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Writer's pictureLizzy Gravelle

Welles’s Shakespeare Update

Film studies professor and author Michael Anderegg wrote that Orson Welles holds an “unparalleled place in American life as a mediator between high and low culture.” In this way, Welles held a similar position in twentieth-century popular culture as Shakespeare did in his own time. Welles was passionate about bringing Shakespeare into the popular consciousness of the 20th century, and his similar directorial balancing act of high and lowbrow sensibilities made him the perfect person to do it. It is little wonder that one of Welles’s most interesting films was his 1948 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. In his depiction of the play, Welles infuses the emotional depth of Shakespearean tragedy with the popular aesthetics of the cheap horror films of his contemporaries, making them accessible to the everyday movie audience just as Shakespeare did centuries before.

Welles developed his passionate love for Shakespeare and his many works from an extremely young age. He starred in several productions of Shakespeare’s plays in school, and referred to the theater as his “first love.” He often found any excuse to perform as Sir John Falstaff -- first as a teenager, on stage in his twenties, on the Dean Martin Show, and finally in his own movie. Throughout his career in film, Welles made several adaptations of Shakespeare, including Othello, Chimes at Midnight, which was a composite film of Henry IV, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, a short film version of Twelfth Night, and of course Macbeth. Welles is also known for his 1936 “Voodoo Macbeth” stage production in Harlem, which set the story of Macbeth in Haiti with an all-black cast, not to mention his countless other radio and stage productions of various stories by Shakespeare.

In 1946 and 1947, Welles sought out funding from a number of sources to make a Shakespearean film. At the time, he intended to make Othello, but later changed the play to Macbeth as he felt it was easier for studios to visualize cinematically. However, the only studio willing to fund a Shakespearean project was Republic Studios. Republic was a relatively smaller studio at the time, one which mostly specialized in low budget B-movie fare. In an effort to improve the studio’s standing and reputation, they allocated funds to a number of “prestige” films a year. The final budget for Macbeth was somewhere around $800,000. For Republic, this was a relatively large budget, but it was miniscule when compared to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, which was released only a few weeks prior to Macbeth with a budget of over $3,000,000. The constraints on the budget for Macbeth resulted in very limited resources for costumes and sets. To compensate, the crew cut corners by reusing old sets and costumes from Westerns and a mix of period films, which contributed to the way the film embraces the staging methods of the theater.



The staging and sets in Welles’s Macbeth are different than other Shakespearean adaptations -- they are not meant to reflect realism, and instead are very stylized in a way that is much more reminiscent of a stage production than a big budget movie. For example, the scene where Macbeth and his wife murder King Duncan, played respectively by Orson Welles, Jeanette Nolan, and Erskine Sanford, is a single take, nearly ten minutes long, in an effort to let Shakespeare’s dialogue truly speak for itself. For another example, the set situates King Duncan’s bed chamber at the top of a great outdoor cliffside stairway, upon which we watch the characters ascend and descend throughout the film. Macbeth moves between light and shadow as he debates whether to murder King Duncan, while his wife remains almost entirely in shadow. This invokes the line from Lady Macbeth earlier in the play, “Your face, my thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters.” Here, cinematographer John Russel turns the Lady’s words literal.

From the lighting, to the fog, to the creepy cave castle in which most of the film takes place, the film’s immediate visual aesthetics most closely evoke the Universal monster horror films of the prior decade, most strikingly the 1931 films Dracula and Frankenstein and the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein. The influence of Bride certainly shines in Nolan’s portrayal of Lady Macbeth, often argued to be the most monstrous character in the play. She is dressed and made-up by Peggy Gray and Maurice Seiderman in a way that recalls the character of The Bride, most notably during Nolan’s sleepwalking scene. Welles himself said, “Macbeth, with its gloomy moors, might be grand. A perfect cross of Wuthering Heights and The Bride of Frankenstein,” in an interview with Modern Screen, a now-defunct film magazine.

In her article “Defining Welles’s Macbeth: Hollywood Horror and the Hybrid Mode,” Amanda Smith argues for the influence of the contemporary Hollywood horror aesthetics of the time on the visual style of Welles’s Macbeth. “Welles frames his main character as a monster, and in doing so employs a visual storytelling style that is at once melodramatic and expressionistic,” Smith says, comparing the film directly to James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. She also draws parallels between the way Welles and Whale shot their respective monsters, observing that “Whale devotes special attention to depicting the drama of the Monster’s developing consciousness through prolific use of close ups,” and later saying, “Macbeth communicates the story of the struggling conscience of its ‘monster’ through the use of close-up shots.”

In Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture, Anderegg wrote that “Welles presents us with B-movie images mediated by avant-garde stylistics.” Anderegg does not necessarily present this as a bad thing; however, many critics of the day admonished Welles’s adaptation in comparison to Olivier’s adaptation of Hamlet, which was made and released around the same time. Welles’s film was largely trashed for its B-movie budget and sensibilities in comparison to Olivier’s very high-brow, polished film. But Welles’s passion for Shakespeare drove him to make it accessible to the common man precisely through the aesthetics of those popular B-movies -- arguably far more in the tradition of Shakespeare, whose work always lived on two levels, always seeking to appeal to the masses.

Another additional example of the film’s intentionally stylized staging is evident in how after becoming king, on multiple occasions Macbeth will exit one area and immediately enter an entirely different, disconnected location. For instance, after a hallucination about the ghost of a friend he had murdered at a dinner party, Macbeth runs from the cave-like dining room and suddenly appears in a dark space, where a forest of dying trees is revealed, along with cracks of lightning and peals of thunder. This scene visually parallels the cracking of Macbeth’s psyche, complete with deeper, more consuming hallucinations as he hears the voices of the Weird Sisters telling him that no man “of a woman born” can slay him. As Anderegg describes it, “this world [is] a mental landscape, a physical manifestation of interior darkness and evil.”


Of course his 1948 film was not the first time Welles put together a controversial production of Macbeth that was intentionally designed to be accessible to a non-high-brow audience. In 1936, Welles produced a stage show of the play that featured an all-black cast and moved the events of the play from Scotland to Haiti. The cast and location change sparked anger among some white critics and Shakespearean academics. Nicknamed “Voodoo Macbeth,” the stage show was a landmark production that received wide praise, and its influence over Welles’s later film adaptation is apparent. The setup of King Duncan’s bed chambers atop a great staircase upon which Macbeth moves from stage right to stage left is present in both productions, an element that Welles emphasized as important.

In his later years, Welles often lamented about Hollywood’s treatment of him. He expressed feeling betrayed by the system and by the people who built him up so high, only to tear him down and sabotage all of his projects that followed. Indeed, Welles ultimately abandoned Hollywood after years of studios ruining his films through their interference. Macbeth was one such film; much to Welles’s dismay, the studio forced an extensive re-recording of the dialogue. In his notes responding to the re-dubs, Welles protests, “When Nolan moves from Scottish speech to what she considers normal speech for Shakespeare, her vocal tone moves at least an octave upwards, and the entire personality of Lady Macbeth vanishes.” Anderegg summarizes the differences between the two versions of Welles’s voiceover in his book. “In the 1948 version, Welles’s reading suggests a powerfully disturbed, overcharged imagination,” he writes, contrasting it to the 1950 redub which “suggests rational thought, as if Macbeth were working through a difficult point in logic.” Orson Welles believed there was no act worse than betraying a friend, and his fascination with Shakespeare is easily linked to this principle. It is ironic that his Shakespearean adaptation of Macbeth in fact illustrates a very similar betrayal by his once-beloved Hollywood.

The theme of betrayal is what shines the brightest in Welles’s adaptation of Macbeth. Welles cuts out much of the politics of the outside world in his film, choosing to focus primarily on the fractured psyche of the title character. Every frame of the film devotes itself to communicating the madness Macbeth is driven to by his guilt. The mirrors he looks in are scratched and distorted, almost like fun house mirrors. They only allow him to physically see himself as the mad broken man he is inside. As king, Macbeth’s clothing never fits him right. What is meant to be royal finery hangs off him lopsidedly, unable to fit on a false king. After Duncan is murdered, the royal guard switches from carrying spears to carrying pitchforks. To Macbeth, the people who surround him are not allies or protectors, but instead the keepers of his self-made Hell. He can no longer trust anyone; if he can betray Good King Duncan, anyone could betray him. It’s impossible to judge precisely how many of these choices were intentional and how many were invented to compensate for the film’s low budget and limited costume options, but the end result is undeniable. Welles, together with Fred Ritter, John McCarthy, and James Redd, the set and costume designers, created something subtly fantastic.


