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Republic sound stages like a laboratory for Orson Welles' experiment, a lunar terrain with shadows on the skies. The three witches have a clay doll out of the "hell-broth" and a flesh one to receive their prophecy—eagerly corruptible, as viscous as the landscape, the jackal who would be king. The missus (Jeanette Nolan) has advice: "Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't." Castles are but glorified caves, the night feels eternal. Early on the camera cuts from a beheading as the ax falls, it prowls continuously outside the rocky manor for the killing of Duncan (Erskine Sanford). Assassins are perched like crows on scraggly trees as Banquo (Edgar Barrier) approaches, the gory phantom is an inconsiderate guest at the usurper's feast, "the very picture of your fear!" Scottish brogues and tenebrous sketches for Welles' first cinematic Shakespeare, a rich dilation of his alchemic stagecraft. (A touch of Flash Gordon strangeness is shared with Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible films.) Thunderclap and howling wind and Stygian blackness engulf the sisters' warning, craning down from pinprick spotlight to Macbeth's trembling frontal close-up. "O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife." Macduff (Dan O'Herlihy) and Malcolm (Roddy McDowall) on the vengeful path, their soldiers low on the frame wielding vertical lances to streak the screen, an Uccello canvas. (By their side is Alan Napier's mummified Holy Father, on his way to an appointment with the sharp end of a pagan spear.) Judicious slow-mo for the advancing forest and the nihilistic soliloquy, the unholy figurine finally cracks around the neck. "Hell... is murky." A compositional model not only for Kurosawa and Polanski, but also Pasolini and Jancsó and Boorman. Cinematography by John L. Russell. With John Dierkes, Keene Curtis, Peggy Webber, Lionel Braham, Morgan Farley, Brainerd Duffield, William Alland, and Christopher Welles. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |