[In the following essay, Harper contrasts Roman Polanski's naturalistic, psychological, and character-driven film adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth with Orson Welles's supernatural, externalized, and fatalistic screen interpretation of the tragedy.]

Character or fate—which holds the key to the destiny of the characters in Macbeth? Shakespeare's play suggests both possibilities, but in interpreting Macbeth for the screen, directors Roman Polanski and Orson Welles each choose only one element as the determining factor. Polanski selects character, Welles fate, and their differing cinematic treatments reflect their choices. Whereas Polanski's imagery is realistic, Welles's is surrealistic. The former director focuses on the natural, the latter stresses the supernatural.¹ Consistent with the notion that character is destiny, Polanski's film probes the psychology of its characters, illuminating the human motivation for their deeds and tracing their degeneration as they wade deeper in blood. Conversely, Welles's film externalizes the characters' inner struggles, transforming them into a battle between good and evil superpowers in which the human figures become mere pawns of the Gods.

Polanski's realistic imagery grounds the tragedy in the sublunary sphere. His salient metaphor, blood, is inescapably human. He reddens the celluloid, graphically and brutally depicting those incidents which Shakespeare only reports: Macbeth hewing enemy soldiers, Duncan hanging the Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth repeatedly stabbing Duncan, Macbeth's henchmen murdering Banquo or raping and destroying Macduff's household, Macduff decapitating Macbeth. Crumpled bodies and blood-spattered messengers litter the screen. In a gratuitous echo of Macbeth's mad carnage, Polanski inserts additional atrocities—the hanging of enemy soldiers, the shooting of Seyton, the mangling of bears.²

However, many of Polanski's realistic touches are not grotesque but simply ordinary,³ a slice-of-medieval-life in all its primitiveness: the castle's unglamorous interiors—rough stone walls surrounding a dirt courtyard, the persistent mud and rain, the dust rising from the traveler Macbeth's cloak as Duncan claps him in greeting, geese cackling as servants prepare dinner in open pots in the courtyard and Lady Macbeth reads her husband's letter, Macbeth's tying his shoes while Banquo warns him against the instruments of darkness, the housekeeping preparations for Duncan's arrival—the getting out of clean linen, the making of beds sprinkled with dried flowers, the sweeping of rooms and the pitching of hay into the common room where many of Duncan's retinue will sleep, Banquo's chasing a large dog from his “bed” on the hay before he can retire, Lady Macduff giving her son a bath. Some details are charming. Others, such as the sheep being sheared at the Macduff's shortly before the murderers arrive or the Macbeths' polluting their courtyard with the bloody water in which they have washed their hands, carry ominous overtones.

Counterpointing the quotidian image of Polanski's creation is the surrealistic distortion of Welles's nightmare.⁴ Welles's primary symbols are abstractions, shades of darkness such as night, fog, shadows, silhouettes. There is a fantastic quality to the action. Banquo's murderers slink down out of gnarled trees; the fog envelopes Malcolm's tree-bearing soldiers, making them appear to walk on clouds. Characters are front lit so as to cast enormous, menacing shadows on the walls behind them, or backlit so as to fade into silhouettes. Perpetually seen in shadow or silhouette, the characters become ghostly and dehumanized. An errie wind claws continually at the characters' clothing or beats on the castle, whose bleak countenance and environs are made even bleaker by the chiaroscuro of black-and-white film. Camera angles further distort reality. Intense close-ups swell hands and foreground figures to gigantic proportions. The camera catches distorted reflections in shields or partial glimpses of bodies from strange angles.⁵

In Polanski's more naturalistic world, the supernatural is de-mystified.⁶ The three weird sisters in his film are not the classical goddesses of destiny but the toothless crones and rumpled girls common to poor rural life. While their predeliction for witchcraft, boiling cauldrons and naked covens is unusual, their behavior is not otherwise mysterious or inexplicable. They do not, for example, vanish into thin air. Macbeth's remarks to the contrary to Banquo are punctuated with mocking laughter, as if to say, “Who could believe such a foolish superstition?” Like their fellow creatures, these “spirits” require shelter and food. First seen in the light of day, when Macbeth happens upon them in the rain, they are huddling under a canopy and retreat at the end of the encounter to their dwelling in the earth, taking with them their goat. Polanski stresses that it is Macbeth who pursues them, both here and in the later scene when he seeks their intelligence. By omitting scenes of Shakespeare's play that enhance their supernatural powers—the first part of I.iii, in which the witches plot to harass a ship's captain, and all of III.v, in which Hecate predicts Macbeth's next visit to the weird sisters and vows to raise spirits to confound him—Polanski places the responsibility for Macbeth's actions in his own hands. If the hags read Macbeth's destiny, they do so not in the Book of Doom, but in his face, as does his wife: “Your face, my Thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters.”⁷ Like Lady Macbeth, the witches tell Macbeth what he wants to hear.

