Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For: Macbeth - 1971

MACBETH 1971lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2013/09/macbeth-1971.html

“If you take material and filter it through me like a sieve, it’s gonna vaguely have my shape. I can’t hide that‘signature’ any more than I can create it. It’s something that occurs. It’s DNA.” Robert Altman on the topic of directors subconsciously leaving their personal imprint on a film.

When Roman Polanski’s controversial film adaptation of Macbeth, William Shakespeare’s famously “unlucky” play(theater superstition has it that the play is cursed), flopped unceremoniously at the boxoffice, the director salved hiswounded ego by complaining to any and all that the film’s poor reception was due to the public failing to believe hisblood-soaked, graphically violent approach to Shakespeare's tale of a nobleman brought low by ambition andwaning conscience, was in any way influenced by the Manson killings. Polanski felt his film was never given a fairchance because misguided critics and Freud-obsessed American audiences insisted on reading allusions to thebrutal August, 1969 slaying of his wife (actress Sharon Tate) and unborn child into all those explicitly rendered,Shakespeare-mandated, stabbings, dismemberments, ambushes, beheadings, and infants from their mother'swombs untimely ripp'd.Yeah...how silly of us.

"It makes 'The Wild Bunch" look like 'Brigadoon'"Or so one critic thought upon the film's release. Most of the bloodshed that

traditionally occurs offstage in Macbeth is placed front and center in Polanski'sadaptation.

Polanski was right of course. Audiences at the time most definitely reacted to Macbeth as a film made by a directorexercising questionable taste in drawing upon an unspeakable personal tragedy for artistic inspiration. But howcould they not? His first film in almost three years, Macbeth was Polanski's follow-up to Rosemary’s Baby (1968)and his first film since the cultural shockwave of the Tate/LaBianca Murders. I think it would be fair to say that at thispoint in his career, Polanski could have adapted The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore and audiences would still havescoured every frame looking for traces of what affect such a profound loss and personal trauma might have had on

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his work.Roman Polanski is perhaps my favorite director of all time, but for him to have assumed it would be otherwise is notonly naive, but smacks more than a little of a disingenuousness on his part. As one of the breed of filmmakers whogreatly benefited from the “film director as star” cult that sprang out of the '70s "auteur movement," Polanski becamethe darling of both mainstream and avant-garde film by promoting his films as the creative end-result of his singularartistic vision. Whose fault is it then when audiences seek to detect traces of the director's DNA on the celluloid?

Jon Finch as Macbeth

Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth

Martin Shaw as Banquo

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Terence Bayler as Macduff

John Stride as Ross

Both Polanski and co-collaborator Kenneth Tynan (the noted theater critic and literary manager of the NationalTheater Company) are terrifically faithful to Shakespeare's original text of The Tragedy of Macbeth, but make nomistake, this IS Polanski’s Macbeth. Good or bad, whether he likes it or not, Roman Polanski's cinematicfingerprints (not to mention copious amounts of blood) are all over this adaptation. Instead of denying it, perhaps it'stime for Polanski to embrace it; for it is the infusion of one man's real-life fixations into the fictional story of anotherthat wrests this Macbeth from its theatrical confines and brings it to vibrant, intensely compelling life. All thetrademark Polanski templates and obsessions are in attendance: the bleak, empty vistas under ominous skies recallCul-De-Sac; Repulsion's hallucinatory dream sequences are echoed in Macbeth's haunted nightmares; there's thecoven of nude, elderly witches that hearken to Rosemary's Baby; and the coiled, masculinity-baiting tensions thatexist between Lord and Lady Macbeth are not dissimilar to Knife in the Water's aggrieved married couple.

The Three WitchesChaos, Darkness, & Conflict

So many familiar themes and motifs that later came to punctuate the entire Roman Polanski film oeuvre are presentin fevered abundance—blunt, unsentimentalized violence; pessimism; a distrust of human nature; guilt; impotencein the face of destiny; black humor—one might be forgiven for forgetting that Macbeth was indeed written by WilliamShakespeare in the 17th Century and not Mr. Polanski in the 20th.

