Shakespeare and the Directors
November 12, 2002

by Joe Sobran

     Because I have a certain respect for Shakespeare, I 
usually avoid productions of his plays. Too many 
directors falsify them by trying to modernize them. I 
don't mind modern-dress performances; I do mind modern-
ideas performances, which turn the plays into parables of 
fascism or feminism or existentialism -- current fads 
that are totally alien to the playwright.

     Such directors seem to think they're paying 
Shakespeare a compliment by showing his "relevance" to 
our world. The truth is that they are too unimaginative 
to enter into his world, where the feudal and the 
supernatural co-exist naturally.

     A happy exception is Roman Polanski's 1971 movie 
version of MACBETH, for my money by far the best 
Shakespeare film ever made. Instead of bringing the story 
up to date, it plunges into the Middle Ages with relish 
and makes even ancient superstitions come eerily alive.

     From the first shot of the Weird Sisters -- a trio 
of truly hideous crones -- you feel evil in the air. 
Macbeth himself, played by Jon Finch, is a handsome young 
warrior whose wife, played by Francesca Annis, has a 
delicate beauty rarely brought to the role of Lady 
Macbeth. These aren't the ruthless middle-aged couple we 
usually see, but a pair of young people on the make. When 
she upbraids him for his reluctance to kill the king, she 
weeps, hurt that her husband isn't giving her the kingdom 
he promised her. You feel her tears melting him.

     But it isn't the actors who make this film so 
satisfying; it's the director. Polanski is a master of 
atmosphere, and he was also advised by the great theater 
critic Kenneth Tynan. It was an inspired collaboration; 
but unfortunately, it can't be repeated. Tynan died years 
ago, and MACBETH is probably the only Shakespeare play 
suited to Polanski's talent for the macabre.

     The murders are shown with uncompromising violence. 
While remaining faithful to the Shakespearean text, the 
film has all the fright of a first-rate horror movie, the 
kind that makes you say to yourself, "I don't know how 
much more of this I can take!" Banquo is slaughtered with 
a broadaxe, and when his gruesome ghost, its face 
blanched and bloody, appears at Macbeth's supper, you 
feel you've seen a real ghost for the first time. No 
wonder Macbeth erupts in hysterical terror. It might 
indeed "appal the devil."

     Even this awful moment is surpassed by the slaughter 
of Macduff's family. As Macbeth's hired murderers invade 
the house, Macduff's young son says, "He has killed me, 
mother," and blood suddenly dribbles like a small 
fountain from the wound in the back of his neck. In this 
world, not even children are safe.

     The film was Polanski's first after the sensational 
1969 murder of his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon 
Tate, by the Manson gang. There was inevitably 
speculation that his personal life had shaped his grim 
MACBETH. Polanski denied this; he'd already made two 
memorable horror films, REPULSION and ROSEMARY'S BABY, 
and he didn't need lessons from life in order to make 
another.

     The film is shot in beautiful color, with Scottish 
landscapes, castles, and fine period detail. Yet even the 
most gorgeous scenes are ominous, pregnant with imminent 
violence. In the battle scene near the beginning we see a 
soldier brutally killed with a mace; soon afterward the 
treacherous Thane of Cawdor is hanged, not by a rope but 
by a chain, which creaks heavily as his body swings from 
side to side like a pendulum. Polanski has a gift for the 
small surprises and sensations, visual and aural, that 
make a scene fresh.

     Except for Orson Welles, Max Reinhardt, and Franco 
Zefferelli, no other first-rate director has ever tackled 
Shakespeare on the screen. This is both a pity and a 
mystery. Elizabethan plays, with their rapid changes of 
scene, are well suited to the cinema. Great scripts are 
hard to come by. The Shakespeare plays have inspired 
wonderful operas; why not wonderful films? (I'm not 
forgetting Laurence Olivier's lovely HENRY V.)

     Countless inferior directors, on the other hand, 
have been eager to film Shakespeare, and they haven't 
been shy about superimposing their harebrained 
conceptions on the plays. Is Polanski's MACBETH destined 
to remain a uniquely successful film adaptation of our 
greatest dramatist?

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