Where Polanski carefully extricates Macbeth from the witches' toils, Welles entangles him further. A prologue that Welles added intones:

Our story is laid in Scotland, ancient Scotland, savage, half lost in the mist that hangs between recorded history and the time of legends. The cross itself is newly arrived here. Plotting against Christian law and order are the agents of chaos, priests of hell and magic, sorcerers, and witches. Their tools are ambitious men. This is the story of such a man and his wife. A brave soldier, he hears from witches a prophecy of future greatness, and on this cue murders his way up to a tyrant's throne, only to go down hated and in blood at the end of all. Now riding homeward from victorious battle in defense of his true king, here on the blasted heath, the witches hail him king. Here the spell is laid upon him and the story begins.⁸

Then the witches, unseen save for their hands which mold a clay figure in a swirling cauldron, chant the lines of the first scene. As they conclude “there to meet with Macbeth,” the name “Macbeth” being given special emphasis, they raise the clay figure, a bust of the protagonist. The camera zooms in on the voodoo doll,⁹ while the music mounts to a crescendo. The film then cuts to the third scene of Act I, with the witches visible for the first time. Unlike the witches in Polanski's film, who are clearly seen in daylight, the sorceresses in Welles's version never reveal their faces; they are always shot from behind or in silhouette, and their eerie appearance is like no country folk one might encounter in this world. As the weird sisters prophesy Macbeth's future greatness, they place a thane's chain and a king's crown on the clay bust. Driven off by a holy man brandishing the celtic cross. Welles's witches literally vanish into thin air. They reappear at the end of the scene to observe silently Macbeth's departure as the new Thane of Cawdor with Duncan's emissaries.

Shakespeare summons witches three times, Polanski only twice. Welles raises his supernatural agents, either in person, by voice, or by proxy in the form of the voodoo doll, numerous times. From first to last, they hover over the film, extending their influence even to the apparitions which assault Macbeth. Before Macbeth envisions a dagger, the camera shows a blade passing in front of the voodoo doll. As Macbeth wanders through subterranean passages in the castle after meeting with Banquo's murderers, he relives via voice-over his last conversation with Banquo. Banquo's last remark, however, is extended from “I will not fail” to “I will not fail your feast.” This ghostly addition foreshadows the entrance of Banquo's ghost in the next scene. When Macbeth vows after the banquet to seek the witches a second time, he is immediately transported to a blustery crag. The camera shoots down on him—a lone, spotlighted figure surrounded by darkness—while three voices from above relay three warnings. (The question concerning Banquo's issue is omitted.)

Conversely, Polanski treats the apparitions as if they were “daggers of the mind. … Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain” (II.i.39-40). Both Shakespeare's and Polanski's Macbeth vacillates between regarding the dagger as an encouraging omen or a psychological projection. “Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going, / And such an instrument I was to use” (II.i.43-44), he reflects, then decides that “there's no such thing. / It is the bloody business which informs / Thus to mine eyes” (II.i.48-50). In a final volte-face, Macbeth concludes, “the bell invites me” (II.i.63), rationalizing his actions with these supernatural solicitings. In Polanski's interpretation of the banquet on the eve of Banquo's murder, it is Macbeth alone who, after a draught of wine, sees Banquo's ghost. The guests contemplate an empty chair. When Macbeth enters the witches' coven, he does not meet their “masters” as he requests. Instead, their mystic messages are contained in a hallucinatory vision which Macbeth experiences only after he has imbibed the witches' brew. This is not the first drugged potion to be administered in the film; Lady Macbeth had earlier proffered one to Duncan's guards.