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Nicholas Selby as King Duncan

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILMI’m not much on Shakespeare. The language is beautiful, I’ll grant you that, but the image I have of Shakespeare onfilm is one of lugubrious dramas with British actors in love with the sound of their own voices staring off into thedistance delivering speeches. In tights, yet.There are exceptions of course. I'm fond of Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet – (1996), Titus (Andronicus) - (1999), andthis, Polanski’s Macbeth—which is my favorite screen adaptation of a Shakespeare work. Macbeth, with itsexceedingly high body count and concern with such relatable, base emotions as guilt, envy, and revenge, is aparticularly impressive translation to film, not only because Polanski is a perfect ideological match for a tale aboutthe poisonous imprint of ambition (Lord Macbeth and Rosemary’s Baby’s Guy Woodhouse would have a lot to say toone another), but as one of cinema’s great visual storytellers, Polanski’s command of the language of cinemaenlivens the story by creating images as poetic and dramatically evocative as the words which accompany them.

As though summoned by Macbeth's own brooding temperament, dark cloudsgather in the skies above Inverness castle as King Duncan approaches to meet

his fate

Polanski takes the naturalistic approach to Shakespeare’s play, an approach that forges a psychological intimacy tothe story, making the characters life-size and rendering their faults not ones born of evil natures, but of humanweaknesses. The tragedy of Macbeth is that the darkness within him is only unearthed after his fortunes have takenan upturn and his future success ordained. Lord and Lady Macbeth are only truly unhappy with their lot after it hasbeen prophesized that it is to be improved. It’s like the “entitlement” sickness that grips Americans today. Peopleseem to have lost the knack of being happy with what they've got, because everywhere you look they're being toldthat they should want more, that they deserve better…and worse…as citizens in the “land of plenty”, are entitled toit. Ambition for ambition's sake is the madness that grips Macbeth.

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Lord and Lady Macbeth: Thwarted by vaulting ambition

Polanski, who knows all too well the corruptive allure of ambition and its close kinship to guilt, makes Macbeth’sconflict of conscience one disturbingly personal and frighteningly real.

PERFORMANCESIn spite of Polanski's well-documented technique of micromanaging the hell out of his actors (which, given the levelof performances he gets out of his actors, may well speak to the efficiency of the technique overall), naturalismdominates. His actors appear liberated and unfettered, their performances effortlessly lifting Shakespeare'scharacters from the printed page.Macbeth’s boxoffice prospects were greatly diminished by the lack of star names attached to it (beyond Polanski’s,of course), but in Jon Finch (the late actor who starred in Hitchcock’s Frenzy) Polanski has an actor capable oftapping into the man behind the monster. Finch, whose dark, anxious eyes reveal more about the demons plaguinghis character’s mind than any monologue can adequately capture, makes for a persuasively vulnerable, down-to-earth Macbeth. A performance refreshingly devoid of theatrical posturing and the arch striking of surface attitudes,Finch’s Macbeth is a man driven to malicious madness by weaknesses within him that he allows himself to beconvinced are strengths.

Jon Finch's Macbeth is no speechifying protagonist. He's a man suffering thedisintegration of his soul in pursuit of ambition he scarcely knew he harbored.

Gender, sexual politics, and women as possessors of the only true power, have been recurring themes in a greatmany of Polanski's films (Cul-De-Sac, The Ghost Writer, Bitter Moon, Knife in the Water, Carnage, and hisforthcoming Venus in Fur). Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth is tailor-made for Polanski's usual upending of genderroles in the service of dramatizing the subtle gynophobia that lies behind the uneasy alliance known as sexualrelations in his films. In Francesca Annis, Polanski happily departs from the usual depiction of Lady Macbeth asnatural femininity perverted by the "masculine" pursuit of power, and presents her as something of an intellectualbarbarian equal to the physical barbarism displayed by the men. She is no better nor worse than those around herwho plot and scheme, but hampered by the medieval limitations placed upon her gender, she operates within theonly sphere allowed her: covert puppetmaster to her husband's implicit will.Few critics in 1971 were able to get past her nude-sleepwalking scene, but Francesca Annis gives a very fine,

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understated performance as Lady Macbeth, both her fevered desire for the crown and eventual decline intomadness quite affecting.

"What, will these hands ne'er be clean?"

