The Magic World of Orson Welles (28 page)

O'Hara is supposed to have murdered a man in the Spanish Civil War, and in the hiring hall the shipmate remarks that “Black Irish” O'Hara can “hurt a guy” when he's angry (we see him do this later, in the funny but terrifying courtroom brawl). Grisby, Iago-like, taunts O'Hara and seems to look right into his past. “I'm very interested in murders,” Grisby says. “How'd you do it? No, let me guess. . . . You did it with your
hands
, didn't you?” O'Hara looks dazed, openly conveying the guilt he can barely conceal throughout the film; in fact one suspects that his occasionally whimsical or baffled attitude comes from a reluctance to acknowledge the full extent of his temptations. When he walks the moonlit streets of Acapulco with Elsa, he passes down a long stone corridor lined with open doorways showing the hovels of the poor. When he walks with Grisby above Acapulco Bay, he glances at a peasant woman hanging out clothes, and then at a lady tourist followed by a gigolo who is saying, “Of
course
you pay me.” These events are not lost on O'Hara, who remarks that the brightness of the bay can't hide hunger and guilt. The guilt, however, is perhaps as much his own as the Bannisters.'

On its surface
The Lady from Shanghai
is the story of a contest between Elsa and Arthur, whose reflections we see in the apocalyptic finale. At a deeper level, however, it concerns O'Hara's highly sexual temptation with the bright, rich world—an “exchange of guilt” formula that had interested Welles from the time he arrived in Hollywood to adapt
Heart of Darkness
. Although he was essentially a humane man, Welles was always aware of the perils of humanism (to say nothing of the perils of California); thus O'Hara descends into a nightmare, coming out of it all resolving to grow older, wiser, and perhaps less complacent. The story has been a comedy, a satiric fantasy, and something of a cautionary tale. For all its imperfections, it manages to retain many of the qualities of Welles's best work.

The financial failure of
The Lady from Shanghai
meant that Welles was out of work in Hollywood for several years until he managed a deal for
Macbeth
, which became what Charles Eckert has called the most controversial Shakespeare movie of them all—“a touchstone to discriminate the
cinéaste
from the Bardolator.”

Although
Macbeth
is a decidedly minor film in the Welles canon, it remains interesting because it is a courageous experiment. Welles had always wanted to bring classics to a popular audience, and ever since the age of nineteen, on and off, he had expended creative energy on this particular play. In 1936
he had achieved major theatrical success with the “Voodoo
Macbeth
”; a few years later he made a long-playing recording of the play and also performed the play on radio with Agnes Moorehead. When he brought the Mercury Theatre to Hollywood,
Macbeth
was on his list of proposed films; in 1947, his fortunes much declined, he staged
Macbeth
at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Then at last, under an arrangement with Herbert Yeats of Republic Pictures, he turned the Utah production into a film, taking two and a half weeks for the shooting and spending around $700,000. He said later that he did not set out to make a great movie, only to prove that worthwhile work could be done on a shoestring. (Actually, the film was not so cheap by Republic standards, and if one counts the Utah stage show as production time, it was not quite such a quickie as it seems.) The haste and cost cutting show through in many ways, and yet the film remains both fitfully exciting and revealing of its director's interest in a radical style.

Every time Welles adapted
Macbeth
, his basic strategy was much the same: he gave it a primitive, exotic setting and tried to eradicate its Renaissance manners. It was precisely this strategy that drew extravagant praise for the Harlem production in 1936. Here, for example, is part of a review by Brooks Atkinson:

The witches' scenes from
Macbeth
have always worried the life out of the polite, tragic stage; the grimaces of the hags and the garish make-believe of the flaming cauldron have bred more disenchantment than anything else that Shakespeare wrote. But ship the witches into the rank and fever-stricken jungle echoes, stuff a gleaming naked witch doctor into the cauldron, hold up Negro masks in the baleful light—and there you have a witches' scene that is logical and stunning and a triumph of the theatre art.

Welles's film was made with similar ends in mind, even to the point of having the witches (now Druid priestesses) fashion a sort of voodoo doll out of Scottish clay (a device that is given some precedent in Holinshed's
Chronicles
). Everything in the production was designed to make the play more primitive, so what Welles gains in melodramatic intensity, he loses in complexity. Macbeth as Shakespeare conceived him is only partly a heathen of the moors—he is also, quite unhistorically, a creature of the Renaissance court, and his machinations are partly a representation of that court's plottings, intrigues, and sophistication. Shakespeare's tragic hero commits his murderous deeds in a reasonably civilized world, where Scottish noblemen are welcome at King Edward's castle, where Macbeth and his lady give housing to their sovereign, where one must “look like the innocent flower, but be
the serpent under it.” This counterpoint between a highly developed social code and the temptations of ambition gives the play its richness of characterizations, its psychological nuance. Welles, on the other hand, chooses to set
Macbeth
in the heart of darkness, emphasizing not psychology but rather the struggle between a ruthless desire for power and a rudimentary, elemental need to maintain order.

Welles announces this theme in a voice-over narration at the very beginning of the film, immediately after the credits, where Jacques Ibert pays homage to Bernard Herrmann by scoring the “power” theme from
Citizen Kane
under Welles's name. We are shown a Celtic cross on the moors of Scotland, a cross that we are told is “newly arrived.” The story takes place, Welles says, in a time “between recorded history and legend,” when civilization is literally being created out of the primeval gloom.
Macbeth
, in this version, will be a tale of “plotting against Christian law and order” by “agents of chaos, priests of hell and magic,” whose “tools are ambitious men.” However different this conception may be from Shakespeare's, one can at least argue that it is appropriate to the magic and savagery of the original.

Obviously, however, Welles's approach results in a very different atmosphere from the one we are given in the play. In Shakespeare, for example, when Duncan and Banquo arrive at Inverness they remark on the look of the place:

DUN
: This castle hath a pleasant seat, the air

Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself

Unto our gentle senses.

BAN
: This guest of summer,

The temple-haunting marlet, does approve

By his loved mansionry that heaven's breath

Smells wooingly here. No jutty, frieze,

Buttress, nor coign of vantage but this bird

Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle.

Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed

The air is delicate. (I. vi. 1–9)

As we might expect, Welles cuts a large part of these speeches, and when he puts that martlet on the screen it looks more like a stray bat. In Welles's film, when the king and his entourage enter the gates at Inverness, they have to scatter a milling crowd of dogs and swine. The castle itself seems to have been hewn out of solid rock, its battlements vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge. The artificial sky overhead is always either black or steel gray, while
the courtyard looks damp or mottled with ice. Inside, bedrooms resemble the caves of bears, water runs freely down the sides of a wall, and the banquet hall is more suitable to Beowulf than to the Renaissance.

If the decor of the film is deliberately simple and primitive, so are the characterizations. As several critics have remarked, Welles looks more like Attila the Hun than a courtier (although his battle costume in the last scenes is embarrassingly like the Statue of Liberty), and he goes through the entire picture with a crazed, somnambulistic expression. This interpretation is made possible by the fact that Welles has cut extensive passages from Shakespeare's opening scenes, scenes establishing Macbeth as a trusted soldier whose ambitions gradually take control of his better instincts. As a result of the cutting, Lady Macbeth (played by a somewhat matronly but sexy Jeanette Nolan, in her first screen role) enters the film sooner than she does in the play, and we are given very little sense of her as a malevolent, psychologically interesting influence over her husband. The film simply shows the pair as evil conspirators and plunges immediately into murderous barbarism. Macbeth and his wife embrace on his return from battle in the early part of the film; he has informed her by message of the witches' prophecy, and their agreement is already sealed when they kiss. (Behind them we can see a hanged man dangling from a gibbet.) The opening scenes at Inverness, far from being courtly, are an Eisensteinian montage that mixes welcome to the king, medieval-looking religious ceremony, and barbaric executions. Against this background, Macbeth's intention to murder looks almost ordinary.