Just as the apparitions in Polanski's film are not messengers from another world but psychological projections or psychogenically induced hallucinations, so the forces that drive Macbeth to his doom are not occult but human. An ambitious, jealous man with a savage streak and a perfectly natural desire to shine in the eyes of his attractive wife, Macbeth is ripe for the role of murderer. Polanski reveals the title character's barbarousness in an opening scene where Macbeth prods a prone soldier, then axes the man in the back when he moves. Duncan and his soldiers regard Macbeth's “carving” and “unseaming” of the enemy as laudable, but Macbeth's brutality, coupled with his ambition, will propel him to violent crimes. Once the witches' appellations have fueled Macbeth's desire to become king, Macbeth broods obsessively over the idea. When King Duncan fixes the succession on his own son, Malcolm, Macbeth leaves the room in a fit of jealous pique. Later he slackens in his resolve to murder Duncan, but his spur, Lady Macbeth, “holps” him to it by asserting that his virility and his love for her are questionable if he refuses to assassinate the king. (Lady Macbeth will likewise attack her husband's masculine pride in an attempt to banish his visions of Banquo's ghost.)¹⁰ Although in Shakespeare's play, Lady Macbeth's insinuations suffice to spur her husband on, Polanski's Macbeth resists her blandishments until he is snubbed by his rival for the crown, Malcolm. Malcolm smiles condescendingly at Macbeth while thrusting his wine glass at his host, so that Macbeth is forced to wait on Malcolm by pouring wine for him. After that encounter, the new Thane of Cawdor returns to his wife's side, hackles raised, ready to avenge the injury done his machismo. Having killed Duncan, Macbeth, in a double entendre directed at his wife, professes his motive to be devotion to her: “Who could refrain / That had a heart to love, and in that heart / Courage to make's love known?” (II.ii. 117-118). It is human factors also—jealousy and fear—that motivate Macbeth to kill Banquo and to sack Macduff's home. Both men have children; the Macbeth marriage is barren. Banquo is a further reproach to Macbeth for having withstood the temptation to which Macbeth succumbed.

Polanski motivates other characters in the film in a similar fashion. Macbeth manipulates Banquo's murderers by using the same techniques his wife employed with him. When they hesitate, he challenges their virility: “In the catalogue ye go for men” (III.i.91). As they accede to his bidding, his tone softens and he places an arm round their shoulders, just as Lady Macbeth placed a hand on him, and tells them, “I to your assistance do make love” (II.i.123). The ambitious Ross deserts Macbeth for Malcolm when Macbeth awards Seyton, not Ross, the Thane of Cawdor's chain, just as Macbeth had jealously deserted Duncan when the King named his son Prince of Cumberland. Lady Macbeth's motivation is more difficult to fathom. Certainly, she delights in the response, her sexual charms elicit from men and probably in the power it gives her over them. In addition to charming her husband, she dances seductively with Duncan and smiles when Fleance serenades her with a ballad proclaiming that she slays with her eyes. Many of her actions, however, seem motivated by childish prankishness. She pouts when she does not get her way and treats smearing the grooms' hands with blood as a game. Her invitation to the “spirits that tend on mortal thoughts” to “unsex me here” (I.v.41) summons no spirits. Such dares and boasts are her way of screwing her “courage to the sticking place” (I.vii.61).

Neither Polanski nor Macbeth is concerned with the hereafter. Macbeth had been willing to “jump the life to come,” to risk future damnation for present success. Ironically, Macbeth does suffer the tortures of hell, but it is a psychological hell, a hell located “here upon this bank and shoal of time” (I.vii.6-7) where he had thought to triumph. Shakespeare's Macbeth begins as a sensitive man who, despite his failings, has the moral sense to be revolted by killing Duncan. In Polanski's film, Macbeth hesitates to kill Duncan until Duncan wakes and sees him, thus forcing his assassin to finish what he has started. Macbeth is disturbed that he could not say “Amen” to the guards' overheard prayers and finds his bloody hands “a sorry sight” (II.ii.19), but by the end of the film he has hardened into a conscienceless killer who indifferently dispatches women and children.¹¹ Even the death of his once dear wife scarcely moves him. His earlier qualms have disappeared, and he no longer cares to repent. “Throw physic to the dogs; I'll none of it” (V.iii.47), he curtly informs the doctor who declares the patient must minister to himself. From a brave warrior who enjoys both men's approbation and an easy, jovial camaraderie with the best men in the kingdom, Macbeth shrinks to a thug surrounded by thugs. At the end of the film, before the battle with the English, Macbeth calls for his armor even though “'tis not needed yet” (V.iii.33), as if he could recover the “golden opinions” (I.vii.34) in which he once was dressed by merely donning his armor. But like a “dwarfish thief” in a “giant's robe” (V.ii.21-22), Macbeth finds his armor no longer fits him properly. All who are able to desert him do so, even killing to escape from his fortress. The road winding down from his castle is flooded with anxious folk scurrying far from his reach. After Lady Macbeth's death, he is left with only the most degenerate of his henchmen, those who killed Macduff's family, and even they abandon him. When the English forces arrive, they enter a deserted castle, a body from which the soul has flown. Stripped of all that “should accompany old age, / As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends” (V.iii.24-25), Macbeth sits alone on his throne.

