crumbling, decaying, but at the same time formatory shapelessness, the face is at once a mirror and a death mask.” He summarizes the opening movements of the drama, some of which we shall witness anyway, as we witness the events condensed in the obituary newsreel of Charles Foster Kane. Welles’s voice speaks to us of “Ancient Scotland lost in the mist that hangs between recorded history and the time of legend.” He speaks of the old being displaced by the new, superstition and black magic reluctantly giving ground before the advent of a Christianity that, for what we see of it later, seems scarcely less barbaric. As with Ambersons, the director’s voice speaks of a vanished age, and the darkness is replaced by endless vistas of heaving fog that may cover land or may as easily be cloudscapes: certainly the landscape is one of dream not dissimilar to the Xanadu scenes at the beginning of Kane. Its opening is superb and marks the film as unmistakably Welles’s own. Small wonder that Welles forsook Hollywood following this experience and began filming on the Continent by hook or crook.īut Macbeth deserves to be remembered for more than its production history and overall failure. The soundtrack of the present Macbeth includes material from all the endeavors, so that Duncan and (at first) Malcolm are still heard burring away. Welles wasn’t around he delivered his own new lines from London, and production assistants Richard Wilson and William Alland (Kane’s Thompson, also the Second Murderer here) coordinated the various tracks as best they could. Actors were called back for re-dubbing some of it in clear English, some in purest American. The technique wore heavily on the players and the sound of the dialogue displeased the producers and the first preview audiences: it was delivered with a heavy Scots burr. Not the least of the difficulties during shooting was that Welles had pre-recorded the soundtrack and asked the actors to synchronize their on-camera performances with their former readings (a method attempted on The Magnificent Ambersons but abandoned almost immediately). With an awesome surge of creative energy and organizational genius, he came in on schedule, although he begged in vain for another two days in which to do some retakes. He had a slightly larger budget than he’d enjoyed on Kane, but his shooting schedule was staggering: a mere 21 days. To be specific on production matters, Welles made Macbeth at Republic Studios, a company that specialized in westerns and action flicks. He had once considered Macbeth for his cinematic debut, remarking in 1940 that “ Macbeth and its gloomy moors might be grand” for the movies: “A perfect cross between Wuthering Heights and The Bride of Frankenstein.” But when he came to make the film some seven years later, he was to enjoy nothing like the production resources behind the Goldwyn–Wyler Wuthering Heights and-save for isolated passages that fairly leap out of the body of the film-he seemed curiously paralyzed, his style grown monotonously murky and overbearingly static, as though he had yet to grasp the full implications of The Lady from Shanghai: little of Macbeth is on a par with its predecessors in the Welles canon or, for that matter, with the extravagant cinematic imagination of James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. Welles’s last American film of the Forties was not a happy experience. In anticipation of that May 2-8 engagement, Parallax View presents… Othello The original text remains essentially unaltered, with references to earlier Welles films the series-goers would have seen and, at the outset, one they had not. In anticipation of that, Parallax View presents a detailed program note written when Othello appeared in an autumn 1971 film series devoted to Welles on the University of Washington campus. Northwest Film Forum is about to showcase a new 4K restoration of Orson Welles’s Othello, one of the director’s greatest-and rarest-films.
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