Macbeth is a 1971 British-American drama 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.

Cast[link]

• Jon Finch as Macbeth
• Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth
• Martin Shaw as Banquo
• Terence Bayler as Macduff
• John Stride as Ross
• Nicholas Selby as King Duncan
• Stephen Chase as Malcolm
• Paul Shelley as Donalbain
• Keith Chegwin as Fleance
• Mark Dightam as Macduff's son

Production[link]

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.

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 savior 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 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. This North Wales location is cited on the DVD release of the film but it is clear that a considerable amount of location shooting also took place in Northumberland on the northeast coast of England. (The BBC Tyne website devotes a section to films that have been made using Northumberland locations, and it includes two by Polanski — Cul-de-Sac and Macbeth.) Location sites listed for Macbeth include: Lindisfarne Castle, Bamburgh Castle and beach, St. Aidan's Church and North Charlton Moors near Alnwick. An extensive list of both the Welsh and Northumberland locations can be found at the IMDb [The Internet Movie Database].

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.^{[citation needed]}

The characterization of Ross[link]

The character of Ross (played by John Stride) is developed far beyond that of 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 revision, he is made into an amoral, opportunistic courtier and henchman who becomes a knowing accomplice in Macbeth's schemes once the latter has murdered Duncan and attained the crown, but later betrays his master. 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 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 separately from the first two murderers. Not only that, but it is Ross who eventually dispatches the two hired villains 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.

Technical style[link]

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[link]

Upon 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.^[1]

The film currently holds an 83% 'Fresh' rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus "Roman Polanski's Macbeth is unsettling and uneven, but also undeniably compelling."^[2]

Soundtrack[link]

See also[link]

• List of historical drama films

References[link]

External links[link]

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