Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  The dissolve to Lady Macbeth reading the letter brings us a first touch of anachronism – exactly as Welles requested (apparently, as Cocteau so wittily noted, on the point of making a phone call). She lies on her bearskin bedspread, and her first soliloquy is heard in voice-over, accompanied by Ibert’s wistful, seductively skirling strings, as she voluptuously, tremulously enjoins the spirits to unsex her, gazing out into the encircling mist. It is a striking realisation of the scene. Though Jeanette Nolan is unimposing physically, she conveys an intense inner life, revealed less as a terrifying ruthlessness, than as a rather complicated sexuality.

  It is when she first appears that the vexed question of the Scottish accent forces itself to the forefront. Miss Nolan was a skilled mimic and, technically speaking, the accent, consonant for consonant, vowel for vowel, is more or less accurate (more so than that of many in the cast – Dan O’Herlihy lapsing frequently into Irish, as sometimes Welles himself does). What she is unable to do is to transcend the accent so that it is a natural, breathing instrument of her thoughts and feelings. The Olivier film, with which Macbeth was so unfavourably compared in this regard, is not flawless: the accents – even Olivier’s – have a slightly clipped, cut-glass character that sets them in their own period. But in Hamlet the actors are, of course, absolutely at ease with what they are saying, and able to play effortlessly with each other. Welles’s actors are in a constant double struggle, with the accent and with the demands of synchronisation: the result is stiff and inexpressive. It is not entirely surprising that the most favourable responses to the film have been from non-anglophone countries: if the film were in Latvian or Swahili, it would be much more enjoyable. Welles’s core problem is that he is dealing with a text that – almost by definition – lives in its language. Moreover, in this particular play (more than many others of Shakespeare), the level of poetic inspiration in the writing of the central character is integral to an understanding of the man. It is one of the commonplaces of dramatic criticism that Macbeth is a great poet – is, to some extent, undone by the power of his imagination, which comes between him and his capacity to act sufficiently ruthlessly in pursuit of his ambition. A great amount of his text is, inevitably, cut; but in addition Welles, as has been observed before, lacks a poetic sensibility, excelling instead in rhetoric – making a fine sound for the sake of effect, rather than inhabiting the metaphorical landscape of the verse. His sense of music is oratorical rather than personal, and tends to the hypnotic (and sometimes, frankly, soporific) rather than the mercurially responsive.

  Interestingly, Welles’s great rival in putting Shakespeare on film, Laurence Olivier, was also lacking in the sort of instinctive poetic sensibility possessed by a Gielgud or an Irene Worth, but he had made of his voice such an extraordinarily flexible instrument that he was able to orchestrate the language to constantly arresting effect; his sharp response to imagery would lead him to draw attention unexpectedly to subordinate phrases, suddenly illuminating a passage unforgettably (if sometimes irrelevantly). His goal was immediacy of comprehension; he always sought to root his work in the perceived world. Ideas scarcely engaged him at all. Welles’s approach to verse-speaking, and indeed to acting in classical plays in general, was very different. He was in some ways a throwback. Michael Anderegg in his masterly study Orson Welles: Shakespeare and Popular Culture draws attention to a tradition of ‘wildness’ in nineteenth-century Shakespearean performers, associating Welles with this tradition. Certainly, he consciously dissociates himself from the contemporary tradition of Shakespearean acting, sometimes hurling himself at a scene with huge energy and indeed wildness, although this never affects his performance of the text, which hurtles on – where formerly it had rolled on – with perfect fluency, but without real individuation. He finds a cadence, quick or slow, and he sticks to it, and the result is sometimes impressive, but very often simply monotonous. Physically, he handles himself like a silent-movie actor (or an opera singer), putting enormous emphasis on his eyes; as director, he uses his own face – often filling the frame with it – as kind of emotional landscape; the effect is static: a painting, as it were, of feeling, which is often impressive in the photographic stills deriving from the shoot, but dramatically inert in the film itself. It is impossible to separate the movie from its leading actor, because he has naturally thrust himself to the forefront of the frame, but his performance is not, needless to say, the whole story: the physical realisation of the action and the overall visual language are quite strikingly separate from it. Welles the metteur-en-scène, and indeed Welles the director of other actors, is a very different creature from Welles the actor. The central paradox of his film of Macbeth is that he deploys a radical shooting style to film a conventional and generally rather limited performance of the piece.

