ShakespeareAND FILM

Film Versions Of Macbeth

Macbeth.
Directed by Orson Welles U. S. A. 1948 (rereleased 1949). Audio Brandon.
Starring Orson Welles, Jeannette-Nolan, Dan O'Herlihy.
This film is more Welles than Shakespeare. The setting is more that of Beowulf than that of the later Middle Ages or the Renaissance. On this account, Welles is impervious to elements in the play (the banquet, King Edward, hypocritical behavior) that suggest a highly developed culture against which the Macbeths do their dark deeds. Welles makes the conflict one between "agents of chaos, priests of hell and magic" and "Christian law and order." dhristianity, we are told, has "newly arrived" on the Scottish moors. For the old order, Welles uses suggestions of Stonehenge and the Druids. Macbeth's appearance is as we might imagine Attila the Hun. All of this means, of course, that murder would be expected of Macbeth. Welles excises political elements intimating the union of Scotland and England and makes the play one of religious conflict: the major symbolism, accordingly, is the Celtic cross against the forked staffs of the Witches. Welles goes to the length of creating a character denominated the Holy Father, who is spiritually pitted against Witches that look like vulgar village gossips. Basically, this film is an expressionist version of Macbeth: it rejects naturalism, reduces human relationships to "broad, primal urges," and expresses these by heavily symbolic gestures and postures. Thus, the shadow of Macbeth's finger moves slowly along a wall to point at Banquo's Ghost. The thrust of the film emanates from Welles' apprehension of a struggle in society between the individual will to power and the need for law and order. Curiously, Lady Macbeth's dress has a zipper, and she uses lipstick. Other discussion of this film may be found in James Naremore, "The Walking Shadow: Welles' Expressionist Macbeth," Film/Literature Quarterly, 1 (1973), 360-366; Susan McCloskey, "Shakespeare, Orson Welles, and the 'Voodoo' Macbeth," Shakespeare Quarterly, 36 (1986), 406-416.

Throne of Blood.
Directed by Akira Kurosowa Japan. 1957. Audio Brandon.
Starring Toshiro Mifune.
This film has been regarded as an adaptation rather than an imitation of Shakespeare. For example, without textual support Kurosawa makes the forest image central to the play: if Macbeth could control the forest he would be king indeed. Kurosawa's visual equivalents, such as having Macbeth die a pincushion of arrows, some of which have been shot by his own people, have been given qualified praise, e.g., by John Gerlach, "Shakespeare, Kurosawa, and Macbeth: A Response to J. Blumenthal," Film/Literature Quarterly, 1 (1973), 352-359. Kurosawa tries to make the corruption of Macbeth understandable by emphasizing the prophecies and the influence of his wife. Lady Macbeth announces her pregnancy, thus giving Macbeth a familial excuse for what in Shakespeare is less certainly realized. There are other instances of Kurosawa's chipping away something of the play's grasp of the darker aspects of human nature. Kurosawa's Macbeth, as the film goes on, becomes distanced from the viewers' sympathies and loses touch with the tragic idea of "a world that mocks human longing with sad knowledge of human limitations" (Gerlach).

Macbeth.
Directed by George Schaefer United Kingdom. 1960. Audio Brandon.
Starring Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson.
This color version, critics say, suffers from "theatrical," "stagey" acting by Evans and Anderson and from the "prettifying" of costuming, the Witches, castles, and the heath, which become the bonny Scotland of the calendars. There is, to be sure, some slight textual support (in I.vi) where Duncan and Banquo remark on the "pleasant seat" of Macbeth's castle. The principal characters are too old for their parts, and too cheerful. There is undesirable contrast between the theatricality of the acting and the down-to-earthness or documentary quality of the scene and the innumerable bits of stage business. The emphasis on realism, as Michael Mullin has pointed out, causes the chubby Evans to appear as an "ageing psychopath" experiencing hallucinations instead of ghosts, visions, and incompletely glimpsed apparitions. The sympathy of the audience is withdrawn from Macbeth.Macbeth. Directed by Roman Polanski United Kingdom. 1971. Columbia Cinematheque. Starring Jon Finch and Francesca Annis. Polanski's color version presents a young and attractive Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, who by these qualities help to realize the "fair is foul" theme of the play. Lady Macbeth is quite free from the meat-ax quality often associated with this character. Polanski-with memories of European concentration camps and the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, by Manson and his "family" - emphasizes bloodshed more than Shakespeare does: for example, the camera focuses on the exceptionally bloody murder of Duncan whereas this act in Shakespeare's play takes place offstage. One gathers that for Polanski the crown itself is tainted because at the ending Donalbain, Malcolm's brother, is shown, pace Shakespeare, riding off to consult the Witches. Polanski sensationalizes Shakespeare's play by, among other things, having Macbeth drink the Witches' brew; by presenting the Witches nude in IV.i; by having Lady Macbeth appear nude in the sleepwalking scene; and by focusing the camera on the decapitation of Macbeth. The result is a rather melodramatic and distracting film.Norman Berlin has reviewed the film in "Macbeth: Polanski and Shakespeare," Film/Literature Quarterly, 1 (1973), 291-298. David I. Grossvogel has written a review, "When the Stain Won't Wash: Polanski's Macbeth," Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, 2 (Summer, 1972), 46-71.