The psychological toll taken on Lady Macbeth differs from that exacted from her husband. He responds by killing others, she responds by killing herself. Like her husband, she had questioned, “What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?” (V.i.36-39). Yet, in the next line of her sleepwalking speech, she gives the answer: “Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?” The old man's blood haunts her still, not as a ghost who walks but as the stings of conscience. In an addition by Polanski, Lady Macbeth, with shaking hands and broken voice, re-reads Macbeth's earlier letter to her in which he rejoiced in their future greatness. Their victory has been pyrrhic, and her present madness, her sleepwalking and hand washing, is the price she has paid for it.

Perhaps the most poignant loss is their love. She had been his “dearest partner” and “dearest love.” When he first returns home as Thane of Cawdor, he sweeps her into his arms and carries her up to their bedroom, although, as elsewhere when they are in bed together, the topic of conversation is murder. At the banquet in Duncan's honor, Macbeth and his wife exchange warm glances across Duncan, who sits between them. This separation by Duncan is prophetic, however, for his murder will irreparably divide them. As time passes and Macbeth's obsession with retaining his crown drives every other thought, including thoughts of his wife, from his mind, he keeps alone, leaving her to stand at the foot of his stairs with his retinue. At the banquet where Banquo's ghost appears, he desires to sit not with her but with Ross, his new partner in crime. After the banquet, she denies the hand he offers her to walk upstairs. Although they continue to share a bed, their joy in each other is gone. As Macbeth pursues his bloody course, she retreats further and further into herself. After she has killed herself by jumping from the parapet, Macbeth, regarding her mangled body, does not even embrace her one last time. Though his thoughts (“out, out, brief candle”) indicate he feels something, if only increased bitterness, he neither touches her nor orders his servants to remove her body. Instead, he leaves her lying in a crumpled heap in the courtyard, where she remains until the film's end.

In contrast to Polanski's rich characterizations, Welles flattens his characters. The latter's Macbeth is a sensitive, henpecked husband spurred on by the three weird sisters and by his shrewish, vampish wife, who nags even in her sleep.¹² Sylized performances,¹³ abbreviated speeches, and weak or histrionic acting all contribute to the thin characterization. As discussed earlier, the strange camera angles and shots of characters in shadow or silhouette lend an air of unreality to the Macbeths. Gone is the psychomachia so conspicuous in Polanski's production. Welles de-internalizes the action by transforming asides and soliloquies into public speeches or by divorcing them from the speaker. For example, Macbeth's rumination that “this supernatural soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good” (I.iii.130-131) is directed at Banquo and Ross, while the remainder of his speech concerning the shaken state of his “single state of man” is omitted. The “out, out brief candle” speech becomes a voice-over accompanying the advance of Malcolm's army.