In his adaptation, Welles employs what is often known as a “filmic” style. Although the film is staged more like a play, he was not afraid to utilize the tools of cinema. His decision to use voiceovers for soliloquies, while perhaps an obvious choice today, was quite a departure from how the monologues are given on stage, as asides spoken aloud to the audience. Throughout the film, his framing of the character Macbeth could only be achieved with a camera; as the story progresses, Macbeth appears increasingly bigger in stature and is more consistently shot from below with upward angles. This shooting angle is known as the “heroic” angle, as it is often used to communicate importance, and is one Welles was known for using sarcastically.


What truly made Welles’s approach to Shakespeare brilliant was his ability to merge elements of filmmaking and live theater. The costumes, lighting, and sets of the film feel like they were designed for a stage show. In fact, prior to shooting the movie Welles had his entire cast do a live performance on stage in Utah for the state’s centennial celebration as a means of rehearsal, as they had a very limited time to film. But Welles was not afraid of utilizing the cinematic tools at his disposal. Indeed, not viewing Shakespeare as untouchable and above the cinema was his strength. While Olivier’s film was good, it was very static; it had highly detailed sets and costumes, but very basic and uninventive camera work. It largely feels like an expensive play recorded by a static camera, combining the tools of the theater and cinema poorly, in a way that makes for a bland film.


Welles was famously unafraid of adjusting Shakespeare’s work and words as needed. In his celebrated film Chimes at Midnight, he crafted a screenplay out of three Shakespeare plays, Henry IV, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Throughout his various Shakespeare productions, he was well-known for rewriting the script, pulling lines and characters from other plays. In Macbeth he added in Lady Macbeth committing suicide by throwing her self off a cliff. While Welles clearly had reverence and love for Shakespeare, he did not treat his plays as untouchable perfection, and his approach to the Bard keeps his work alive and thriving, rather than leaving his plays as archaic relics of the past. This approach also allowed Welles truly to tap into the elements of Shakespeare’s plays that have kept them famous and ever-present in the public consciousness -- the forever-relevant human element of the stories.


Welles drains the character of Macbeth of almost all of his perceived “nobility”. Here, the film’s scrappy budget largely worked in its favor. As Anderegg observes, Welles’s Macbeth is a world of “postnuclear devastation.” There is no sense of greatness to the Kingdom in front of us. The film offers very little sense of life outside the walls of the castle in which we spend most of our time. For this pathetic position of non-power over a small, seemingly dying kingdom, Macbeth betrays and murders his friends, sacrificing his sanity in the process.


But sanity, of course, is not the only thing Macbeth sacrifices. Prior to the murder of King Duncan, Macbeth and his wife are clearly in love. They embrace, hold and kiss each other. After the king’s murder, Macbeth cannot even look at her. The performances by Welles and Nolan are extremely effective and affecting. In his portrayal, Welles shows that the act of murder has also killed his love and affection for his wife. Not only does he no longer love her, he in fact seems to now despise her.

Nolan, as well, turns in an exceptionally empathetic performance as Lady Macbeth, playing up her character’s murderous ambitions before any killing has even occurred. Her very first scene in the film, in which she receives a letter from her husband informing her of the Weird Sisters’ prophecy, is chilling. Nolan’s delivery of the monologue is erotic, as if this prospect of power is arousing to her. After the murder, Nolan shifts her performance to be more pitiable. Lady Macbeth is scared, from the moment she plants the daggers to the scene where she throws herself off the cliff. She is afraid both of and for her husband, longing for the affection he now refuses to give her. Nolan’s performance brings

a remarkable humanity to this often villainized character.


Despite studio interference and poor critical reception at the time of its release, Macbeth remains one of Orson Welles’s most interesting films. Welles possessed a unique understanding of Shakespeare and his work from the perspective of both an actor and a director, and of its potential to be performed for and enjoyed by people of all classes and stature. His personal connection allowed him to make a piece of art that unites the highbrow emotions of classical theater and the lowbrow staging and theatrics of popular contemporary cinema. In his film adaptation of Macbeth, Welles truly made a twentieth-century version of a Shakespearean production.


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