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Macbeth
original movie poster
Directed by	Roman Polanski
Produced by	Andrew Braunsberg Hugh M. Hefner Victor Lownes
Written by	William Shakespeare (play) Roman Polanski Kenneth Tynan
Starring	Jon Finch Francesca Annis
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release date(s)	October 13, 1971
Running time	140 min.
Country	United States
Language	English

Macbeth is a 1971 film directed by Roman Polanski, based on William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth, about the Highland lord who becomes King of Scotland through treachery and murder. It features Jon Finch as Macbeth and Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth. For cinematic purposes, passages from the original play were cut for time and some soliloquies changed to inner monologues for the sake of psychological realism.

Production

When Roman Polanski's pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and several of his friends were all senselessly murdered by members of the Charles Manson cult at the director's house in Beverly Hills on the night of August 9, 1969, he quit his current film project, The Day of the Dolphin, and sank into deep psychological depression, blaming himself for the tragedy.

Francesca Annis and director Roman Polanski on the set of Macbeth.

After months of grieving Sharon's death, he set to adapting Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth, but major Hollywood studios refused to finance it. His financial saviour was friend Victor Lownes, a senior VP of Playboy Enterprises in the U.K. who persuaded Hugh Hefner to finance the film. Some construed Playboy's involvement as the reason for Lady Macbeth's nude sleepwalking scene; however, Polanski and co-scenarist Kenneth Tynan said they had written the scene before their association with Hefner. British film producer Andrew Braunsberg also provided financial support and executive guidance.

Macbeth was filmed on location in Snowdonia National Park, Gwynedd, in northwest Wales, U.K., and the production suffered delays caused by chronic bad weather and malfunctioning special effects as well as by Polanski's own perfectionism and his stubborn insistence on shooting multiple takes of difficult and expensively mounted scenes on colour film stock. The shoot went over schedule, ultimately taking six months to complete and exceeded its $2.5 million budget by some $600,000.

The characterization of Lady Macbeth

In Polanski's version, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are played by actors younger than has been tradition. In the person of twenty-six-year-old Francesca Annis, Lady Macbeth is a softer, tamer woman than usual. Polanski explained this by noting 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".

However, Lady Macbeth's strength and sanity crumble at a horrific pace when she, at last, is aware of the inescapable nightmare she has helped create. Polanski diagrams her mental deterioration with an added scene that occurs shortly before her suicide.

In this interpolated scene, she re-reads a letter (from Act 1, Scene 5) which was originally sent by her husband to inform her that he had just won the favour of Duncan after helping to defeat the Norwegian invaders—a turn of events that had been foreseen by the Three Witches.

They met me in the day of success: and I have

learned by the perfect'st report, they have more in

them than mortal knowledge. When I burned in desire

to question them further, they made themselves air,

into which they vanished. Whiles I stood rapt in

the wonder of it, came missives from the king, who

all-hailed me 'Thane of Cawdor'; by which title,

before, these weird sisters saluted me, and referred

me to the coming on of time, with 'Hail, king that

shalt be!' This have I thought good to deliver

thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thou

mightst not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being

ignorant of what greatness is promised thee. Lay it

to thy heart, and farewell.

– Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 5, lines 1-14

As Polanski frames the scene within the wider context of the film's tragic narrative, it functions like a Joycean epiphany. The effusively optimistic message at the beginning of the play now serves as a devastating reminder of the innocence and grace that Lady Macbeth and her husband have irretrievably lost as a consequence of murdering Duncan to seize his throne. Their fortunes are rapidly dwindling and she weeps in despair with the bitter realization that the two of them have thrown away all the hope, happiness and security they once possessed.

In another audacious departure from Shakespearean convention, Lady Macbeth's famous sleepwalking soliloquy (from Act 5, Scene 1) is performed in the nude.

The characterization of Ross

The character of Ross (played by John Stride) is developed far beyond what is mentioned about him in the play. Along with the jarringly downbeat ending and the unconventional portrayal of Lady Macbeth, this embellishment takes considerable liberties with Shakespeare's original work. In the play, Ross is a relatively insignificant and innocuous character; but in Polanski's sour, cynical Kottian revision, he is made into a thoroughly devious, amoral, opportunistic courtier and henchman who becomes a knowing accomplice in Macbeth's schemes once the latter has murdered Duncan and attained the crown.

In the film, Ross is first brought to the attention of the audience during Macbeth's coronation ceremony at Scone when he shouts "Hail Macbeth, King of Scotland!" in a very ostentatious manner, and this causes Banquo to look upon him with suspicion. Ironically, in the penultimate scene of the film, when the tables have finally turned, Ross removes the crown from the decapitated head of the slain Macbeth and presents it to the victorious Malcolm, loudly hailing the latter as the new king in precisely the same ostentatious manner as before. The implication is that Ross is totally unprincipled and self-seeking, and his only allegiance is to the one who holds the most power at any given time.

