Cinematic Shakespeare by Michael Anderegg

Author:Michael Anderegg [Anderegg, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780742573444
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

Shakespeare on a Budget: Macbeth (1948)

Welles’s Macbeth went against the expectations of “Shakespeare films” as Hollywood had earlier constructed the genre. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, as we have seen, were prestige productions, created with the facilities of a large, wealthy studio, starring well-known performers in both major and minor roles, and aiming for, if not entirely achieving, an epic grandeur. Both of the earlier films, though not moneymakers, brought prestige to their respective studios and to Hollywood itself. Both drew on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century theatrical practice and, in doing so, associated themselves with the respected “legitimate” theater, under whose shadow Hollywood felt itself oppressed. Both Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the latter especially) mixed high culture, “theatrical” elements with low culture, “cinematic” elements in order to draw a large, varied audience. Each film was, at least potentially, accessible. Romeo and Juliet wanted to be recognized as a “class” act, and it strove to provide viewers with a cultural experience offered in the mode of Hollywood gloss and romance. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, less culturally ambitious, aimed to reproduce Shakespeare as popular entertainment. Welles’s Macbeth failed to satisfy on either level.

Macbeth had its origins in Welles’s notorious 1936 voodoo production in Harlem, sponsored by the WPA (Workers Progress Administration), which featured an all-black cast and a nineteenth-century Haitian setting. In preparation for the Republic film, Welles staged the play in 1947 at the Utah centennial celebration in Salt Lake City. As with the film, Welles for this production restored the Scottish setting and had the actors employ a distinctive brogue. Though Welles later claimed that there was no connection between the Harlem staging and the Republic film, both employed a similar unit set (as did the Utah production), both emphasized the occult and supernatural elements of Shakespeare’s play, and both edited the text in essentially the same fashion. Welles shot the film in three weeks at Republic Studios, a feat considerably helped by the Utah “tryout.” Critics of the initial release, focusing in particular on the “incomprehensible” accents, were sufficiently negative to frighten Republic executives into pulling the film out of circulation. Under pressure, Welles’s rerecorded much of the sound track and reedited the visuals, in the process shortening the film and adding a spoken prologue, after which Macbeth was rereleased in 1950. European critics were more impressed than their American counterparts, and Welles’s film found a significant cult reputation abroad.

In Macbeth, Welles highlighted the brutalism and primitivism implicit in the world Shakespeare depicts as well as the contradictions he left unresolved. His Lord and Lady Macbeth are very much as Brecht characterized them in the Messingkauf Dialogues, “petty Scottish nobility, and neurotically ambitious.”38 Whereas Shakespeare portrays the Macbeths as an aberrant element in a world of order and harmony and as the inevitable product of a world of violence, bloodshed, and betrayal, Welles clearly opts for the brutality. (He even goes back to Holinshed, Shakespeare’s source, as when he shows Macbeth leading the soldiers who kill Lady Macduff and her children.

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