How ‘Macbeth’ Kicked Off Orson Welles’ Run as One of the Greatest Independent Filmmakers in History
Jim Hemphill
The bravura opening shot of Orson Welles‘ “Touch of Evil” — in which the camera begins on a close-up of a ticking bomb and then pulls back to present the bomb’s journey to detonation via a dizzying array of camera positions — is one of the supreme technical achievements in film history.
When asked about the long take, Welles often claimed to be prouder of another elaborate shot placed later in the film, in which the camera traveled back and forth between motel rooms to reveal several key plot points and pieces of information without a break. Yet one could make the argument that, for sheer dramatic impact, neither of these shots represents peak Welles; for that, you’d have to go back to 1948 and Welles’ masterful Shakespeare adaptation “Macbeth,” a film that not only contains the director’s first truly great unbroken take but plants the seeds for the filmmaker he would become for the rest of his life.
The shot in question occurs around a half-hour into the initial release version of the movie, which, like many Welles films exists in multiple versions — in this case, there’s the two-hour 1948 cut, followed by a drastically shortened and redubbed (to get rid of what some viewers found to be impenetrable Scottish dialects) 1950 version supervised by Welles in an effort to improve the movie’s commercial prospects. While Welles signed off on both of these incarnations (this is not a sad case like “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “Mr. Arkadin,” or “Touch of Evil,” where the movie was taken out of his hands), the longer 1948 edition is unquestionably the superior of the two and has largely been agreed upon as the default version to watch since it was lovingly restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive back in the 1980s.
That restoration is presented on a new Blu-ray release from Kino Lorber that boasts a gorgeous transfer taken from a recent 4K scan of the film (the disc also contains the 85-minute re-release cut and a wealth of extras, including an indispensable new audio commentary by film historian Tim Lucas and an equally enlightening commentary by Welles scholar Joseph McBride). The new transfer showcases the film’s richly atmospheric cinematography by John L. Russell, who would go on to shoot Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and had played and would continue to play a key role in Welles’ history of groundbreaking long takes: two years before “Macbeth” he was the camera operator on a four-minute shot in “The Stranger,” and when Welles needed a crane operator for the “Touch of Evil” opening he called on Russell.
Welles had experimented with long takes before “Macbeth”; there was the aforementioned traveling shot through the woods in “The Stranger,” and an extraordinary feat of visual choreography in “The Magnificent Ambersons” that was truncated when studio meddling cut into what was intended to be a long, sweeping movement through a party scene. “Macbeth” represents a breakthrough, however, in terms of both length (at 10 minutes, its long take is nearly three times as long as the more celebrated set piece in “Touch of Evil”) and emotional impact — in fact, its movements are so perfectly attuned to the psychology of the characters that most viewers don’t even notice the shot on first viewing.
Most of the shot consists of dialogue between the Scottish lord of the title (played by Welles himself) and his wife Lady Macbeth (Jeanette Nolan) as she pressures him to take the murderous action that will ultimately be his undoing. Yet there’s nothing stagey or static about the scene, which takes place before, during, and after Macbeth’s off-screen murder of the king who he plans to replace. Both the actors and the camera are in constant movement, repositioning to visually express the instability and paranoia at the core of Macbeth as Welles has envisioned him; the shot also moves between high and low angles that reveal the sophistication of Welles’ cinematic grammar, as he places the camera beneath his hero not to elevate him but to ironically comment on his weakness.
François Truffaut once remarked that all of Welles’ films are about “the weakness of the strong,” and the long take in “Macbeth” illustrates this beautifully, moving in constant opposition to the character’s movements — rather than follow the restlessly roving Macbeth, the camera takes its own independently decided upon positions and makes a mockery of his declarations of power. The fact that there are no cuts and that Macbeth cannot escape the camera’s gaze creates the impression of a bug trapped under a microscope, reinforcing the movie’s implication that Macbeth — like everyone else in the film — is helpless against fate.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the long take comes toward its end, when the camera moves to a different location and shifts gears from tragedy to comedy for an entirely new scene that begins as part of the same shot. This ties in with aspects of the production that were largely economically determined but which Welles turned to his aesthetic advantage; while his budget (roughly $800,000) was not excessively low for the time, it wasn’t excessively generous either, and Welles did not have the money to build the kinds of elaborate sets that had served him so well on more well resourced films like “Citizen Kane” and “The Magnificent Ambersons.”