MACBETH -REVIEWS

reviewed by
Steve Rhodes

Roman Polanski is a controversial, but extremely gifted director. His best pictures (Oscar nominated for CHINATOWN and TESS) are brilliant and some of his lessor ones (FRANTIC, BITTER MOON, and DEATH AND THE MAIDEN) are still intriguing. His downfall is that his roots are in horror films (ROSEMARY'S BABY and DANCE OF THE VAMPIRE).

Undoubtedly giddy with the success of his ROSEMARY'S BABY, Roman Polanski decided to approach his next film, a Shakespearean play, in the same manner. With backing from Playboy Productions, his vision of MACBETH is one of the lessor of the movies made from Shakespeare's works. Beside the slasher movie aspects, the film is filled with full frontal nudity. It even has naked boys who are gruesomely murdered.

[Polanski also lost his wife to the Manson clan sometime during this period, and I have no idea how that affected him. MACBETH might have been finished before then. All I know for sure is that it was released in 1971.]

All of this notwithstanding, the major problem with the film is that the acting is lifeless. Yes, the shocking portions are there, but most of the acting is remarkably devoid of energy. Polanski's direction serves more to confuse than to enlighten. If you are not already well versed in the play before you enter, you will undoubtedly leave shaking your head and wondering "what was that all about?"

Polanski's MACBETH has a traditional look. The sets and the costumes are quite realistic. The squalor of that period is in full evidence. The castle rooms have straw beds with a roaring fire in the middle. Several people sleep in each room, and their big dogs sleep with them. From what I know of Scottish history this is all authentic. The movie was actually filmed in Wales, but that is another story.

The cinematography (Gilbert Taylor who later did STAR WARS) is full of earthen browns. It paints a bleak picture of the landscape. Rather than the picture postcard look, it goes with quite a depressing motif.

Polanski has his actors think aloud many of the lines as they walk rather than speak them. He is no Kenneth Branagh. He seems incapable of imbuing in his charges the importance of enunciation. They run through their lines as if the dialog were of little consequence.

If one of Shakespeare's purpose in the play was to shock people with Macbeth's dastardly deeds, then Polanski's techniques are effective. When Macbeth (Jon Finch) murders Duncan (Nicholas Selby), he stabs him several times with the blood spurting onto his hands and his clothes. He transfers the blood to the hands of his wife, Lady Macbeth (Francesca Annis), which makes all the dialog about the blood particularly poignant.

"Do not bid me speak; see, and then speak yourselves," says Macduff (Terence Bayler) when asked about the king's death. As in most sequences, the words are literate but the acting is not. Bayler has little screen presence which is the problem with most of actors in the film. Only Francesca Annis gives a mildly interesting interpretation of a woman gone mad.

Regardless of all of its flaws, this is Shakespeare, and the language is worth the price of admission. When Macbeth wants to beat a fast exit, he does not say, "Let's get out of here." Oh not, Shakespearean prose is ever so much more elegant. Macbeth advises, "Let us not be dainty of our leave-taking." Don't you wish you could talk like that? Don't you wish everyone would talk like that?

As you hear the cold wind blowing across the barren Scottish plain, you can feel the chill going right through your bones.

Finally, I can not leave this review without mentioning the famous scene of the witches. So what do you think Polanski's vision of this is? Well, he has not just a few, but three score of witches. He picks them for their ugliness, no surprise there, for their enormous girth and for their lack of teeth. Oh yes, and he has them all strip naked before the cameras roll. I wish he had spent less time trying to shock and more on practice sessions for his actors.

MACBETH runs 2:20. It is rated R for graphic violence and full frontal nudity of women and boys. The show would be appropriate for mature teenagers. Although it is full of flaws, the movie does have lovely language and effective settings. In the end, I can not recommend it, but I do give it ** which is perhaps a bit more than it deserves

Aylmer's Review

Excellent adaptation of the popular Shakespeare play written in 1607 to impress King James I of England.  Here, 400 years later, mister Polanksi hath maketh a film that doth impress yours truly.  Well, yeah I suppose...  How long did you think it would take for a Shakespeare flick to make it onto this site anyway?  Were you waiting for me to do the Joe D'Amato version of Hamlet?  No way, ugh, I had to read Shakespeare's Hamlet a while back and oh the memories... ugh!  Anyway, this is Polanski at his best doing what he does best, which is to seriously kick ass with the camera!

Jon Finch stars as Macbeth, a king who is told by a group of witches that he shall become King of the Scots someday.   Grown impatient for that day, he conspires to kill the present king Duncan, and finally gives into his desires after the persuasions of his lovely wife (Francesca Annis from Dune).  King Duncan is brutally murdered and Macbeth rules the country with an iron fist, desperately committing atrocious acts to maintain his power while slowly going insane from his buried guilt.  Eventually he is turned upon and a large rebellion rises against him.  I'm sure you know what happens in the end if you ever graduated High School.

Anyway, this was a Shakespeare play done very well.  The photography was eerie and dreamlike, the music was fitfully grim, and the set design was particularly impressive.  Lots of Polanski style violence and amazing gore thrown in there as well, the best of with was a scene where an arrow hit a man in the forehead.  It makes Friday the 13th look so incredibly lame by comparison!  Good decapitations, sword slashings, impalements, mace-whackings, and a lot of nice nudity to boot.  I've never seen Shakespeare done before in such an interesting way, almost never boring... utterly amazing!  Polanski did add a lot of scenes and changed a few characters around (particularly that of Ross) when writing the adaptation and created quite a few interesting subplots and puzzlements to think about.  The acting was also quite good, but not nearly to the scope of Orson Welles' dark and moody 1948 adaptation.  Annis failed to portray the megalomania of Lady Macbeth very well.  Otherwise, the film was almost flawless!  Polanski really was one of the better directors of our time and it really is a shame he had to flee the country all those years ago.  A MUST SEE!