Welles projects the struggle in Macbeth onto a cosmic scale.¹⁴ No longer an internal psychological battle, the struggle becomes a war between God and Satan. The witches' numerous appearances as representatives of the infernal have already been noted. To counterbalance them, Welles adds a cross-carrying “Holy Hermit.” When Duncan arrives at Dunsinane, his chanting retinue kneels while the Holy Hermit invokes the Archangel Michael to protect them from Satan and other evil spirits who roam the world. Meanwhile, Lady Macbeth whispers to her husband that she will drug the guards' drink. The Hermit then asks, “Do you renounce Satan?” and the crowd thunders “Yes.” When Duncan's murder is proclaimed, the holy man is the first to awake, and, as Duncan's body is carried out, he prays, “God's benison go with you and with those that would make good of bad and friends of foes.” The Holy Hermit then joins Malcolm and the English forces. As Macduff vows to kill Macbeth, the hermit stands next to him in shadow, like his good angel. Conversely, Welles indicates that Macbeth's advisors are evil spirits by changing the word “angel” in Macduff's remark to Macbeth—“the angel whom thou still hast serv'd” (V.viii.14)—to “devil.” Truly an army with God on their side, the English forces sport helmets emblazoned with crosses and carry hundreds of poles bearing the cross as their standard. In their vanguard rides the Holy Hermit. They arrive at Dunsinane chanting religiously. This externalized battle for dominion over the earth resembles the morality play structure in which good and evil counselors battle for man's soul. Unlike the morality plays, however, Welles's production de-emphasizes the protagonist's free will and crucial choice for good or evil. Instead, the Holy Hermit and the three weird sisters determine the outcome of events.

The difference in Polanski's and Welles's points of view can be summed up by comparing their treatment of the play's conclusion. Both filmmakers indicate that the cycle of violence will continue as Donalbain, Duncan's other son and Malcolm's brother, makes a bid for the throne. Once again, however, Polanski stresses human factors as the cause of continued disorder, while Welles attribues the strife to the powers of darkness. In the former's version, Donalbain shares Macbeth's jealous ambition. Polanski underscores the similarities between the two by focusing on both Donalbain's and Macbeth's discomfited expressions as Duncan names Malcolm Prince of Cumberland and by endowing Donalbain with a limp, which links him to Macbeth's henchmen. Donalbain has been conspicuously absent from Malcolm's fight against Macbeth and subsequent coronation, but after the coronation he reappears at the witch's crag. It is a rainy day similar to the one on which Macbeth first encountered the witches and was hailed with prophecies of greatness. The witches are not in sight, but Donalbain dismounts from his horse and goes to seek them. Polanski thereby emphasizes human responsibility in voluntarily choosing and fostering evil.¹⁵ If there is a power outside Macbeth which shapes his destiny, it is a human not a superhuman one—Lady Macbeth, the ambitious wife, or Ross, the kingmaker who first serves Duncan, then crowns Macbeth, and finally crowns Malcolm.¹⁶ In Welles's film, the supernatural has the last word. Just before Macduff kills Macbeth, the camera shows the voodoo doll being decapitated. Its crown falls to the ground, and a male figure, seen only from the waist down, picks up the crown. Then the camera returns to Macduff, holding Macbeth's head. Macduff hails Malcolm as “King of Scotland.” The camera cuts from Malcolm, to the crowd, to Donalbain clutching the voodoo doll's crown. The film closes with a long shot of Dunsinane; the witches preside in the foreground, while fog envelopes the castle.

Taking their cues from the same source, the two directors pursue very different directions. Roman Polanski's film tells the story of a man whose “will became the servant to defect” (II.i.18) and whose unleashed passions, like stampeding horses, hurtled him “the way to dusty death” (V.v.23). A psychological study, Polanski's Macbeth employs realistic imagery and minimizes the supernatural elements in Shakespeare's play. Orson Welles's production, on the other hand, relates the tale of a man caught in the crossfire of warring deities, “between the pass and fell incensed points of mighty opposites.” A shadowy figure, Welles's Macbeth is set in a surrealistic world dominated by supernatural forces.

Notes

1. Although Michael Mullin (“Macbeth on Film,” Literature/Film Quarterly: [1973]: 332-342) contrasts the expressionistic and naturalistic styles of Polanski and Welles, his final interpretation of both films is radically different from my own. Furthermore, he fails to relate the technique to the question of free will.

2. The violence in Polanski's film has been much discussed. Many critics, such as Pauline Kael (Deeper Into Movies [Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1973], p. 393) and Bernard Weinraub (“A Visit with Roman Polanski,” The New York Times Magazine, 12 Dec. 1971, p. 64) read the film biographically. Kael argues: “One sees the Manson murders in this Macbeth because the director has put them there.” Weinraub records the director's vehement protests that the film is not about his life, but offsets these assertions with remarks to the contrary by Polanski's friends, Kenneth Tynan and Michael Klinger. The biographical approach finds its extremist expression in Kenneth Rothwell's “Roman Polanski's Macbeth: Golgotha Trimphant,” (Literature/Film Quarterly, 1, [1973]: 71-151) Rothwell labels Polanski's creation “a Golgotha in technicolor (p. 75), a “series of amusing cruelties” (p. 73), permeated with “the bizarre ambience from whence the film was generated” (p. 71), namely, the Manson murders, the Playboy lifestyle, and Polanski's interest in the occult as evinced by Rosemary's Baby.

