Orson Welles

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Shakespeare by Orson Welles

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Welles's approach to Macbeth was bound to be unusual. First of all, he imposed upon it a theme which has no parallel in the text, and announced it himself at the beginning of the film…. The words were spoken over shots of the witches seen amid a swirl of mists at work over their cauldron, shaping the clay image of a baby, which was to be a symbol used throughout the film. Macbeth, Welles said, was a story which involves 'plotting against Christian law and order'; the hostile forces were 'agents of chaos, priests of hell and magic' making use of 'ambitious men' to achieve their dark and primal purpose. In order to provide a Christian symbol in the film he created a new character, a priest, to whom he gave lines taken over from other, suppressed characters. Welles cut the play extensively …; he rearranged scenes; he even introduced lines from other plays.

The result is a Wellesian superstructure imposed upon the play, which is then bent to conform to this new thematic device; visually, it is often striking and splendid. But the verse is for the most part badly spoken, even by Welles himself. The original track of 1948 sounded, in his view, too American; later … he re-recorded two-thirds of the track in order to give the speech a more Scottish flavour. The result is that the sound is uneven in quality and often scarcely intelligible…. (p. 56)

Welles has described this elaborate re-visualization of the play as a 'violently sketched charcoal drawing of a great play'. He wanted it to be a 'Stonehenge-powerful, unrelieved tragedy'. It was to this end, therefore, that the sets created an artificial world of caves, rock-enclosed areas like the core of an extinct volcano, catacombs and cells with fiercely barbed window frames; it is a world of moving mist and falling water; swine wallow in mud at the castle entrance. Shots are distorted in mirrors to reflect the bent mind of Macbeth. The costumes are part Asiatic, part barbaric, made up alike of skins, cloth and metallic armour. Special effects are used to make the scenes of witchcraft macabre and unearthly. (p. 59)

Like Macbeth, Othello has a magnificent visual flair, stemming this time not from studio sets but from a brilliant use of the locations. Welles imposed no new or artificial interpretation on the play, as he had done so disastrously in the case of Macbeth; rather, he widened its environment by using Italian and Moroccan backgrounds. (p. 61)

It is unfortunate that once again the sound recording is so ill-balanced that the speech is often barely intelligible. The characterization, however, is better balanced than in Macbeth…. (p. 62)

Welles cut deep into the text of the play, isolating the dialogue and speeches he needed in order to carry the action forward, transposing when he felt the urge. A brilliant touch of improvisation, celebrated by now, was the resetting of the scene in which Roderigo … is himself murdered by Iago; Welles decided to film this in a Turkish bath because the costumes for Cassio and Roderigo were not available at the times of shooting. The result is one of the most effective scenes in the film, with Roderigo stabbed by Iago as he hides under the slatted boards in the Turkish bath, surrounded by clouds of steam.

However, the large number of strikingly lit architectural shots coming in quick succession on the screen makes the film restless, and to this extent more difficult to enter into. Satiety sets in; so much photographic beauty becomes a drug. The characters move rapidly, and the camera is tilted upwards to the point of obsession in order to achieve [a] kind of strictly formal beauty…. The film is at its best when this restlessness is broken and a certain degree of concentration is allowed…. Some of the later interchanges between Iago and Othello are fragmented into a series of emphatically tilted portraits, which drain the drama from the speech, which is in any case underemphasized, and so transform the scenes into a photographic exhibition. A similar beauty destroys, not enhances, the intensity of the later scenes between Othello and Desdemona, which are posed in a succession of beautiful architectural interiors. The music, too, though often apt, is sometimes used in such a way as to prove a further distraction, disintegrating the dramatic effect. (pp. 62-3)

[Chimes at Midnight] is a deeply moving film, in which Falstaff, the central figure, has an essential goodness, even a greatness, about him, which Prince Hal, finally dedicating himself to the formal duties of monarchy and the establishment of power, can no longer permit himself to recognize or even tolerate. Falstaff bears none of the marks of respectability, and Hal breaks his heart by publicly rejecting him. (p. 64)

From the start of the film certain photographic devices become marked. Shooting from a low angle is constant throughout the film; it emphasizes the power struggle between the King—an aloof, isolated figure, his throne set high on a great rostrum, in contrast to the restless, gyrating nobility. Falstaff's vast belly is emphasized by similar, up-tilted shots. (pp. 65-6)

The scenes of battle are finely staged, rather in the manner of Eisenstein in miniature. There are smoke and sunlight, tall lances against the sky, banners and small, decorative tents, galloping horsemen…. Hand-held, swiftly panning cameras, and many un-tilted shots emphasize the bloody violence of mediaeval warfare; some shots are speeded up, and the sequence ends with scenes of innumerable corpses scattered in the mud. (pp. 68-9)

Chimes at Midnight is one of Orson Welles's finest films, and one of the most successful screen adaptations from Shakespeare so far made. The much-criticized earlier adaptations of Macbeth and Othello have the great virtue that they are not reverential or academic exercises—in their best sequences they are pungent, lively, imaginative extensions of the tragedies, flights of fancy too often held back by technical shortcomings, obscurities in the story continuity and incessant over-indulgence in purely visual beauty. But the Shakespearean screen would be much the poorer without these earlier experiments, while Chimes at Midnight is nearly, if not quite, a masterpiece. (p. 70)

Roger Manvell, "Shakespeare by Orson Welles," in his Shakespeare and the Film (copyright © 1971 by Roger Manvell; reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston; in Canada by J M Dent & Sons Ltd), J M Dent & Sons Ltd, 1971, pp. 55-71.

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