For Roman Polanski, August of 1969 was a time rich with the possibility of happiness. The man who said, "Whenever I get happy, I always have a terrible feeling," had long had good reason to dread every new day. He had barely escaped the Krakow ghetto ahead of the Nazis; his mother had been killed at Auschwitz. Raised in the gray austerity of postwar Poland, he had managed to make brilliant, quirky art films like KNIFE IN THE WATER (1962) which had brought him to the attention of Hollywood. After an affectionate horror film parody, THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS (1967), he had married Sharon Tate, the film's beautiful star. Then had come ROSEMARY'S BABY in 1968. Hugely popular, the film had turned Polanski into an "A" list director. He was already in pre-production on one of the season's big money projects, DAY OF THE DOLPHIN. Financially secure, happily married, expecting his first child, installed in the requisite plush house in Beverly Hills, Polanski was now a certified member of the film aristocracy. It seemed as if the demons of his youth had retreated.

Overseas to scout locations for DAY OF THE DOLPHIN, Polanski rushed home when word of the Manson family's savage ritual murder of Tate and three friends reached him. Instantly at the center of the most celebrated criminal case in the world, blaming himself for Tate's death, suicidal, Polanski fell back on the old ways of emotional survival tested in his youth. He haunted the house on Cielo Drive looking for clues, brought in a medium, made himself a familiar figure in the investigation, and was, for a moment, considered as a suspect. When Life magazine asked for a picture, he complied enthusiastically, posing himself seated on the bloodstained stoop, the door to the house and its grisly contents standing open behind him. When word came out that Polanski had "directed" the shot, the film community shunned him. The slaughter at Polanski's house had finished Hollywood's brief era of flirtation with the emerging youth culture. The chemical days and the decadent nights in the dark canyons behind Sunset Boulevard ended. Polanski's art director on ROSEMARY'S BABY, Richard Sylbert, said "You can hear the toilets flushing all over Beverly Hills. Everybody became Presbyterian. That marked the end of the fun and games of the 60s. . . It was the end of the joke."

DAY OF THE DOLPHIN got away from Polanski. He gave up quickly a project about cannibalism, and tried to get the rights to Henri Chariere's bestseller Papillon. Exile in Europe, a year of ceaseless sex, and idling about ski slopes passed before Polanski asked critic Ken Tynan to work with him on an adaptation of Macbeth. The two had met when Tynan was writing Oh, Calcutta!, his notorious erotic revue. Polanski was to shoot two miniature films which were to be shown as part of Oh, Calcutta!. Each just a few moments in length, the two films depicted obscured views of sex acts, seen through windows. Unmade, the films' bizarre predilections raised Tynan's understanding that Polanski's deepest anxieties were also his likeliest subjects. He considered Polanski's ROSEMARY'S BABY "one of the very few films that made one consider the possibility that there was any such thing as absolute evil."

Screenwriting on MACBETH in London went smoothly. The two did not discuss the murders, or Polanski's increasingly hysterical right wing politics. Instead, they acted out sections of the screenplay, even Duncan's murder, until neighbors became shocked by the sight of the two men wrestling each other in Polanski's bedroom. The process of financing the film went unsmoothly. Shakespeare was passe to distributors. First Allied Artists and then Universal turned the project down. Finally, Polanski contacted Victor Lownes, his close friend and a senior executive at Hugh Hefner's growing Playboy empire. Tynan, a Playboy contributor, knew Hefner as well. Hefner was adding movie and book publishing entities to Playboy's corporate holdings, and Polanski's outrageous lifestyle and the art film aura of a Shakespearean adaptation proved irresistible to him. The presence of the film's celebrated nude sleepwalking scene was later widely ascribed to Hefner's interference, but in fact it had been an integral part of the script before the Playboy connection had been established. The scene caused Polanski's first choice, Tuesday Weld, to turn down the part of Lady Macbeth.

The striking youth of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth was an innovation that Polanski and Tynan felt strongly about. Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth was another actress in an already noticeable Polanski line of naive and winsome nymphets, from Mia Farrow in ROSEMARY'S BABY and Nastassia Kinski in TESS. Polanski's was a novel understanding indeed of Lady Macbeth, usually portrayed as middle-aged and calculating.

Location shooting in Wales consumed four weeks. The weather there was wretched, and the film's gray, rainswept look mirrored Polanski's continuing depression during the filming. As always, he sought catharsis for his inner turmoil in actions both grotesque and cryptic. On Hefner's birthday, for instance, Polanski sent Hefner a short film of three aged naked women, intended to evoke MACBETH's witches, singing "Happy Birthday, Dear Hef." He was ruthless to his actors, muscling them about, japing them pitilessly, seeking a control over the filmic world that had eluded him offscreen. Critics of MACBETH were amazed at its torrent of violence and cruelty, and indeed, Polanski drags much of the offstage mayhem in the play into audience view. Still, MACBETH, for all its depravity, was less violent, less ironic, and less shadowed by evil—by far—than Polanski's own life had been since his earliest days. For a man who had known the depredations of Hitler, Stalin, and Charles Manson quite intimately, the intrigues of Cawdor looked delicate by comparison.

