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Macbeth Movie Review

Macbeth is a 1948 historical drama film directed by and starring Orson Welles. It’s a flawed, but mostly very good and atmospheric Shakespeare adaptation.

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“Double, double, toil and trouble;

fire burn, and cauldron bubble“

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It tells the story of the Scottish general who becomes the King of Scotland through treachery and murder. This is a pretty faithful rendition of the original source material, though some liberties are taken with the dialogue, especially the introduction of the words amen and God, which were quite sparse in the original work. But for the most part this movie is faithful and very well adapted.

Orson Welles is a very good Macbeth. He cast himself in the main role and focused extensively on the protagonist’s sequences and speeches, but he rose to the occasion and delivered a terrific performance. I appreciated the decision to shoot his scenes from many different angles, which led to a psychological whiplash on the audience. Welles particularly sold the scenes where Macbeth became insane out of guilt.

Jeanette Nolan was actually older than Welles and it shows, but she delivered a pretty good performance. I really liked all of her scenes, but those scenes were not found in abundance unfortunately. Yes, one of my main gripes with this adaptation is that Welles narcissistically chose to focus mostly on his character, thus diminishing the impact of the great Lady Macbeth character.

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Roddy McDowall was pretty confident as Malcolm and Macduff was also solid, but this story never had particularly well developed supporting players, so Welles did the best that he could with the material that he was given. The directing from him is quite strong and the movie is well edited and paced. It flows well and is neither too rushed nor too lengthy.

1948’s Macbeth has one big problem and that is the inferior quality of its production. This was filmed obviously on a shoestring budget and it shows – the sets look cheap and the costumes are not the best either. I’d come to appreciate the main set eventually, but it was definitely odd that the castle looked more like a cave than a full-on castle. The crowns that they wore looked quite silly and the costumes were fine, but clearly not lavish. But given that he did not have the biggest budget, he should be forgiven for these flaws.

Thankfully, the cinematography is excellent. The movie was splendidly shot and the score was also magnificent. The acting is superb and I loved the witches here and how eerie they looked and acted. Their scenes were so amazing that I wished that we got more of them.

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This Macbeth is also highly atmospheric due to the presence of so much smoke and fog. The noirish atmosphere was gorgeous and the murder and death scenes effectively conveyed the terror and horror on display. The two main characters going insane was particularly well done and those moments were the standouts for me, though the dialogue and characterization overall was weaker than in the source material.