  In terms of staging and shooting, he is frequently brilliant, particularly considering the constraints of budget and time. The frankly painted image of the Macbeths’ castle is pure fairy tale, at the same time – whether intentionally or not – irresistibly recalling the distant view of Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu. The arrival of Duncan at the Macbeths’ dank and dismal fortress is an especially stunning sequence, with Kodo drummers thundering, their shadows dancing over the walls, as the army, with flickering torches and Celtic crosses, processes into the dank and gloomy courtyard; unseen pigs squeal frantically – in preparation, presumably, for a coming banquet. Ibert provides a suitably impressive, swaggering, swelling march. The royal entourage having arrived, the Macbeths withdraw to an area somewhere between a rock and a hard place, to which the cyclorama with its projected but static clouds lends a highly unreal back-ground; during the course of the film, much more will be seen of this essentially theatrical feature. When they rejoin the crowd, which is praying and singing hymns, Lady Macbeth whispers her plot into her husband’s ear, his haunted face registering the baffled doom that he clearly lives with all the time, as if the voice were coming, not from his wife, but from inside his head. In a scene that has no equivalent in Shakespeare’s play, the Holy Father then calls on the assembled company to renounce Satan; the subsequent scene with Duncan (Erskine Sanford, dressed up as Santa Claus or an elderly crofter who has wandered into the castle) is impossibly stilted, and the troops wander off in desultory fashion. The celebrated lines referring to the castle in Inverness having a pleasant seat, the air sweetly and gently recommending itself unto their gentle senses, are very wisely cut, though Shakespeare’s martlet still makes an appearance (in the score, too); for a while after Duncan retires to sleep, the film seems to lose power. Welles makes little of the deliberately riddling nature of ‘If ’twere done when ’tis done, ’twere best ’twere done quickly’; Nolan seems suddenly very domestic; the courtyard in all its papier-mâchè vastness has the feeling of a stage set, and a rather empty one.

  Left alone, Macbeth hallucinates a dagger, which in his mind’s eye merges with the witches’ voodoo doll of himself, slicing its head off; the subsequent scene of the murder is well enough played, with Welles slumped in disbelieving horror at what he has done. The hammering at the gates duly electrifies him and he speeds away. The Porter’s sexually quibbling speech is of course cut; it is Banquo at the door arriving with his son Fleance (jerry Farber) – the young actor gives real urgency and lucidity to his speech, something of a lesson to his elders. The scene of the discovery of the murder using the extreme height of the castle set is urgently done, extensive use in particular being made of the great sweep of the staircase (as, again, in Olivier’s film of Hamlet, though Welles favours more vertiginous angles than the English director); the uproar is excitingly managed, the universal suspicion of Macbeth – every eye narrowed as he blusters unconvincingly – belonging again to the fairy-tale world of expression, with a nod in the direction of the court of Ivan the Terrible. The sudden cut to the Weird Sisters’ cauldron as they crown their clay doll is another typically bold and disturbing image, significantly a realisation of an incident not in the text – indeed, without
text – thrillingly dissolving into Macbeth’s distorted face, crowned with what came to be known as his Statue of Liberty crown, as he gazes balefully into a metal mirror.

  Macbeth sets off for what is presumably his coronation banquet, past line after line of soldiers holding their high flags aloft, moving somewhat uncertainly down the staircases: he is clearly drunk. Ibert underpins this with a Tubby the Tuba march, pompous, ludicrous. Welles’s Absurdist view of the reign of King Macbeth is unmistakably spelt out when he finally ascends his throne, which is impossibly high, separating him from his subjects by a wide gap, but devoid of majesty or power. He – even he – simply looks and feels small and lonely in it. Welles’s essentially Expressionist approach (imbibed as a boy from theatre magazines excitedly reporting developments in the German and the Soviet theatre, and more formatively still impressed on him by Hilton Edwards at the Gate Theatre in Dublin when he first worked on the professional stage at the age of sixteen) leads him constantly to externalise the internal: subtext and the gradual revelation of character or situation are alien to his method. Everything must be stated; nightmare is the essential framework, wherein fears and longings are played out in magnified form. In this context, Welles’s use of space and of his camera (and it is to be presumed that John L. Russell was his obedient servant) constantly seeks to convey Macbeth’s disturbed inner life. When the play itself cannot follow him there, he is often content to shoot very simply and conventionally.