Polanski lost himself in the shooting, finding in the freezing winds of Wales and the closed world of Shepperton studios the kind of crowded solitude he preferred. He seemed loath to surrender his hard-won mastery, and the film began to run alarmingly over budget. By the time shooting was over, he had spent ten extra weeks and $600,000 more than the film's small budget. The film would still manage to lose 3.5 million dollars. Hefner stood by Polanski, providing him with more money and intervening for him in a dispute with the completion bond company which threatened to halt shooting. In gratitude, Polanski gave a pre-opening interview at Hefner's London Playboy Club. He began by ostentatiously sending back his meal as inedible and finished by mocking Hefner's generosity. The whole thing, from the overcooked trout almondine to the insults, made the Evening Standard.

It got worse. The film opened in February 1971, in a misguided attempt to showcase Playboy's hipness and its aspirations to high society respectability at the same time. The event was a full-dress benefit for spina bifida and hydrocephaly victims, a singularly inappropriate association with a film like MACBETH. As squadrons of Playboy Bunnies served cocktails, Lownes introduced Polanski to Princess Anne, the event's royal sponsor. Looking closely at Anne's famously long face, Polanski joked, "I'll never make another film with horses in it." Lownes's friendship with Polanski was at an end. Angrily, he returned a cherished gift to Polanski, the life-sized gold penis Polanski had modeled for during happier days. Lownes wrote that "I'm sure you'll have no difficulty finding some friend you can shove it up."

Meanwhile, the film lost money precipitously. Polanski was unwilling to participate in the publicity effort at all, preferring to lose himself in work on a tiny documentary on Grand Prix driver Jackie Stewart. It made no difference, for it seemed no one wanted to see a Shakespearean film, a horror film, or a documentary in 1971, and MACBETH was all three. Polanski's MACBETH, wrote one critic, was "a world flooded with blood." It was, in a manner of speaking, Polanski's blood. When it came time to shoot the murder of Lady Macduff and her children, the cast and crew were edgy, nervous, aware of the tragic resonances the scene would have for Polanski. Instead, they found him eerily calm, apparently reconciled to a fate that condemned him to relive his worst agonies in order to make his greatest art. As he wiped fake blood on a child actress, Polanski did not even seem surprised to find out that her name was Sharon. When Terence Bayler, the film's Macduff, argued with Polanski over the character's reaction to the massacre, Polanski quietly ended the dispute, saying, "No, you'll do it this way. I know."

— Kevin Hagopian, Penn State University

 "Nothing is but what is not." With that ultimate statement of nihilism, Macbeth establishes himself as one of literature's (and cinema's) blackest villains. But what makes him memorable is not just his ambition and bloodlust, but also his conscience and imagination.

Almost immediately we hear of Macbeth's great exploits on the battlefield. However, before Scotland's King Duncan can announce Macbeth's reward for such valour, the three "weird sisters" let Macbeth know that one day he will be king. When Duncan gives Macbeth the title of Thane of Cawdor, he can't help but feel disappointed. Isn't he meant to be king? As played by Jon Finch, Macbeth is intriguingly complex; he is ambitious but, "without the illness that should attend it." Finch gives a convincing performance of a once good man devolving into a paranoid amoral madman.

Macbeth's tragedy is that he is unable to wait and see if "chance may crown me king." The reason is simple, his delightfully wicked wife Lady Macbeth. She knows her husband's greatest hurdle is not the title of king, but his unwillingness to do anything evil to attain it. He is, "too full of the milk of human kindness." Lady Macbeth spends much of her time driving all kindness out of her man by verbally assaulting his manhood. Unfortunately, as portrayed by Francesca Annis, Lady Macbeth seems less sinister than simpering. We never witness her transformation from loving, doting wife to fiendish shrew, so her character is only half-realised.

Polanski creates an imposing, rugged landscape. The castles look as stark as one might imagine those in the13th century to be. Polanski also makes shrewd decisions when rearranging, eliminating and 'embellishing' scenes from Shakespeare's play. "Blood will have blood," he has taken quite literally.

With the single (glaring) exception of the depiction of Lady Macbeth, this is a worthy addition to the Bard's cinematic canon.

Copyright is retained by the author

‘Tynan Bares the Bard.’ (1) ‘And Now it’s Oh! Macbeth!’ (2) In Britain, both tabloid and broadsheet headlines relished the 1970 announcement that Playboy magazine was setting up a production company to finance a film of Macbeth, to be shot on location in Scotland. Playboy’s English contributing editor, Kenneth Tynan (who was responsible for the erotic London stage show Oh! Calcutta), had prepared a screenplay and Roman Polanski (whose wife had recently been murdered by the Manson ‘family’) was to direct. Playboy founder Hugh Hefner promised ‘more’ violence and plenty of nude scenes, ‘although Shakespeare will be in there somewhere too’. (3) Rumours of Hefner judging a Bunnies of the Century competition for the casting of the three witches, and of Polanski showing a script to the British film censor because of ‘such a high level of sex and violence’ (4) provided entertaining fodder for the readership, and ensured such speculative journalistic gems as ‘Playboys and playmates can be assured of an entirely new interpretation of the line "Lay on, Macduff!"’. (5) Few would have wagered that the film’s treatment of its female characters would in any way prove acceptable to feminist analyses. However, Polanski disappoints prurient interests by producing a film which displays little of the exploitative nudity the newspapers anticipated, no sex, and violence which, although graphic, only serves to enhance the realistic tone of the film.

