The beauty of this film lies not in where Welles went wrong, but in what Welles was able to achieve.
Macbeth 1948 tv#
If you turn the volume down on your TV and you just watch the “art” of Macbeth, you will truly be blown away by what an exquisite film this is aesthetically. Luckily for Macbeth, Welles brought his amazing directorial abilities, as well as his brilliant knowledge of using light and shadows, to accomplish more for the overall feeling of this film than if he would have spent a small fortune on grandiose sets.
Macbeth 1948 movie#
Not every Shakespeare movie can run over three hours. These days most adaptations are expected to exclude large amounts of text, and perhaps in some way Macbeth showed filmmakers that it was possible, when necessary, to make those tough cuts. Many critics didn’t like Welles’ editing and changing of the story, but he was a man on a mission and he needed keep his movie (and himself) in control. Welles’ Macbeth is very short (107 minutes) considering the original text. A short shooting schedule required extensive cuts to be made. Now admittedly the problem within this film is the script itself. Essentially, Welles was trying to prove that you could make a film adaptation of a Shakespeare play without spending too much of the studio’s time or money. He used as many sets and costumes that had been left behind from previous movies (mostly westerns) from Republic Studios, in order to keep the cost as low as possible. He also set himself on a regimented shooting schedule, where he only allowed himself 23 days to shoot the film. They gave Orson Welles $700,000, and he agreed to pay any overages. He went to Republic Pictures and they agreed to join forces with him because they were looking to expand their films to include a “high class” quality of film. Since his previous films had some financial difficulties, no studio wanted to make something as risky as a Shakespeare adaptation with Welles in charge. Macbeth was Orson Welles’ fifth directorial effort, and he was only 33 at the time of its release. In addition, the great Laurence Olivier released his Hamlet at almost the exact same time, and in comparison, Welles’ movie looks slightly inferior…but perhaps that was Welles’ goal. Both at that time and in the years since, his movie has been looked down on for being incomplete and unfaithful to Shakespeare’s original work. In 1948, Orson Welles released his screen adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
0 kommentar(er)
