For Orson Welles, Shakespeare was the touchstone. Welles wasalready mounting ambitious Shakespeare productions in high school; he was stilla teenager when he received his first professional roles in Hamlet and Romeoand Juliet. He gained attention for directing an all-black version of Macbeth,transposed from medieval Scotland to 19th century Haiti. And when hecame to Hollywood and changed the course of filmmaking with Citizen Kane,wasn’t Charles Foster Kane a tragic Shakespearean monarch for the mass mediaage?
As a film director, Welles kept returning to his favoriteliterary source. His first Shakespeare movie, Macbeth (1948), has been releasedon Blu-ray and DVD in a two-disc set that also contains the edited 1950 versionplus informative bonus material. Branded as a mad pariah by the Hollywoodindustry by the time he made Macbeth, Welles was reduced to working forsecond-tier Republic Studio, which kept him on a budget tighter than a cat’sleash. Welles was never the spendthrift of legend and found ways to mountMacbeth despite lack of money. Commissioned to stage the play for the UtahCentennial, Welles brought a well-rehearsed cast of thespians back to Hollywoodfrom Salt Lake City and shot Macbeth on an often half-empty soundstage that tolater generations would resemble the low-budget alien settings from “StarTrek.”
Welles cast himself as a guilty-looking Macbeth, egged on bythe power-mad Lady Macbeth to regicide, tyranny and an embrace of the dark side.He had easy command over the Bard’s quicksilver language and understood thetext well enough to make abridgments and additions that served the cinematicmedium.
Bonus material includes the short movie “We Work Again,” aNew Deal newsreel directed toward African Americans and incorporating the onlysurviving footage from Welles’ all-black Macbeth; and an interview withdirector-historian Peter Bogdanovich, who describes Welles as formidable,disarming, scary and irascible. Bogdanovich reminds us that Welles, in lateryears plagued by an inability to move projects to the finish line, completedMacbeth in just 23 days.
