Macbeth (Fully Restored Version)
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DVD Cover Information
DVD: Region Code 0.0Audio: English (Unknown); Korean (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Full Screen, Import, NTSC
Running Time: 107 unknown-units
Movie Reviews of Macbeth (Fully Restored Version)
Movie Review: Film Noir Shakespeare
Summary: 4 Stars
Bloated budgets and smooth edges are not prerequisites to good filmmaking. No one knew this better than the perpetually money-strapped Orson Welles. Once he'd been ostracized from the studio system, the faded Wunderkind spent the majority of his career making pseudo-masterpieces from funds scraped together by the odd acting job. Despite the monetary constraints, Welles proved that a little imagination and visual verve can make up for a tight purse.
"Macbeth" was produced on the relative cheap (about $500,000), filmed at a breakneck pace (about twenty days), and the result is a haggard, stylized tone poem. This is Shakespeare as lurid film noir. The messy quality somehow makes it more compelling, mostly because Welles' unsurpassed visual imagination compensates for the low-end production values. He embraces the supernatural aspects of the play: stylized sets serving for blasted heath and dank castles are blanketed in fog and lit in high contrast B & W. Askew angles and Welles' signature deep-focus photography make for bold, innovative compositions. Gothic flourishes like the silhouetted Weird Sisters seem fever-dream induced. Plenty of sound and fury to be found here. Even a master stylist like Kurosawa borrowed liberally from Welles for his own Macbeth adaptation, "Throne of Blood." Check out both films' "Not 'Til Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane!" sequences and see how Kurosawa compared notes with Welles.
The performances follow Welles' film noir aesthetic. Jeannette Nolan understands Lady Macbeth is among drama's ultimate femme fatales, and plays her like a vampish shrew with a boot of a face but a killer body. She always seems to tower over her whipped husband in the early portion of the film. Welles proceeds to diminish her place in the frame as her power wanes and she descends into despair and madness. Nolan's strong performance and Welles' equally solid turn in the title role are the foundation of this movie. Their theatrical Scottish brogues are occasionally cringe-inducing, but the intense love their characters have for each other is palpable.
Though both leads are solid, the main interest here lies in the hallucinatory intensity of the images. The nightmarish world Welles creates, a world of overt nihilism oddly coupled with doomed fate, makes the skin crawl. Though the text is gutted and some of the acting too shoddy to make this anywhere near a definitive version of "Macbeth", Welles' endless sense of invention carries him through. This is a must-see for anyone with more than a passing interest in Orson Welles or Shakespeare's most feverishly intense play.
Summary of Macbeth (Fully Restored Version)
PLOT SUMMARY: In fog-dripping, barren and sometimes macabre settings, 11th-century Scottish nobleman Macbeth is led by an evil prophecy and his ruthless yet desirable wife to the treasonous act that makes him king. But he does not enjoy his newfound, dearly-won kingship... Restructured, but all the dialogue is Shakespeare's. [IMDB - Rod Crawford] ++++ DVD FEATURES: This officially licensed release from South Korea is the ORIGINAL, fully restored version (which returns the 20 minutes previously cut by the studio), in black & white, 4:3 full screen, Dolby Digital Sound in ENGLISH with optional Korean subtitles. NOTE: According to the manufacturer, there is a a misprint on the package: Orson Welles' "Ghost Story: Return To Glennascaul" is listed on the back, but it is NOT included on the DVD.Classics DVD Video
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