From his childhood eluding the Nazis in his native Poland, to the loss of his family to the Manson madness, oneattribute of Polanski's real-life acquaintance with the naked face of horror has been his inability to see the need topaint evil as anything more than human, and anything less than something that resides within each of us.

THE STUFF OF FANTASYPerhaps because I've never been partial to medieval costume dramas full of derring-do, pageantry, and heroicswordplay; I’m crazy about the squalid, gloomy look of Macbeth. Polanski gives us one of Shakespeare’s mostunrelentingly bleak and depressing plays and serves it up with extra dollops of rain, murk, and medieval filth. There’snothing romantic or even remotely cheery about it, and the effect is to ground Shakespeare’s larger-than-life themesof wrongs corrected and order restored into a cynically circular tale where suffering is as ceaseless and bleak as thehorizon.

The graceful, romanticized fencing duels of the typical Shakespearean film arereplaced by clumsily brutal bouts that highlight the awkwardness of the armor

and the sense that what we are witnessing are not heroic battles, but lowlybrawls and acts of aggression.

THE STUFF OF DREAMSAlthough I dearly wanted to, I wasn't allowed to see Macbeth when it was opened. Not because my parents thoughtit was too violent for my tender age (I was 14), but because of all the pre-release publicity surrounding LadyMacbeth’s nude sleepwalking scene (so tame by today’s standards, the film could be shown in high school Englishclasses) and the guilt-by-association tarnish of Macbeth being the premiere entry from Playboy’s newly-formed filmdivision. (It’s reported that Polanski’s somber film got off to a bad start at press screenings when the title card, “APlayboy Production” was greeted with snorts of derisive laughter.)

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The Macbeths find their nights plagued by sleeplessness

In any event, I’m grateful for having been spared seeing this film at a time when the horrors of the Manson casewould have still been too fresh in my mind. As Manson's trial had only ended that same year, seeing the film justwould have been too painful and depressing an experience. Now, with neither its nudity nor violence the incendiaryfocus they once were, it's possible to see Macbeth as one of the screen's more successful Shakespeareadaptations. A fact that remains even though time has yet to fully eradicate the cloud of sadness hovering over theviolent events it recalls.Polanski's Macbeth was released the same year as Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Ken Russell's The Devils. Asyou can imagine, the entertainment world was up in arms over what it perceived at the time to be the "newpermissiveness" in films gone completely out of control.

Both in interviews and in his memoirs, Polanski has spoken of how happy he was during the making of Rosemary'sBaby; a fact easily attested to by Polanski delivering an ingeniously dark thriller that is nonetheless buoyed by adelicate black humor and obvious love of moviemaking. By comparison, Macbeth, as riveting a dramatization as itis, has an unshakable air of sadness about it (the real reason I think the film fared to score well with audiences), andfeels at times like an act of hostility directed towards the audience. It's as if—in choosing to make the violence sographic, gruesome, and in-your-face—Polanski is enacting revenge on those who blamed him and his films forattracting the violence of the Manson crimes.

Critics like Roger Ebert took issue with Macbeth's wanton barbarism and theunfortunate resemblance of many of the knights to Charles Manson and his minions

Armed with the rejoinder that all of the violence depicted in Macbeth is Shakespeare’s, not his own, Polanski,subconsciously or not, decides to rub our faces in it. Outdoing any film he’s done before or since in terms of thedepiction of savagery (even going so far as to provide a startling view of jeering crowds from the point of view of thealready beheaded Macbeth), Polanski, perhaps feeling he would be damned by the public no matter what he did,opts for showing us a vision of a world the press had claimed he'd inhabited all along. A world of unremittingbleakness and hopelessness.

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"When you tell a story of a guy who’s beheaded, you have to show how they cut off the head. If you don’t, it’s liketelling a dirty joke and leaving out the punch line." Roman Polanski

The suggestion that artists cannot help but leave behind a patina of some aspect of themselves on their work is aconcept to which I strongly adhere. And in the case of an artist as gifted as Roman Polanski, such a belief onlystands to further enrich the viewing experience. For me, his Macbeth, a film of haunting images both beautiful andhorrific, stands as a towering achievement in terms of one artist adapting the work of another (in this instance, astory ofttimes told) and fashioning it into something uniquely, exclusively...and to Polanski's regret...revealingly, hisown.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

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