MACBETH 1971

“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 his wounded ego by complaining to any and all that the film’s poor reception was due to the public failing to believe his blood-soaked, graphically violent approach to Shakespeare's tale of a nobleman brought low by ambition and waning conscience, was in any way influenced by the Manson killings. Polanski felt his film was never given a fair chance because misguided critics and Freud-obsessed American audiences insisted on reading allusions to the brutal 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's wombs 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's adaptation. 

Polanski was right of course. Audiences at the time most definitely reacted to Macbeth as a film made by a director exercising questionable taste in drawing upon an unspeakable personal tragedy for artistic inspiration. But how could 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 this point in his career, Polanski could have adapted The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore and audiences would still have scoured every frame looking for traces of what affect such a profound loss and personal trauma might have had on his work.

Roman Polanski is perhaps my favorite director of all time, but for him to have assumed it would be otherwise is not only naive, but smacks more than a little of a disingenuousness on his part. As one of the breed of filmmakers who greatly benefited from the “film director as star” cult that sprang out of the '70s "auteur movement," Polanski became the darling of both mainstream and avant-garde film by promoting his films as the creative end-result of his singular artistic 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

Terence Bayler as Macduff

John Stride as Ross

Both Polanski and co-collaborator Kenneth Tynan (the noted theater critic and literary manager of the National Theater Company) are terrifically faithful to Shakespeare's original text of The Tragedy of Macbeth, but make no mistake, this IS Polanski’s Macbeth. Good or bad, whether he likes it or not, Roman Polanski's cinematic fingerprints (not to mention copious amounts of blood) are all over this adaptation. Instead of denying it, perhaps it's time for Polanski to embrace it; for it is the infusion of one man's real-life fixations into the fictional story of another that wrests this Macbeth from its theatrical confines and brings it to vibrant, intensely compelling life. 

All the trademark Polanski templates and obsessions are in attendance: the bleak, empty vistas under ominous skies recall Cul-De-Sac; Repulsion's hallucinatory dream sequences are echoed in Macbeth's haunted nightmares; there's the coven of nude, elderly witches that hearken to Rosemary's Baby; and the coiled, masculinity-baiting tensions that exist between Lord and Lady Macbeth are not dissimilar to Knife in the Water's aggrieved married couple.

The Three Witches

Chaos, Darkness, & Conflict

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

Nicholas Selby as King Duncan

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’m not much on Shakespeare. The language is beautiful, I’ll grant you that, but the image I have of Shakespeare on film is one of lugubrious dramas with British actors in love with the sound of their own voices staring off into the distance delivering speeches. In tights, yet.

There are exceptions of course. I'm fond of Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet – (1996), Titus (Andronicus) - (1999), and this, Polanski’s Macbeth—which is my favorite screen adaptation of a Shakespeare work. Macbeth, with its exceedingly high body count and concern with such relatable, base emotions as guilt, envy, and revenge, is a particularly impressive translation to film, not only because Polanski is a perfect ideological match for a tale about the poisonous imprint of ambition (Lord Macbeth and Rosemary’s Baby’s Guy Woodhouse would have a lot to say to one another), but as one of cinema’s great visual storytellers, Polanski’s command of the language of cinema enlivens the story by creating images as poetic and dramatically evocative as the words that accompany them.

As though summoned by Macbeth's own brooding temperament, dark clouds
 gather 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 to the story, making the characters life-size and rendering their faults not ones born of evil natures, but of human weaknesses. The tragedy of Macbeth is that the darkness within him is only unearthed after his fortunes have taken an upturn and his future success ordained. Lord and Lady Macbeth are only truly unhappy with their lot after it has been prophesized that it is to be improved. It’s like the “entitlement” sickness that grips Americans today. People seem to have lost the knack of being happy with what they've got because everywhere you look they're being told that they should want more, that they deserve better…and worse…as citizens in the “land of plenty”, are entitled to it. Ambition for ambition's sake is the madness that grips Macbeth.

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’s conflict of conscience one disturbingly personal and frighteningly real.