In their introduction to The Woman’s Part, a collection of feminist Shakespearean criticism, Lenz, Greene & Neely describe the work of the feminist critic: ‘Feminists assume that women are equal to men but that their roles, more often than men’s and in different ways, have been restricted, stereotyped, and minimised . . .’ (6) The feminist performance critic must bear in mind that the text is only the starting point for a dramatic production, be it on stage or screen. The illumination of the text, and of the characters contained therein, is thus a matter of choice. Feminist Shakespearean film criticism must examine the cinematic choices made for Shakespeare’s so-familiar texts, and, like its literary counterpart, attempt to determine to what degree these choices restrict, stereotype or minimise women’s roles. The assumption of negativity is dangerous, however. Film directors are equally capable of positive choices in their depictions of women’s roles, and the impartial critic should chronicle and evaluate these in just as much detail. If we examine the points at which Polanski makes choices about his central female character, and what those choices are, we find that while he may indeed drift into stereotype in his treatment of Lady Macbeth, Polanski, far from restricting or minimising, takes active steps to extend the role through re-attribution of lines and the creation of extra scenes.

Polanski’s Lady Macbeth is a woman who rules her husband with her psycho-sexual power. She is childless (she has not ‘given suck’ - the lines from I.vii were cut) and so the focus of her characterisation falls more squarely on the sexual and the controlling aspects of her personality. She is more ambitious than Macbeth, and more resolute, but this powerful persona is proved to be brittle. When confronted with the actual results - blood and murder - of her well executed plans, her seeming strength shatters, and the ensuing loss of control is pitiful. Like Orson Welles in 1948 (7), Polanski realises that the more attention given to a conception of Lady Macbeth’s influence and subsequent fall, the more fascinating the Macbeths’ power-hungry relationship will be to audiences.

One of the few critical works to specifically address Lady Macbeth on film is the article ‘Polanski’s Determining of Power in Macbeth’ (8). In her analysis of the 1971 film, Bruna Gushurst concludes that ‘Polanski insinuates within this film that the brilliant, colorful and heard voice of power is masculine in origin and reality’. Her identification of three types of sensory imagery which Polanski employs in delegating power to men in his interpretation is useful as a way of critiquing the film, but she uses it in an extremely selective manner. For example, she claims, ‘Adult males and their actions are usually portrayed in brilliant color, women in muted, bland colors’, forgetting the vibrancy of the opening shot of Lady Macbeth, or during the ‘Unsex me here’ speech. She goes on to compare the murder of Duncan scene - visually intense, with the gold of the crown, the blood, and Macbeth’s blue attire - with the scene directly following, where Lady Macbeth is waiting for her husband in the courtyard: she is portrayed in almost black-and-white color, with some muted blues and greens appearing. Macbeth has performed their life-determining deed; he is perceived as vital and alive - while Lady Macbeth is somehow not real, for she now lacks the vigorous coloring of life . . . Gushurst here ignores the fact that Lady Macbeth is outside, waiting at night. When Macbeth joins her, he is lit by exactly the same muted blue and green filters as she is. Gushurst’s analysis of the film is coloured by what she chooses to see. She perceives Macbeth as ‘vital and alive’ because of the vivid scene in which he has just participated, but omits the fact that Jon Finch plays him trance-like, walking and gesturing slowly, and speaking with hesitation.

Gushurst describes accurately the opening of MACBETH (9), where the landscape is vibrant red, and then fades to a duller green. This robbing of colour from the landscape she describes as foreshadowing the loss of ‘masculine virility from the country as a whole’, attributing it to the influence of the weird sisters and Lady Macbeth. Macbeth’s usurpation of the throne is directly brought about by the witches’ prophecy and the power and ambition his wife has over him, but the ‘masculine virility’ imagery is Gushurst’s, not Polanski’s.

Surprisingly, Gushurst makes no differentiation between Polanski’s directorial choices and Shakespeare’s authorial choices; ‘But the weird women themselves never exert the physical power of leadership. At best, they can only mediate the exchange of power.’ She does not recognise that at no point in the play do the weird sisters, or Lady Macbeth, attempt to lead. The power they seek comes through influencing events, and this is effectively achieved. Gushurst is casually dismissive of Lady Macbeth’s power over her husband in the early part of MACBETH, which I believe to be one of the most important themes of the film. While Lady Macbeth is unquestionably the controller up until the assassination, the shift of power away from her and toward Macbeth begins their tragic fall. Polanski recognises the importance of Lady Macbeth’s influence as the motivating force behind the assassination. There are four key scenes in Polanski’s MACBETH which demonstrate this power.

The first is the scene in the bedchamber just after Macbeth’s arrival in Inverness. There is a close-up of Lady Macbeth pulling Macbeth onto the bed. He lies down and she leans over the top of his head, so that they are face to face, but viewing each other upside down. She glances at the Thane of Cawdor’s medallion before stripping it from him, then gives him a brief passionate kiss, which is halted by Macbeth informing her, ‘Duncan comes here tonight’(I.v. 56) (10). The play has Lady Macbeth already forewarned of Duncan’s arrival. But Polanski and Tynan eradicate the Messenger of I.v, thus highlighting the decisive, controlling influence of Lady Macbeth. Immediately her face changes to seriousness. She sits up and re-examines the Thane of Cawdor’s medallion, then with laughter and suppressed excitement in her voice, says ‘Never shall sun that morrow see’(59-60). She laughs at his shocked face, takes his face in her hand, and in close-up puts her forehead against his, then swings round to kiss him. The speed at which she assimilates the information and then turns it into reality is breathtaking. Her ambition far exceeds the passive Macbeth’s. As she caresses her husband’s face, her voice is soothing his alarm, as a mother might to a child, while her actions suggest a strong sexual undercurrent. This potent mix is enough initially to convert Macbeth to treason.

