Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 196: Wed Jul 15

Macbeth (Welles, 1948): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm


This film is part of the Orson Welles season at BFI Southbank. The movie also screens on 18th July and you can find full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Orson Welles's 1948 production, made on a short schedule and a tiny budget for Republic Pictures. (Some 20 minutes of footage and the original Scottish-accented sound track were replaced in the 80s in a UCLA Film Archive restoration, though it's still the least of Welles's Shakespearean adaptations.) Welles makes no serious attempt to present the language of the play; instead, this one is all atmosphere and movement, filmed on forthrightly stagy sets with a restlessly tracking camera. Welles's Macbeth is no more than adequate, though his rise and fall follows the personal, punitive patterns of all Welles films, and Jeanette Nolan's Lady M is a near disaster. Still, there is force in this rough, hasty rendering; the sheer speed of the pacing gives it a quality of crushing delirium.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the opening to the film.

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