The Problematics: Examining Roman Polanski’s Traumatized Take On ‘Macbeth’, Financed By None Other Than Hugh Hefner

William Shakespeare’s action-packed tragedy of ambition, betrayal, murder, and pesky stains that just won’t wash out, Macbeth, has a vexed reputation among Real Theatre People. Legend has it that the blood-drenched five-act is cursed, and hence must not be referred to by its name when in rehearsal or production. Instead, they call it “The Scottish Play,” because it’s set in Scotland, you see. This idea is one of the hooks for Dario Argento’s rather good 1987 Opera (one of the director’s last rather good movies as it happens), except in this case, as the title implies, they’re doing Verdi’s opera, not the play. (Argento himself directed a staging of the actual opera, which I’ve seen a video of, and consider rather bad.) ANYWAY, despite this lore, Macbeth has an excellent track record — and very few recorded production mishaps — in the film world. 

By this critic’s lights, World Cinema has produced four truly masterful adaptations of the play. Not just masterful, but unusual, idiosyncratic, peculiarly and particularly dynamic. In 1948, Orson Welles — who once directed for the theatre a “voodoo” Macbeth, relocated from Scotland to a Caribbean island and featuring an all-Black cast — cast himself in the title role in a version he made for shoestring-budget studio Republic. He didn’t have a lot of money for sets, but fog is cheap, and the Expressionist mode he brought to bear when shooting the minimalist décor of the piece resulted in a Macbeth that could be taken as a film noir. In 1957 Japanese titan Akira Kurosawa made Throne of Blood, a ruthlessly forward-moving vision of Shakespeare that ends in the most startling moving-forest attack in the canon, complete with a terrifyingly realistic bow-and-arrow attack (because real arrows were actually shot). This year sees Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, which makes the usurping Macbeth couple an older couple, played with breathtaking power by Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand. Coen, leaving his sarcasm home, crafts a vision highly influenced by silent film, the dark visions of Dreyer and Murnau. It’s a real horror movie, among other things. And not without humor — Stephen Root is perfectly cast as a comedic porter and makes a meal out of his screen time. 

Now on to the fourth. In 1969, as you well know, Charles Manson commanded some of his followers to commit a series of grisly, inhuman murders in the hills above Hollywood. Among the victims of this horrific spree was the actress Sharon Tate. Tate was recently wed to Polish-born director Roman Polanski and was carrying their child at the time of the murder. 

The movie Polanski chose to make immediately in the aftermath of this tragedy was an adaptation of Macbeth, a film celebrating its 50th anniversary this month. At two hours and twenty minutes, it’s the longest of the four in this critic’s Macbeth pantheon, which means that it’s got the most of Shakespeare’s text. Which isn’t to say it’s not cinematic, or that it’s slavishly bound to the text. Its treatment of the character Ross is rather uncanonical (that’s true of the Coen film, too), for instance. And the movie has several elaborate dream sequences. Very effective ones at that.

The press, particularly the gossip columnists, were second-guessing the movie even as it went into production. It was made in association with “Playboy Films” and executive produced by “Hugh M. Hefner” himself. Hefner took his first steps into cinema seriously. Unlike Penthouse magazine’s Bob Guccione, he didn’t try to cast any of his magazine’s own models in the movie. The production afforded Polanski the tech values he was looking for: location shooting in the cumbersome Todd AO format, for instance. But in those times the mere mention of Hefner set eyebrows raising, and would-be wags making jokes about whether Macbeth’s witches would be incarnated by Playboy playmates. And while one of the witches does indeed flash Macbeth (in a long shot, and the gesture is a mocking rather than lascivious one), they are most certainly not portrayed as at all seductive. 

Working with theatre critic Kenneth Tynan as a consultant and co-screenwriter and harvesting his cast from British theatre rather than film, Polanski constructed a properly purposeful and grim world for his movie, teeming with seemingly accurate Middle-Ages period detail. Opening with a stunning sunrise, Polanski dissolves to a barren beach on which the witches meet and assemble a ghastly three-dimensional rebus (complete with severed human forearm).

Jon Finch’s Macbeth, when we first see him, is a relatively baby-faced brooder. He’s got rock star hair too.  Polanski’s interpretation of the play ties Macbeth’s — and his wife’s — ambition to their youth. (And the couple are very attracted to each other, physically close, more so than in any other screen version of note.)

While English is Polanski’s second, or maybe actually third, language, he’s very good at handling Shakespeare’s cadences — or maybe it’s just that he left it to his superb, experienced actors. In any event, when Malcolm (played by Stephan Chase) remarks after the execution of the Thane of Cawdor, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it,” he makes the observation sound both poetic and tossed off, natural. 

What was controversial about the movie when it saw release boiled down to Polanski’s artistic choices. While in Shakespeare’s play the murder of Duncan takes place offstage, in the film Polanski devotes a nearly three-minute sequence to it. It’s excruciating. Macbeth makes to stab Duncan in his sleep. But Duncan awakes and sees the man he thought loyal with a dagger. Macbeth stabs Duncan seven times in the chest; there’s a lot of blood. In a medium close-up, he drives his dagger into Duncan’s neck. Later, MacDuff’s son is killed on screen. And we see the other children of MacDuff’s household, bloodied. It’s like a crime scene. And the viewer can conclude these visions were informed by the Manson murders. Is Polanski’s vision morbid or traumatized? It would seem to me the latter. 

Later, Polanski has Lady Macbeth, a very fine Francesca Annis, do her sleepwalking “out damn spot” soliloquy in the nude. But those looking for a leering male gaze won’t find it. Annis’ hair obscures her breasts; she’s mostly shot from the shoulders up, as her servants observe her. The nudity signals a terrible vulnerability more than anything else. And as for the nude witches’ coven that Macbeth is hustled into during one of his dreams/visions, it’s inspired by Hieronymus Bosch, not Playboy.

Roger Greenspun got it right in his review for the New York Times: “So much has been written and rumored about the nudity and violence of Roman Polanski’s Macbeth that it seems worth insisting that the film is neither especially nude nor unnecessarily violent.”

What it is is potent, not just in its immediate drama but its more expansive observations. Like his 1974 film Chinatown, Polanski’s Macbeth casts a gimlet eye on power. Not just power in men, but power in institutions headed by men. Most of his other films stick to power relations in interpersonal affairs (but even there, we catch implications — and more — of a larger outline, as in, for instance, 2011’s overtly allegorical Carnage). Macbeth can in fact be viewed as Polanski’s first overtly political film; Chinatown, 2010’s The Ghost Writer, and 2019’s An Officer and a Spy are the others.

In 1977 Polanski was arrested and charged with drugging and raping a 13-year-old. While he did not dispute certain of his actions, he pleaded not guilty to the charges. His lawyers negotiated a plea bargain. On learning the judge in the case was not going to accept that arrangement, Polanski fled the United States and remains to this day a fugitive from the American justice system.

Polanski’s crime has had the effect of retrospectively tainting the entirety of his body of work, and his personal character. For instance: Accounts of Polanski hitting on women in the immediate aftermath of Tate’s death, for instance, seemed more credible attached to a man who would drug and rape a teenager than they might have when attached to an admittedly prickly and hard-partying filmmaker who’d endured remarkable suffering in his childhood —and never turned criminal.  

For this film, you need not consider separating the art from the artist. Like Chinatown, this film is a portrait of where Polanski’s heart and soul were at in a particularly fraught time for him. The movies examine corruption and bestial behavior from a certain distance, at a point before Polanski himself opted to give full free rein to his own corrupt and bestial side. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.

Where to stream Macbeth (1971)