The second key scene begins with a close-up of Macbeth preparing for the king’s visit by putting his Thane’s medallion (presumably that of Cawdor) over his head. He is passed it by a disembodied pair of hands which then hand him his sword, hilt first. He grasps it as a matter of course, before starting as he realises what it signifies. The camera pulls back to reveal the face of Lady Macbeth as he turns to look at her. Her face is impassive. She is in the position of power, manipulating his subconscious as he carries out a normal activity (dressing) and placing the weapon in his hands. By placing the sword in his hand, Lady Macbeth gives to him the instrument by which he may achieve his ambition (11). At the same time, she is delegating a task to a person of lesser resolve, thereby using him to attain her own desires.

Lady Macbeth’s critical moment is her effective bolstering of Macbeth’s courage when he is at his weakest point. Macbeth is outside the banqueting chamber, his resolve dissipating. He realises ‘I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on the other side’(I.vii. 25-28). At that moment Lady Macbeth, who will prove a greater spur than his pallid ambition, interrupts, off camera. When Macbeth asks if Duncan has been asking for him, Lady Macbeth replies ‘Know you not he has?’(30) lightly, again as if to a child, gazing into Macbeth’s eyes while attempting to gauge his mood. When Macbeth determinedly tells his wife ‘We will proceed no further in this business’(31) she does not turn and face him but remains staring into space, thinking. Macbeth, behind her, immediately attempts to justify his decision. His tone is beseeching. It is he who appears the supplicant. As she turns to face him his voice falters slightly and he walks away from her gaze.

When they enter the hall she sobs as she chides him, challenging his virility: ‘Art thou afeard as thou art in desire?’(39-41). (12) He snaps under his breath ‘Prithee peace’(44), attempting to assert himself. This does not spoil her rhythm as she continues to cry in shame and disappointment. It is a failing of the film that it is not clear whether or not her tears are genuine, or are manufactured to bring Macbeth into line. Either way, it achieves the desired result. After being mocked by Malcolm, Macbeth’s ‘If we should fail’(59) inspires new hope in her, and she quickly reassumes her dominant role by almost laughing ‘we fail!’(60) as if it is of no consequence. As she lays out her plan for the assassination there is the same suppressed excitement in her voice as when she first broached the subject in their bedchamber. As she asks ‘What cannot you and I perform on the unguarded Duncan?’(70-71), the shadow of the crown falls over her face and the drums start up again. She turns and realises that Duncan has approached her, and without a shadow of consternation on her face she immediately moves with him into the dance. There is more than a hint of flirtatiousness in her eyes as she dances with her victim. Her dissembling is effortless; she seems totally natural.

The fourth example of Lady Macbeth’s influence over her husband is barely perceptible, yet all the more powerful for its subtlety. It occurs just before the murder of Duncan, at the pinnacle of Lady Macbeth’s power in the narrative. Lady Macbeth takes the flagon from Macbeth without speaking and moves across the elevated walkway towards Duncan’s chamber, in order to drug the guards. She is barefoot, moving quickly. As Fleance and Banquo begin to speak she halts outside the door to Duncan’s chamber. She looks down on them. There is then a close-up on her impassive face as she stares at her husband, and a close-up on the worried Macbeth. They exchange looks across the massive courtyard at each other, but because of the close-ups it seems that they are right next to each other. With the tiniest flicker of her eyes Lady Macbeth signals to Macbeth to make a noise to draw Banquo’s attention away from her activities, which he does, immediately. As her husband speaks to Banquo she quickly enters above, into the chamber, undeterred from her treasonous intent. The subtlety of this gesture reinforces the magnitude of Lady Macbeth’s influence over Macbeth. It is an exchange which confirms her coolness under pressure, foreshadowing the clearheadedness which enables her to place the daggers in the guards’ hands.

Despite this formidable display in the early part of the film, Polanski’s Lady Macbeth shows chinks in her armour when confronted with the reality of the violence she sets in motion. Her domination of her nervous spouse throughout the plan and its execution is total, and she similarly overcomes her own fearful reaction immediately after the murder. But she cannot control her reaction to the sight of the guards’ butchery so easily. When faced, perhaps for the first time, with an actual product of her husband’s bloody profession, Lady Macbeth cannot retain possession of her consciousness. Her shock is unguarded and unfeigned, and there is nothing in Polanski’s camerawork to suggest that her swoon is contrived.

Polanski allows his protagonists to enjoy their new exalted position together (watching the savage bear-baiting) for only a moment before their fate drives them apart. Joan Larsen Klein notes that Shakespeare’s Macbeth becomes ‘wholly dominated by self’ after the murder of Banquo (13), and Nicholas Brooke points out how the Macbeths’ relationship changes radically as he alone plots Banquo’s death (in III.ii): ‘they are never intimate again; simultaneously their roles are reversed, and he now displays the determination on blood which was once hers alone, but which she can no longer sustain’. (14) This psychological transfer is clearly tied in the films to the (edited) dialogue of III.ii.

