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Critics reviews

MACBETH

Orson Welles United States, 1948
Fredrik on Film
Macbeth (1948), an interesting mixture of theatricality and cinematic inventiveness, is fine but not Welles's best Shakespeare adaptation. As an example of how to make good use of a cheap production and abandoned sets it is rather impressive however.
October 4, 2018
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As with the wartime Shakespeare adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Welles's film is rooted in the arch theatricality of the stage but livened by a shrewd calculation of the ways that cinema can enrich and imagine the Bard's text. Lady Macbeth (Jeanette Nolan), for example, is regularly filmed from low angles, emphasizing the authority she wields over all those around her, especially her husband, who usually appears below her in the frame.
November 16, 2016
Olive Films
Welles' approach to the material is wildly neo-primitive and so expressionistic that one can never be entirely sure whether the action is taking place in interiors or exteriors; the same ambiguity persists in the spoken text, where off-screen internal monologue and on-screen external speech often seem only a breath apart.
January 1, 2016
Welles is perhaps the only director of whom it could be said that any deliberate changes were likely made from a place of artistic equality. It's ambitious in both vision and execution, but while Welles had much of the former, he had little with which to succeed at the latter.
May 29, 2015
In his first Shakespeare film, from 1948, Orson Welles employed a stark and gloomy medieval production of the play to address the horrors of his own times.
January 12, 2015
Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that no actor has satisfactorily bridged the gap between the Macbeth easily exploited by women in the play's first two acts and the merchant of menace of the play's remainder. In this particular adaptation, Welles the actor arguably makes a better go at it than Welles the director, who may have been concentrating too much on the logistics of his production to put his cast through their paces.
September 19, 2012