“Macbeth” was made for Republic Pictures, which was a lower-end studio at the time known mostly for cheap Westerns, and Welles shot the film in just three weeks primarily on one stage. Given the limitations of time and money, Welles went for an abstracted look in which the characters are often surrounded by darkness and it’s difficult to determine whether they’re even in interiors or exteriors; characters seem to move between locations and times of day without clear lines of demarcation, giving the whole movie an abstract, nightmarish quality that emphasizes Macbeth’s isolation. It’s a story of ambition, but the world Welles presents is so desolate and ruined that Macbeth’s quest is made to seem hopeless and pointless — what is there for him to conquer or possess in this black void of a world?
This cynicism would become a hallmark of Welles’ later work, particularly “Mr. Arkadin” and “Touch of Evil,” films about power that seem heavily informed by the age in which they were made. “Macbeth,” like “The Stranger,” is a post-Holocaust movie, a film wrestling with Welles’ awareness of civilization’s bottomless potential for cruelty and abuse; it’s also a post-nuclear bomb movie, in that its production design presents a world made up of nothing more than rock fragments surrounded by darkness.
Again, the minimalism is partly driven by circumstance, but in embracing his limitations and finding a thematic justification for them Welles displays an inventiveness every bit as bountiful as that in “Citizen Kane,” but at the other end of the studio system food chain. That inventiveness extends beyond the visuals, too, for “Macbeth” also takes an extremely unorthodox approach to sound recording. In an effort to free the camera for elaborate shots like that 10-minute long take and unshackle it from the restrictions of boom microphones and other equipment that would normally need to be accommodated, Welles had his actors pre-record their dialogue and lip-sync to it on set.
Welles had tried this before on “The Magnificent Ambersons” but quickly abandoned it when it proved unworkable for the actors. To be sure, even in “Macbeth” it surely robbed the performers of a certain amount of spontaneity as they found themselves locked into performances they had given in the recording studio days or weeks before production. Yet Welles’ odd approach works beautifully here, as it ends up providing yet another subliminal indication of the predestined outcome for the characters. It also allowed Welles the flexibility he craved on set, as he was able to use multiple cameras without worrying about boom shadows or other limitations created by sound; he even strapped costumed mannequins to the backs of his camera operators to both hide the cameras and provide additional extras for crowd scenes.
This kind of innovative problem-solving became not only typical of Welles in years to come but a necessity; by the time of “Macbeth” the Hollywood studio system had more or less turned its back on him, and he would only return to it once, for “Touch of Evil” in 1958 (and then under less than ideal circumstances). Although “The Stranger” was technically an independent production, it had been made under largely the same conditions as typical studio movies of the era and was distributed by RKO, the same company that financed and released “Kane” and “Ambersons.” “Macbeth” was Welles’ first real foray into the kind of scrappy, low or modestly-budgeted filmmaking that would yield nearly all of his subsequent work — and it provides the key to how we should evaluate Welles’ career.
For many decades, Welles was seen as a filmmaker of immense but unfulfilled promise — the guy who never lived up to “Citizen Kane.” But as Welles expert Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted, this thesis only makes sense if one defines Welles as a studio filmmaker, a dubious proposition given that he only spent seven years or so of his directing career in the studio system but nearly 40 years outside of it.
The fact is that Welles is not a failed studio filmmaker but a successful independent filmmaker in the same category as another director who often used his acting jobs to finance his passion projects, John Cassavetes. Successful, that is, if one defines success as having made at least a half-dozen movies — “Othello,” “Mr. Arkadin,” “Chimes at Midnight,” “The Trial,” “F for Fake,” “The Other Side of the Wind” — that endure as some of the richest and most original personal statements in American film history. All of these films develop and expand upon both the thematic and technical ideas Welles was playing with in “Macbeth,” making it essential viewing for anyone interested in Welles — and making Kino’s new Blu-ray upgrade an indispensable addition to any physical media enthusiast’s shelf.