Polanski allows his protagonists to enjoy their new exalted position together (watching the savage bear-baiting) for only a moment before their fate drives them apart. Joan Larsen Klein notes that Shakespeare’s Macbeth becomes ‘wholly dominated by self’ after the murder of Banquo, and Nicholas Brooke points out how the Macbeths’ relationship changes radically as he alone plots Banquo’s death (in III.ii): ‘they are never intimate again; simultaneously their roles are reversed, and he now displays the determination on blood which was once hers alone, but which she can no longer sustain’. This psychological transfer is clearly tied in the films to the (edited) dialogue of III.ii.

Polanski’s handling of this scene (III.ii) constructs a perfect microcosm of how the power changes hands in the Macbeths’ relationship. The scene begins with a demonstration of Lady Macbeth’s usual role of allaying her husband’s fears, and ends with her isolation from him as he forges ahead to further murder. Macbeth dreams of being killed by Banquo and Fleance, but the hand that is Banquo’s in the dream turns out to be a form cut of Lady Macbeth’s hand reaching over to him in bed. In extreme close-up she wipes the sweat from his brow, and with her lips against his ears she urges him to forget. She soothes, ‘What’s done is done. Things without all remedy should be without regard’(12-13) (15), advice which later proves impossible for her to follow. Macbeth is afraid, and she takes him to her breast, comforting him. She leans her cheek against his head, she caresses his hair, she comes back down to his face. Her influential dual roles of mother figure and sexual partner are again in evidence in this scene, but now the effect is subverted. In the midst of these cloying embraces, Macbeth changes, becomes stronger. He moves away from her to the window, and it is she who follows him. ‘Oh, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife. Thou knowest that Banquo and his Fleance lives. . . . They are assailable. . . There shall be done a deed of dreadful note’(III.ii.39-46). Alarmed, her voice trembles when she asks, ‘What’s to be done?’(47). Suddenly she is the weaker. He doesn’t answer, but kisses her, not on the mouth, but on the cheek, as if to a child. ‘Be innocent in the knowledge, dearest chuck, till thou applaud the deed’(48-49). In this decisive scene, she moves from being the dominant, comforting mother figure to the passive, manipulated observer.

After this transfer, the descent of Lady Macbeth into powerlessness and madness is inexorable. She attempts to rally herself during the ghost of Banquo/banquet scene, but by its end it is clear she has failed. Francesca Annis’s Lady Macbeth attempts to re-create the party atmosphere of the first banquet. In the first banquet, given in Duncan’s honour, Lady Macbeth is in her element, seemingly carefree, and fully composed, drinking, dancing and laughing. In the second banquet scene, she makes an effort to instill a similar mood, but fails. She calls out, ‘You do not give the cheer!’(III.iv. 34) quite genially. But when Macbeth raises the toast to Banquo and everyone joins in the assent, Lady Macbeth does not speak. She raises her glass and drinks two heartbeats behind everyone else. The effortless dissembling from the first banquet has left her, and it is clear a bloody burden has begun to oppress her. This is far more apparent after the nobles (and the ghost) have departed. Her responses to Macbeth are even and measured, but when she tells him ‘You lack the season of all natures. Sleep’(142), she is the one who looks more in need of rest. He says ‘Come, we’ll to sleep’(143), and holds out his hand to her, but she ignores it, taking instead the firebrand. She then carries it out, and they ascend the stairs, lonely in the hell of their own making. The horrors and the consequences of their deed are beginning to overwhelm her.

Polanski contrives an establishing scene of a severely depressed Lady Macbeth before the sleepwalking sequence. Lady Macbeth is asleep over her sewing in the great hall, watched by two nobles. She is woken by her waiting lady as Macbeth rides back to the castle. As she awakens, looking down she screams as she sees blood on her hands, which fades away after her gasp. Terrified, she blurts out, ‘Gracious Duncan’s dead’. The camera immediately switches to the cynical nobles’ point of view, looking across at her across the throne room. The larger Thane half smiles at her words. She who was so good at concealment and planning ahead has now given the game away, and confirmed what they suspected.

Polanski’s MACBETH gained notoriety in part through Lady Macbeth’s nude sleepwalking scene, a choice inspiring much comment in 1971. Does the nudity have any justification, beyond the titillation Hugh Hefner promised at the launch? It has no textual justification, but there is, perhaps, a case to be made. It is difficult not to feel any sympathy for Lady Macbeth. However much an objective view might conclude that she deserves her fate, viewing a film is a subjective experience, and the presentation of Lady Macbeth is such that an audience is able to feel sorry for her. This is one of the peculiarities of the medium. By following any character’s life and experiences for two hours or so on film, we build up a sympathy for them simply because we are sharing, often intimately, part of their life (16). So with Polanski’s Lady Macbeth, any revulsion we may feel at her artless manipulation is tempered by our realisation of the slow failure of her marriage and her ever-quickening descent into madness. When we see Lady Macbeth in a guilt-induced sleepwalk, and she is naked, there is a degree of emotional identification with her being stripped of her guile, her pretentions, and being viewed so objectively by the doctor and the nurse. Kenneth Tynan confirms this as Polanski’s intention: ‘there is something particularly vulnerable and pathetic about a nude woman wandering around a cold castle’ (17). She seems very fragile, beset with madness, and is in stark contrast to Macbeth, whose confidence is almost overwhelming.