   In “Macbeth: Polanski and Shakespeare” (Literature/Film Quarterly, 1, [1973]: 291-298), Normand Berlin urges a return to formalist concerns: “It seems easy to see in the movie's emphasis on bloodshed a working out of Polanski's personal obsession. Whatever truth such a view may have, it should not stop us from investigating Polanski's use of the horror. … There is no denying that Polanski has an imagination that is essentially Gothic. … But his Gothic sensibility serves artistic purposes” (p. 293). Polanski himself cites one such use: “To explain why Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are so shaken, we have had to make the murder of Duncan very long and horrible and full of blood” (quoted by Francis Wyndham, “The Young Macbeth,” The Sunday Times Magazine, 28 Feb. 1971, p. 19).

   Polanski admits that the film is violent, while insisting “But the play is violent. And life is violent too” (Weinraub interview, p. 64). Unlike the censors who endorse “murder as long as it's committed in a ‘clean’ way” (Weinraub interview, p. 82), Polanski claims that “If you don't show [violence] realistically, then that's immoral and harmful” (Weinraub interview, p. 64). Polanski thus argues that his film is a statement against violence, against war. Jack Jorgens agrees: “Seldom has war been less appealing … seldom has a murder … been less of a romantic adventure. The violence is not the central focus of the film any more than it is the central focus of Shakespeare's play” (Shakespeare on Film [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977], pp. 173-174).

3. William Johnson (Film Quarterly, 25 [Spring, 1972], 47) regards the “medieval local color” as “distracting details of time and place”; having dismissed these norms of human behavior, he not unsurprisingly concludes that the world of the film is Kottsian (see footnote 14).

4. Jorgens recognizes the nightmarish quality of Welles's production: “Welles places concrete details in the film not to ground it in reality but to serve (as in dreams) as emblems. … (Jorgens, p. 152).

5. Two useful investigations of Welles's technique are Roger Manvell's Shakespeare and the Film (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1971), pp. 55-61; and James Naremore's “The Walking Shadow: Welles's Expressionist Macbeth,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 1 (1973): 360-366. Manvell discusses camerawork, composition of the frame, sound, editing and set. Naremore discusses aspects of the film such as the camerawork that makes Welles' Macbeth “the purest example of expressionism in the American cinema” (p. 364).

6. Nigel Andrews, in a review of Polanski's Macbeth in Sight and Sound, 41 (1972), 108, also notes “the film's general determination to de-mystify,” citing as an example the withces' failure to vanish into thin air.

7. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1980), I.v.62-63. All further references to this work appear in the text.

8. The text of the narration can be found in Jorgens's outline of the final version of Welles's Macbeth (Jorgens, p. 280). The key words “tool,” “agent,” “cue,” and “spell” signal a protagonist whose fate is sealed before the film even begins. This is precisely the kind of film which Polanski set out not to make: “There will be no superstition in my version. The witches are real witches—those sort of poor women who were burnt at the stake in the Middle Ages. The ghost of Banquo is just in Macbeth's imagination. … Traditionally, Macbeth is always done one way: the tragedy starts before the curtain has time to go all the way up” (quoted in The Sunday Times Magazine, p. 19).

   Jorgens, Mullin, Manvell and Higham (The Films of Orson Welles [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971], p. 133) concur that the fate of Welles's protagonist is predetermined. Conversely, some critics manage to discern free will in Welles' Macbeth. Jean-Claude Allais (“Orson Welles,” Premier Plan, No. 16 [1961]); quoted by Peter Cowie in the Cinema of Orson Welles (London: A. Zwemmer Ltd., 1965, p. 98) sees him “shaken between good and evil.” Maurice Bessy (Orson Welles, trans. Ciba Vaughan [New York: Crown Publishers, 1971], p. 42-48) believes Welles's Macbeth is typical of the Wellesian criminal/hero who creates his own end.

