Word: macbeth
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...would expect that a Macbeth produced by Playboy Enterprises, adapted by Kenneth Tynan, and directed by Roman Polanski would scale heights of the bizarre. And that, in fact, is what Playboy would like us to believe it does. Throughout the press campaign the unconventionality of the film has been trumpeted, the radicalism of its interpretation celebrated. It is billed as "the most original treatment of the drama since the reign of James...
...some innovation in the film and some shock value. But the innovation is rather conventional (addition and deletion of scenes, effects of light and color, and so on), and the shock is neither scandalous nor exploitative. Certainly in the context of the past year, the violence in this Macbeth is hardly noteworthy. It is not that the film is without its visual extremism. One simply would have expected more from Polanski, Tynan, and Hefner, and one is thankful for less...
...THOUGH, it is as if Tynan and Polanski are ashamed of their conventionalism, and almost periodically there is an effort to remind us that what we are watching is, as promised, something strange and new. So the Thane of Cawdor's hanging is presented in full view, and Lady Macbeth sleepwalks in the nude. And where Shakespeare chose to let Macbeth die discreetly off stage, Polanski decapitates him in the middle of the wide screen and follows the head, rolling down steps...
...most part the drift into flamboyance is forgivable. In one scene in particular--Macbeth's second meeting with the witches--the visual overstatement undoubtedly enhances the text. Polanski fills a dank, green-smoked cavern with a bevy of the oldest, ugliest, cacklingest witches imaginable, and the grotesquerie, the outlandishness, is just in line with Shakespearean exuberance...
...least two instances the impulse to innovation results in crucial missteps. The first is in the casting. Flouting the traditional portrayal of Macbeth and his Lady as middle-aged figures, Polanski and Tynan chose Jon Finch, 29, and Francesca Annis, 26--both attractive, young and vital--for the leading roles. Their youth, if not unprecedented, is at least unfortunate. Tynan's argument has been that youth underscores the connection between murder and sexuality. But as Mary McCarthy pointed out in an essay several years ago, Macbeth's distinctive personal quality is analogous to the modern, middle-class, literal-minded, church...