In addition, there are several other notable departures from Shakespeare's text with regard to Ross throughout the course of the film:

• In the play, Macbeth has a conversation with an unidentified person who he tells the king of Macduff's refusal to present himself in the Scottish court; however, in the film, Macbeth is directly informed of this by Ross.
• In the play, the identity of the third murderer who is sent by Macbeth to kill Banquo is never specified by Shakespeare. Whereas, in the film, Ross is clearly the third murderer of Banquo, sent by Macbeth as separate from the first two murderers. Not only that, but it is Ross, who eventually deposits the other two hired villains to their death in a dungeon when they have outlived their usefulness to the king.
• During the banquet scene when Banquo's ghost appears and frightens Macbeth, the brief lines of dialogue each specifically attributed to Lennox and Ross in the play are spoken by exactly the opposite characters in the film—thus making Ross appear somewhat fawning and insincere in his stated concern for the king's health.
• In the play, Ross is apparently unaware of the slaughter of Macduff's household at Fife, even though he is the one who takes the news to Macduff, claiming he heard about it from trustworthy sources. But in the film, Ross is an active conspirator who has prior knowledge of the raid on Macduff's castle and deliberately leaves the doors wide open for the assassins to enter and massacre Macduff's family and servants.

Also, in the film, Ross eventually betrays Macbeth only because he is not honored with Macbeth's former title of Thane of Cawdor, a rank symbolized by a ceremonial necklace which the king chooses to bestow upon Seyton instead. In this particular instance, Polanski's depiction of Ross as a despicably treacherous and envious Machiavellian schemer is closer to the character of Iago in Shakespeare's Othello—an ambitious military ensign who similarly turns against his master when he is passed over for a promotion. Just before the combat with Macduff in which Macbeth is slain, the latter symbolically acknowledges Ross's defection to his rival Malcolm by angrily throwing a battle-axe that knocks the helmet off his former lackey's head—thus "exposing" him to the crowd as an unscrupulous turncoat.

The ending and its thematic implication

The film's bleak absurdist ending is Polanski's most significant departure from Shakespeare's text. Although Malcolm is vindicated and crowned as Scotland's rightful king, his victory speech (which ends Shakespeare's play) is abruptly omitted in favour of a scene with no dialogue that deliberately echoes the beginning of the film. In this last scene, Malcolm's younger brother, Donalbain, is shown returning from exile and furtively entering the Witches' lair on the heath during a rainstorm. Throughout the film, Donalbain is seen to be envious of Malcolm, perhaps even more so than Macbeth was. And by the film's conclusion, Polanski makes it quite clear that the Weird Sisters will now counsel Donalbain in his prospective usurpation of Malcolm's crown just as they had previously goaded Macbeth to usurp Duncan's.

By suggesting that the cycle of violence will be repeated ad infinitum, Polanski recasts Shakespeare's story as a closed circuit of perpetual, self-renewing conflict. Such a grim, hopeless overdetermination of events—in which power continuously changes hands through a permanent and unalterable pattern of internecine bloodshed and betrayal—seems to demonstrate, if only superficially, what Polish theater critic Jan Kott called "the Grand Mechanism" in Shakespeare's history plays (particularly in Richard II and Richard III).

However, Kott has also made a subtle distinction, stating that in the case of Macbeth "this murder-cycle does not possess the logic of a mechanism, but suggests rather a frighteningly growing nightmare."^[1]

The plot of Macbeth does not differ from those of the Histories. But plot summaries are deceptive. Unlike Shakespeare's historical plays, Macbeth does not show history as the Grand Mechanism. It shows it as a nightmare. Mechanism and nightmare are different metaphors to depict the same struggle for power and the crown. But the differing metaphors reflect a difference of approach, and, even more than that, different philosophies. History, shown as a mechanism, fascinates by its very terror and inevitability. Whereas nightmare paralyses and terrifies. In Macbeth, history, as well as crime, is shown through personal experience. It is a matter of choice, decision and compulsion. Crime is committed on personal responsibility and has to be executed with one's own hands. Macbeth murders Duncan himself.

History in Macbeth is confused the way nightmares are; and, as in a nightmare, everyone is enveloped by it. Once the mechanism has been put in motion, one is apt to be crushed by it. One wades through nightmare, which gradually rises up to one's throat.

– Jan Kott, ' "Macbeth or Death-Infected" in Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, W. W. Norton and Company (1964), pages 85-86

The ending of Polanski's film may also in part explain the legendary founding of the House of Stuart by Fleance's putative heirs, the eventual extinction of Duncan's line, and the historical fact that Donalbain later became King Donald III upon the death of his elder brother, King Malcolm III, when he prevented his nephew, Edward (who was Malcolm's eldest son and designated heir) from assuming the throne of Scotland in 1093. The sub-plot about the English installation of Malcolm to the Scots throne is downplayed to an extent not in the original work. This is Shakespeare's implication that Fleance is the ancestor of the contemporary King James I of England, the playwright's sovereign and benefactor.