Everywhere, Welles has slashed away lines, speeches, whole scenes. He has interpolated his own dialogue, switched episodes around, and even created an important new character. He has also removed all vestiges of Shakespeare's chauvinism. In the play, Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane in the company of an English army, and Malcolm makes an ally of the English king. To his contemporaries Shakespeare was justifying King James's attempt to unify England and Scotland under the title of Great Britain, and by having Banquo's offspring triumph over Macbeth, he was showing his loyalty to the Scottish succession. In place of these political references Welles substitutes religious conflict, creating a character named the Holy Father (Alan Napier) and giving him some of the lines that are spoken by Ross in the original.

In addition, Welles greatly simplifies the role of the witches. Macbeth's second conversation with them is stripped of Shakespeare's crazy-comic boiling cauldrons, and the character of Hecate (probably not by Shakespeare anyway) has been dropped entirely. Instead, Welles plays the whole scene as if in a dark pit, with John Russell's camera executing an incredibly slow, almost
invisible tracking movement down and in on the tormented hero's face; the witches are not seen, only heard occasionally, like Macbeth's evil thoughts. Even when we see them at other points in the film, they are less like the old hags of seventeenth-century folklore and more like a Wellesian spook show. In Shakespeare the witches resemble superstitious village gossips, cackling to one another and occasionally throwing a toad or a sailor's thumb into a pot; in Welles they are three eerie sentinels, half human, half spirit, lost in romantic fog.

All this manipulation of the play may sound as though Welles were striving for greater realism or historical accuracy, but nothing could be further from the case.
Macbeth
is a completely stylized film. It makes very little attempt to conceal the fact that it was shot on a soundstage, and it is so ahistorical that it gives Lady Macbeth lipstick, forties-style shoulder pads, and a dress with a zipper. The setting is like the primordial landscapes of popular fantasy; in fact, as Joseph McBride has observed, the long shots of horsemen approaching the castle early in the film are probably a reference to
King Kong
. The figure of Macbeth, as Welles conceives him, is almost a mini-Kong himself—a stubby-bearded fellow clad in animal furs, often photographed from below with a wide-angle lens. Against this image Welles opposes a handsome, relatively fair Macduff (Dan O'Herlihy), who has a blonde wife with Shirley Temple curls (Peggy Webber, who doubles as one of the witches). On every level the film is built out of simple contrasts that have been emptied of any precise historical reference; for example, the major visual motif of the picture is a contrast between the Celtic cross and the satanic forked staffs of the witches. These two emblems are introduced in the opening scenes, and they run through the movie until the final battle, where the attacking armies are represented as a sea of crosses mounted on long poles. In the last images, as the camera retreats
Kane
-style from Dunsinane, we can see the staffs of the witches rising once more out of the mist, symbols of the brutality and lust for power that seem to be overtaking Malcolm's new rule.

The atmosphere of
Macbeth
is so intensely subjective, so much told from the central character's point of view, that at times the movie has a solipsistic quality; this feeling is intensified by the repeated close-ups of Welles (including many deep-focus shots of him with his head in the extreme foreground and the other characters arrayed in the distance) and by the fact that he is entirely alone in his castle when Malcolm's army attacks. Often the film is anti-naturalistic to the point that it strongly resembles theater. Perhaps because of pressures of time and budget, Welles now and then seems to be filming the Utah stage production exactly in its original form, trying to adapt the camera to stage blocking. Consider, for example, the scene where Macduff is informed of the murder of his wife and children. The setting presumes to be a heath of some kind, though it is quite obviously a studio set. In the distance is a huge stone Celtic cross that represents the forces of “Christian law and order.” Macduff, the Holy Father, and Malcolm all have speeches in this scene, and as each character delivers his lines he steps down “up-stage” near the camera while the others move in a little arc behind him. Except for a couple of cuts at the beginning, the whole scene is filmed in a long take, with the camera tracking a bit to follow the actors in the foreground. Typical of Welles's style is the composition in depth, with three distinct planes of action: a character in the extreme foreground, someone in the middle distance, and the cross in the background.