  One of the most remarkable sequences in the film starts with Macbeth’s briefing of the murderers (Brainerd Duffield and Bill Alland – Thompson from Citizen Kane – covering themselves in professional disgrace, vocally, physically, emotionally) in which Welles, looming above them in his high-chair/throne, allows himself one of his few human touches in the role, smiling seductively like the young Kane to persuade them to their murderous task. This leads straight on to his encounter with Lady Macbeth (‘Be innocent of the deed’) and his sudden plunge into guilt and an awareness of the absurdity of it all, finally leading to a dissolve into mist, revealing the murderers magically perched in a fairy-tale tree, their coats of animal hide seeming to metamorphose them into forest creatures: pure Brothers Grimm. The score’s urgent, tragic cellos over muted strings evoke the pity and terror of what is to follow in a sequence of what might be termed pure cinema: picture and sound create an image that is both unforgettably haunting and pregnant with dramatic tension. The sharp plunge back into horror after the murderers reveal to Macbeth that Banquo is dead, but that Fleance has escaped (in the fullness of time to breed a line of kings), drives him – roaring and raging like a bull – into the nightmarish banquet, but not before he has, in a striking moment, washed his hands in the waterfall that rather strangely runs down the inside walls of the castle. Welles, playing drunk for rather more than the text’s hints to that effect might suggest, shows Macbeth stupefied as he sees sitting round his table, first Banquo and then (an effective innovation of Welles’s) Duncan. He throws the table over as the guests look appropriately mortified. The sequence is conceived almost balletically, the full horror of the appearance of the undead curiously muted. Macbeth’s subsequent speech to Lady Macbeth – ‘It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood’ – is, however, filled with that atmosphere that Welles told Peter Bogdanovich makes doing the play so oppressive! ‘Really – it’s terrifying – stays with you all day … so horrendous and awful that it’s easy to see how the old superstition [about the play’s unlucky nature] lives on.’

  Revolted by what he has done, Macbeth strides off into a space that is nowhere at all, smoke clinging to the ground, a storm raging, shadows playing over what is very clearly a cyclorama. Above the roar, in voice-over, the witches give him their deceptive reassuring prediction that only when ‘great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill/Shall come against him’ will he be vanquished. As the camera swoops in, the light focuses down to a single spot on Macbeth’s tortured face, and then there is a blackout. Now this is pure theatre, from beginning to end. On stage it would be conventional, but on film it is radical, pure expression, referring to no observable reality. Some of Welles’s most drastic compressions of the text and action follow: extraordinarily, Lady Macbeth is present at the beginning of the scene of the murder of Lady Macduff and her children, as is the Holy Father, who pokes his head through the window to offer some dubious comfort. Macduff’s son is played by Welles’s daughter Christopher, giving a bright if not especially talented performance, and she hurls herself at her father with some passion when Macbeth (in a radical departure from the play) arrives to despatch the whole family personally. This direct involvement of both of the Macbeths in one of the most savage of all Shakespearean murder scenes ensures that any vestige of sympathy for them that one might have harboured is wiped out, making of Macbeth an unredeemed hell-hound (as Macduff later describes him). Its effectiveness is undeniable, a steep descent into the abyss.