Although, it should also be pointed out that most modern scholars believe that the characters Banquo and Fleance were simply fictional creations of the early sixteenth-century Scottish writer Hector Boece, who first made the claim for Banquo as the ancestor of the Stuart dynasty in his rather tendentious and unreliable Scotorum Historiae (1526-1527). This claim was later repeated in Holinshed's Chronicles—a text which ultimately provided the source information for Shakespeare's play.

Polanski's starkly pessimistic interpretation of Macbeth is consistent with his other films in the way it shows characters who seem to be unavoidably victimized and destroyed by a chaotic and hostile world in which corruption, brutishness and predatory sexuality run rampant. Likewise, it is quite apparent that the director takes a decidedly cynical, despairing attitude about conventional notions of heroism, redemptive action and the possibility of peace and justice in the midst of such turmoil. This attitude is also present in Polanski's other films of the 1960s and '70s, most notably Chinatown (1974).

Technical style

The film is composed of single-camera establishing shots and subjective point-of-view shots, whereby the audience are vicarious, voyeuristic participants in the action. Also, the soliloquies are presented naturalistically as voiceover narration and without the unambiguous emotional subtext of a conventional musical score. Instead, the actors' voices are heard sotto voce accompanied by the atonal wails and drones of the Third Ear Band. As in his earlier Repulsion (1965), Polanski employs ominously unnatural silences and amplified sounds to create a sense of enveloping discomfort and dread.

When Macbeth confronts the Witches a second time and is invited to gaze into their cauldron to glimpse his future, the scene becomes a cryptic, hallucinatory set piece in which Polanski makes a rare use of cascading montage imagery. Macbeth is warned by his doppelgänger of the dangers to hand, culminating in a surreal visual allegory of the eventual, dynastic triumph of Banquo's heirs as each king is seen holding up a looking glass which contains the image of his successor. This mise en abyme effect is repeated eightfold until, ultimately, young Fleance is seen grinning and crowned in the final, eighth looking glass—an allusion to Shakespeare's original stage direction that the last Banquo appear holding a looking glass, as well as the historical myth that King James I of England was descended from Banquo by eight generations.

Reception

Upon theatrical release in October 1971, Macbeth received mixed critical reviews. Some found the film's graphic violence and nudity distracting, complaining that such blatancy and literalness diminished the complexity and ambiguity of the original text. Moreover, the single-minded bleakness and unrelenting brutality of Polanski's vision was faulted by less sympathetic commentators as being a crude and monotonous oversimplification of the play which, in Pauline Kael's view, ultimately "[reduced] Shakespeare's meanings to the banal theme of 'life is a jungle'".

Many were particularly disturbed by the lurid manner in which Polanski depicted the bloody slaughter of Macduff's wife and children. Kael went so far as to say that Polanski seemed to stage the scene as a deliberate evocation of the Manson Murders.

Other critics, however, praised the film for its technical excellence, vivid atmosphere, fluid cinematic narrative and compelling modernistic interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedy. The U.S. National Board of Review named Macbeth the Best Film of 1971.

The film was screened at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, but wasn't entered into the main competition.^[2]

Miscellany

• 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 plays the traitorous former Thane of Cawdor at the beginning of the film, had 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 Jan Kott's Shakespeare, Our Contemporary (1964). Hogg later played Banquo in the 1983 BBC Television Shakespeare production of Macbeth, which featured Nicol Williamson and Jane Lapotaire in the lead roles.
• 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 before the Norman conquest of England.
• Keith Chegwin had one of his first film roles in this film playing Fleance at the age of 14.
• The Third Ear Band produced a soundtrack album of the movie called Music from Macbeth.

References

External links

• Macbeth at the Internet Movie Database
• Review by Fraser Donald
• Review by Roger Ebert

William Shakespeare's Macbeth Characters Macbeth · Lady Macbeth · Banquo · Macduff · King Duncan Malcolm · Donalbain · Three Witches · Fleance · Lady Macduff · Macduff's son Scenes and speeches Sleepwalking Scene (5.1) · "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" Literary adaptations MacBird · Wyrd Sisters · The Third Witch · The Tragedy of Macbeth Part II Film and theatre adaptations Throne of Blood · Men of Respect · Scotland, PA · Maqbool · M · Macbeth (opera) · Macbeth (Bloch) · uMabatha · Sleep No More 2003 - 2009 Macbeth in film 1908 film · 1909 French film · 1909 Italian film · 1911 film · 1913 film · 1915 film · 1916 film · 1922 film · 1948 film · 1954 film · 1960 film · 1971 film · 1987 film · 2006 film · 2009 film