PERFORMANCES

In spite of Polanski's well-documented technique of micromanaging the hell out of his actors (which, given the level of performances he gets out of his actors, may well speak to the efficiency of the technique overall), naturalism dominates. His actors appear liberated and unfettered, their performances effortlessly lifting Shakespeare's characters 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 of tapping into the man behind the monster. Finch, whose dark, anxious eyes reveal more about the demons plaguing his 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 be convinced are strengths.

Jon Finch's Macbeth is no speechifying protagonist. He's a man suffering
the disintegration 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 great many of Polanski's films (Cul-De-Sac, The Ghost Writer, Bitter Moon, Knife in the Water, Carnage, and his forthcoming Venus in Fur). Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth is tailor-made for Polanski's usual upending of gender roles in the service of dramatizing the subtle gynophobia that lies behind the uneasy alliance known as sexual relations in his films. 

In Francesca Annis, Polanski happily departs from the usual depiction of Lady Macbeth as natural femininity perverted by the "masculine" pursuit of power, and presents her as something of an intellectual barbarian equal to the physical barbarism displayed by the men. She is no better nor worse than those around her who plot and scheme, but hampered by the medieval limitations placed upon her gender, she operates within the only 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, understated performance as Lady Macbeth, both her fevered desire for the crown and eventual decline into madness are 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, one attribute of Polanski's real-life acquaintance with the naked face of horror has been his inability to see the need to paint evil as anything more than human, and anything less than something that resides within each of us.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Perhaps because I've never been partial to medieval costume dramas full of derring-do, pageantry, and heroic swordplay; I’m crazy about the squalid, gloomy look of Macbeth. Polanski gives us one of Shakespeare’s most unrelentingly bleak and depressing plays and serves it up with extra dollops of rain, murk, and medieval filth. There’s nothing romantic or even remotely cheery about it, and the effect is to ground Shakespeare’s larger-than-life themes of wrongs corrected and order restored into a cynically circular tale where suffering is as ceaseless and bleak as the horizon.

The graceful, romanticized fencing duels of the typical Shakespearean film are replaced by clumsily brutal bouts that highlight the awkwardness of the armor and the sense that what we are witnessing are not heroic battles, but lowly brawls and acts of aggression.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

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

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 case would have still been too fresh in my mind. As Manson's trial had only ended that same year, seeing the film just would have been too painful and depressing an experience. Now, with neither its nudity nor violence the incendiary focus they once were, it's possible to see Macbeth as one of the screen's more successful Shakespeare adaptations. A fact that remains even though time has yet to fully eradicate the cloud of sadness hovering over the violent events it recalls.
Polanski's Macbeth was released the same year as Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Ken Russell's The Devils. As you can imagine, the entertainment world was up in arms over what it perceived at the time to be the "new permissiveness" 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's Baby; a fact easily attested to by Polanski delivering an ingeniously dark thriller that is nonetheless buoyed by a delicate black humor and obvious love of moviemaking. By comparison, Macbeth, as riveting a dramatization as it is, has an unshakable air of sadness about it (the real reason I think the film fared to score well with audiences), and feels at times like an act of hostility directed towards the audience. It's as if—in choosing to make the violence so graphic, gruesome, and in-your-face—Polanski is enacting revenge on those who blamed him and his films for attracting the violence of the Manson crimes.

Critics like Roger Ebert took issue with Macbeth's wanton barbarism and the unfortunate 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 the depiction of savagery (even going so far as to provide a startling view of jeering crowds from the point of view of the already 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 unremitting bleakness and hopelessness.

"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 like telling 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 a concept to which I strongly adhere. And in the case of an artist as gifted as Roman Polanski, such a belief only stands to further enrich the viewing experience. For me, his Macbeth, a film of haunting images both beautiful and horrific, stands as a towering achievement in terms of one artist adapting the work of another (in this instance, a story ofttimes told) and fashioning it into something uniquely, exclusively...and to Polanski's regret...revealingly, his own.

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2013