9. Welles first employed his vision of the witches as voodoo witch doctors in his all-black production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem in 1936. Richard France (“The’Voodoo’ Macbeth of Orson Welles,” Yale Theatre, 5, No. 3 [1974], 66-78); John S. O'Connor (“But Was It Shakespeare? Welles's Macbeth and Julius Caesar,” Theatre Journal, 32 [1980], 337-348); and Michael Mullin (“Orson Welles's Macbeth: Script and Screen,” in Focus on Orson Welles, ed. Ronald Gottesman [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976], pp. 136-145) discuss the pattern of predetermination and the diminishing of Macbeth's responsibility for his crimes as a result of the witches' interference. France and O'Connor devote themselves to the play; France and Mullin briefly relate the concept of predetermination in the play to the film. O'Connor sees the Harlem production in terms of historical cycles of stage conventions regarding Macbeth: “Welles and a number of other theatre artists in this century are reacting against [eighteenth and nineteenth century] attempts to rationalize the supernatural and make understandable the power of the witches. They want to emphasize rather than ignore the primitive and magical elements in Macbeth” (p. 344).

10. When Macbeth refuses his lords' invitation to sit down at the banquet table, saying “The table's full” (III.iv.46), and then addresses Banquo's ghost in lines 50-51, Lady Macbeth pulls her husband aside. “Are you a man?” she hisses (III.iv.58). He protests that he is; she deprecates his fancies as “flaws and starts [that] would well become a woman's story” (III.iv.63-65). When Macbeth addresses the ghost yet a second time, his wife protests, “What, quite unmann'd in folly?” (III.iv.74).

11. William Johnson (Johnson, p. 45), Michael Mullin (“Macbeth on Film,” p.337), and Pauline Kael would disagree with my conclusions. They find no degeneration in Polanski's Macbeth because, in Kael's words, “Macbeth is so villainously twisted throughout that it's not a matter of his yielding to his worst impulses but of his just being himself” (Kael, p. 401).

    Normand Berlin (Berlin, p. 293), however, notes the “close physical and emotional relationship” that the Macbeths enjoy early in the film, a union that foils their later relationship of callous king/indifferent husband and mad wife (Berlin, p. 293). This reading accords more closely with the director's intention to present a Macbeth who “is quite happy at the beginning” (Polanski quoted in The Sunday Times Magazine, p. 19), and a husband and wife who are young and ardent and strongly attracted to one another.

12. Again, the Welles's type of Lady Macbeth is one which Polanski sedulously avoided. “They always present Lady Macbeth as a nagging bitch. … They think of her in Charles Addams terms. But people who do ghastly things in life, they are not grim, like a horror movie” (Polanski quoted in The Sunday Times Magazine, p. 19). Accordingly, Polanski cast his Lady Macbeth as a young, innocent-looking redhead, not a mature, dark-haired Morticia.

13. Claude Beylie discusses the artifice and theatricality in Welles's film, seeing it as a “reflection of the consciousness, or rather the subconscious, of the hero” (“Macbeth, or the Magical Depths,” Etudes Cinematographiques, 24-25 [1963], pp. 86-89, reprinted in Focus on Shakespearean Films, ed. and trans. Charles Eckert [Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1972], pp. 72-75).

14. This cosmic scale is reflected even in the sound. Roger Manvell reveals that “Welles used an echo chamber at times to give the voices a dimension larger than life” (Manvell, p. 56).

15. In the Playboy interview for December, 1971 (p. 96), Polanski denied that he is “preoccupied with the macabre”: “I'm rather more interested in the behavior of people under stress.” Yet, if the evil that men do fascinates Polanski, it is the evil that men do which obsesses his critics. Pauline Kael, Kenneth Rothwell, Robert Knoll, and to some extent William Johnson regard the film as a Kottsian wasteland of meaningless violence. Such readings ignore the crucial element of choice or free will in Polanski's film. True, the film does project a dark view of human nature, but it does not portray a world where action is meaningless. The choices that people make in the world of the film have the most serious consequences for their community and themselves. While most of the choices in the film are negative ones, they imply the possibility of positive choices as a normative standard by which they are judged. It is in this sense that Polanski's film is an ethical statement, a rejection of human violence and cruelty, not a sanguinary endorsement of a Kottsian universe.

16. Polanski has changed Shakespeare's text at a number of points to show Ross manipulating the action.