  The subsequent scene – what is left of the so-called England scene, in which the self-exiled Malcolm takes the lead against the usurping tyrant – is wretchedly acted, shot and conceived. Roddy McDowall as Malcolm is pallid and bleating, and though Edgar Barrier’s Macduff is strong and soldierly enough, he is unable to rise to Shakespeare’s terrible demands of the actor, hearing that his wife and children have been slaughtered (‘All my pretty ones?/Did you say all? – Oh hell-kite! – All?/What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam,/At one fell swoop?’). The scene is also burdened with the defection of the Holy Father – whom Alan Napier plays with gravelly solemnity, but who is unable in the end to do anything but hover about in his plaits looking Hugely Significant – and with an odd Falstaffian figure who stands amiably by, his occasional utterances quite audibly dubbed by Welles. The gathering of the troops under Malcolm and Macduff is a more vital affair, their forest of banners topped with Celtic crosses making a striking effect, though McDowall remains feeble at their head. This liberation army makes its way across a land oddly reminiscent of Arizona with its parched plains, its ravines and gulches; no doubt many a posse of Republic extras had covered the same terrain.

  In the castle, Macbeth’s endgame has begun. He himself is found in a large empty courtyard in his shirt sleeves, looking curiously boyish and vulnerable despite his deep-sunken kohl-rimmed eyes. He is attended by a couple of lords and by Seyton (rather strangely, and one can only hope fortuitously, pronounced Satan by Welles), played – as we have seen – by Welles’s chauffeur, Shorty Chirello, who, when he is not scuttling about the castle on errands, stands quizzically in the frame like a Domenichino dwarf, just looking; it is an exotic touch, which, though it could conceivably be justified historically, brings to the proceedings a Renaissance colour that seems quite alien to Macbeth’s world. After dismissing the cream-fac’d loon, Macbeth, calling for his armour, moves in a single remarkably free shot from his courtyard through to Lady Macbeth’s bedroom, where she is lying wide-eyed and staring on her bed; Macbeth and the doctor discuss her condition over her prone form, giving grim vividness, to Macbeth’s profound questions about mental illness (‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,/Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow’?). The rebel army has meanwhile reached Birnam Wood, an unexpectedly beautiful vision of leafy trees rising out of the mist; Malcolm enjoins his men to cut them down, but before we see them do so, Welles interpolates Lady Macbeth’s great sleep-walking scene. Nolan plays this with great range – it was, as we have seen, the one scene where she was permitted to speak without use of pre-recorded sound; the result is noticeably freer than the rest of her performance. She actually sings some of the lines as she moves across the battlements, ending up in her husband’s arms; she recoils. ‘Needless to say,’ Nolan recalled, ‘I wasn’t delighted when he decided to put himself as Macbeth into the sleep-walking scene, but he was the director, it was his version of the play.’ In fact, his attempt to embrace her, in the context of the rest of the film, is a powerful image of his inability to control the outcome of his actions;
an even more audacious extension of this idea is his decision to show Lady Macbeth’s death – merely reported in the play, and presumed to be the outcome of her distemper – as a suicide leap from the castle walls. Her body’s twirling descent to the gorge is an archetypally dream-like moment which, sandwiched as it is between the impressionistic, almost surrealistic advance of Birnam Wood, filmed in a slight haze, and the shifting clouds over which Welles speaks the lines ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’, shifts the film decisively into a non-realistic idiom. The outer becomes inner. As it happens, Welles disappointingly chooses to intone Macbeth’s most famous speech in his Great Verse throb, courting sentimentality, laminating the stark phrases with baritonal plushness, nobly intoning them but never touching their unsparing confrontation of life’s terrible truths.

  The last phase of the story is hectically enacted, a fine montage of medieval castle-storming techniques (which includes the famous ‘Lunch!’ shot). Macbeth’s first action is to spear the Holy Father through the heart, an event that carries less weight than it seems to demand. Welles is filmed over the shoulder facing the massing troops below, while Ibert sounds high-pitched fanfares; Macduff appears, heavily backlit, in silhouette, and when he tells Macbeth that he was untimely ripp’d from out his mother’s womb, the phrase is echoed, high-pitched, on the soundtrack by the Weird Sisters. Macbeth is mocked on all sides. The end comes swiftly: as Macduff’s sword slices off his head, so is the clay doll decapitated. The banners and torches of the victorious rebels proclaim their triumph. In a fine closing sequence, the mysterious Xanadu-like castle, so frankly painted and unreal, is established; then, in a billow of cloud, we see the outline of the Weird Sisters, and one of them says – so suddenly that it is almost over before we have heard it – ‘The charm’s wound up’, and the story is at an end – until, Welles implies, the next time.