#Macbeth 1948 how to

Obviously, by the finish, it doesn’t work heck, it doesn’t work immediately after Macbeth starts losing it, but until then… it’s the best noir ever. So much I thought it’s weird no one ever tried calling film noirs Macbeths. Another reason I don’t think I’ve read or seen Macbeth is not knowing how many common phrases come from the play, but also because it hopefully would’ve occurred to me Macbeth, at least in the first act (here and then the first two acts of the play itself), is film noir, actually. Of course, by the third act, it’s clear Welles doesn’t have anything else up his sleeve, filmmaking-wise, but, unfortunately, Nolan is lashed tight to the film’s wanting ambitions.īecause the first act of Macbeth is ambitious as all hell.

Webber, playing O’Herlihy’s doomed wife, has a meaty part, but Tuttle’s literally just describing Nolan’s behavior and ends up getting the better scene. She’s one actor Welles trusts with the power of the triple r-roll (outside himself), and she gets looped by Peggy Webber and Lurene Tuttle. It’s not Welles’s fault Nolan goes from having a transfixing part in the first act to getting upstaged at every turn in the second and third.

#Macbeth 1948 how to

Welles hasn’t figured out how to be a low-budget filmmaker at this point.Īnother significant constraint is the play itself. Instead of working through the specific constraint, he comes up with a universal fix (the lighting, dubbing the entire thing), and it might work for that one scene, but it sure doesn’t work everywhere. One of the problems is when you visibly see Welles chafe against the budget. It’s always cheap, but it’s often well-directed. Russell play with contrast throughout to compensate, and it often works. The film’s primary location is a paper machete castle. The film has a bunch of apparent constraints.

When Dan O’Herlihy gets his incredible monologue-I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Macbeth or read it because I think I’d remember the Holy Father (Alan Napier, in the film’s best performance) telling O’Herlihy his family’s “well” only to say “jk, Macbeth killed them all, why are you upset”-but when O’Herlihy gets that moment, it’s clear it’s the better part. Though nothing’s more baffling than him taking the lead role. Like much of Macbeth, it’s a puzzling directorial decision from Welles. Everyone else is only doing the double r-roll for their Scottish accent. Director, star and screenwriter Welles gets to do the triple. There are two classes of performance in Macbeth, those who can only handle a double r-rolling and those who go for a triple r-rolling.