Macbeth

Production: Mercury Productions

Script/Based on: Orson Welles, William Shakespeare

Director of Photography: John L. Russell

Score:  Jacques Ibert

In no other artist’s work do the worlds of Shakespeare and film noir intertwine as intensely as they do in Orson Welles’s. As early as the 1930s, before Citizen Kane (1941), Welles had already made a name for himself with his stage productions of “voodoo” Macbeth and Julius Caesar. As a film director, he went on to make two full-length adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays with his versions of Macbeth (1948) and Othello (1951), and his obsession culminated with Chimes at Midnight (1965), in which he combined no fewer than five Shakespearean texts. Welles’s contribution to film noir probably needs no further elaboration; after all, we dedicated a retrospective to the director at the 3rd NFF. In this year’s program, Welles’s vision is represented by the aforementioned Macbeth. Although the film was made on a relatively low budget by the smaller studio Republic Pictures, Welles had free rein during its production and effectively combined his knowledge of theatre and cinematic techniques. (mh)