The film that Hugh Hefner promised at the launch, full of sex and violence, is not the one Polanski delivered. The violence is well represented, but within the plot of Macbeth there is the scope for a lot of cinematic sex, yet Polanski for some reason chose not to include it. Moreover, in the only scene in which the female protagonist is nude, Polanski takes steps to avoid the possibility of titillation by the use of the on-screen viewing male. The male audience is represented on-screen by the viewing doctor, and his reactions draw our minds towards the political consequences of her words. The sleepwalking scene then, seems curiously ambivalent. It begins with a gaze. The camera, for the only time in the film, reveals itself when it peeks in through the pillars to see the waiting doctor and nurse. At first it appears the camera approximates what Lady Macbeth is seeing. However, she then moves into the same shot, belying that first assumption. Also, if she is genuinely sleepwalking, which I think it is clear she is, she would not see the doctor and nurse at the outset. She would be, as she is in the rest of the scene, fixed on horrors beyond the comprehension of the doctor and nurse. Polanski’s clumsy use of the camera here simply creates confusion in the mind of the audience, because it sets up the proposition that Lady Macbeth, once such a manipulator, is manipulating the doctor and nurse. This does not prove to be the case in all her subsequent actions, and there is no look or gesture to reveal her intentions to the audience. The camerawork in the sleepwalking scene strikes a jarring note in the film.

There is no release for Polanski’s Lady Macbeth. Her feverish re-reading of Macbeth’s original letter, another scene created for the film, underlines the cyclical nature of the film’s horrors. She reads it compulsively, tears streaming down her face, her hair wild, untidy, her tired, dark-ringed eyes wild, staring. There is an effective edit at the end of this scene. She is breathing heavily, very distressed. The camera leaves her and shows a long-shot of the tower in which she is reading the letter, during which two more quick breaths are audible, and then there is a cut to Macbeth and the scene in which he hears that she has leapt to her death. The next time we see Lady Macbeth she is a corpse, lying at the foot of the tower, broken and twisted, one arm twisted up grotesquely, her eyes open, blood streaming from her nose and mouth, and a patch of blood beneath her.

Films made from the same play, like stage productions, often create a critical dialogue between them whereby later films comment on earlier ones by revising cinematic interpretations. Polanski judged Orson Welles’s MACBETH a ‘failure’ (18), and in a discussion concerning the characterisation of Lady Macbeth he makes another criticism, not specifically of Welles, but obviously including him: ‘They [directors] always present Lady Macbeth as a nagging bitch . . . They think of her in Charles Addams terms. But people who do ghastly things in life, they are not grim, like a horror movie’ (19). Visually, Welles’s Lady Macbeth (20) is the stereotyped Morticia which Polanski disdains. Francesca Annis’s appearance is, more interestingly, one of youth and seeming innocence. The disturbing import of ‘Fair is foul’ is nowhere more personified than in Polanski’s Lady Macbeth, but the main strength of the performance lies in its ability to be both monstrous and yet pitiable.

NOTES

1. The Daily Express, 22 August, 1970

2. The Sunday Telegraph, 22 August, 1970

3. The Daily Express, 22 August, 1970

4. The Evening Standard, 27 October, 1970

5. The Times, 22 August, 1970

6. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely, 'Introduction' to The Woman's Part, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 3.

7. MACBETH, dir. Orson Welles. Republic Pictures and Mercury Films, 1948.

8. Bruna Gushurst, 'Polanski's Determining Power in Macbeth', Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, 13, no.2 (April 1989), 7 (p.7). The following quotations are from the same article

9. MACBETH, dir. Roman Polanski. Columbia Pictures, Playboy Productions/Caliban Films, 1971. Following the example of Kenneth Rothwell and Annabelle Henkin Melzer in Walking Shadows (London: Mansell, 1990), the National Film and Television Archive's catalogue of Shakespeare on screen, I print the name of the film in capitals to distinguish it from Shakespeare's play of the same name, which is in italics.

10. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, edited by Nicholas Brooke, Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). All quotations are transcribed from the film, but are keyed to this edition unless otherwise stated.

11. Given Lady Macbeth's later jibes about her husband's virility (see next footnote), the phallic connotations of a sword should be also be noted. Lady Macbeth provides him with the means to prove his manhood.

12. Combining lines 39 and 41. Line 40 has been cut, which restructures the sentence into a sexual insult.

13. Joan Larsen Klein, 'Lady Macbeth: "Infirm of purpose"', in The Women's Part, edited by Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980), p.244.

14. Nicholas Brooke, 'Introduction' to William Shakespeare, Macbeth Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 19

15. Kenneth Tynan sets the snappier, more dismissive 'What's done, is done' before 'Things without all remedy...'; the Folio has it immediately after.

16. Per Serritslev Petersen finds Roman Polanksi to be striving for this audience indentification in the scene showing Macbeth's severed head's point of view: 'the audience is... stuck with the existential tragedy of Macbeth, even beyond his death and to the point of total emotional and visual empathy, if not sympathy'. Per Serritslev Petersen, 'The "Bloody Business" of Roman Polanksi's Macbeth: A Case Study of the Dynamics of Modern Shakespeare Appropriation' in Screen Shakespeare, edited by Michael Skovmand (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1994), p40.

17. From an interview with Kenneth Tynan by Clement Freud, The Daily Telegraph Magazine, 5 March, 1971 (pp32-38), p.32.

18. Roman Polanski, Roman (London: Heinemann, 1984), p289.

19. Francis Wyndham, p.19.

20. Played by Jeanette Nolan