Watch Macbeth For Free

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Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Orson Welles adapts the iconic William Shakespeare play about a prophecy from three witches that Macbeth will become the King of Scotland. Orson Welles stars as Macbeth. There are experienced stage and film actors. Sometimes they give overwrought stage performances. Then there are the over-pronounced r's. The varying levels of fake Scottish accents are distracting with the Shakespearian script. It comes and it goes depending on the time and the person.As for the Shakespearian script, there are a few differences and not just the usual subtractions. Welles added a Christian Holy Man to accentuate the conflict with the old religion. The sets are all interior sound stages. The costumes are a hodgepodge of wardrobe leftovers. Some are fine. Some are head-scratching like a weird sci-fi metal-bubbles shirt for Macbeth or the tridents and blank triangle shields for the soldiers. Through it all, Welles is doing intriguing camera shots and other stage craft to stretch the traditional play.

In the time of William Shakespeare's time there were just two kinds of stories. If something bad happened it was a drama. IF not is was a comedy. But if this story was made now of the very first time as a Hollywood movie. There is enough about evil witches and murder that it would have been grouped as a horror story. It is a horror story. It is one of the best horror stories ever. It is very scary. This is one of the scariest movies ever. It has a great story line. It also has great acting. This is one of O.r.s.o.n Welles best not Citizen Kane. That has got be one of his worst. This is a great movie. This movie is must see. This is better then Richard III.

Macbeth (1948) was directed by Orson Welles and stars Welles himself as Macbeth, and Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth. The immensely talented Welles was famous for thinking up ambitious projects that he could not fund. Macbeth fell into that category.With inadequate funding, Welles was forced to patch together his cast, his props, and his location. Although most of the important scenes of the play take place in a castle, Welles didn't have a castle. His set was an amorphous rock formation, with steps that apparently led nowhere.I saw this movie as part of an honors seminar (Shakespeare in Film) that I'm auditing. The students were scornful about the movie. They got tired of the obvious Christian (good) Pagan (bad) symbolism. They got tired of Macbeth lurching around the set as if he were drunk. (Could he have been drunk, or did he want us to think Macbeth was drunk?) They got tired of a new character that Welles introduced--the Holy Father.Welles was a great actor, and his interpretation of Macbeth as a glowering medieval lord covered in sweat is as valid as other interpretations. Jeanette Nolan was not a great Lady Macbeth, but she was creditable enough.What ruined the movie for me was the lower-than-low budget appearance. Sometimes, you just can't fake it with papier mâché and shadows. For example, in one of the most dramatic scenes in world theater, Lady Macbeth comes sleepwalking into a hall and continues to wash her hands. (That's where "Out, out, damned spot" comes from.)In this version, Lady Macbeth, her maid, and the doctor seem to be on a platform of rock, with no roof. Shakespeare meant this to be a tight, intimate, indoor scene. It loses its effectiveness in this setting.We saw this film on the small screen. It might work a little better in a theater, but it works well enough on DVD. This is a flawed, unsatisfying film, but it's not without its merits. Welles is a genius. Even a lesser movie by a genius has some great moments in it. My suggestion--watch it and decide for yourself.

After Laurence Olivier's epic production of Henry V in 1944, movie versions of Shakespeare plays suddenly became viable again after a dwindling of interest in the 30s. And this being the era of film noir, the Shakespeare pictures that appeared in the late 40s and 50s were almost all of the tragedies. Olivier's Hamlet was the big Oscar-winner of 1948, but just preceding it was Orson Welles's take on the overwhelmingly bleak MacBeth.This was the time in which Welles was having his infamous "troubles" with studios that would eventually make him a cause célèbre. Unable to get work with the majors MacBeth finds him working for Republic, a tiny studio yet one that produced some good stuff occasionally. While most Shakespeare adaptations from this period tried to open the plays out a bit, the low budget on offer here actually gives MacBeth a very stagey look. The castle where most of the action takes place is just a sparse couple of walls, a staircase and some scattered props, very much like a stage "building". This actually serves the play fairly well. Low-key lighting and billowing mist hide the gaps in the set and the fact that Welles only had a handful of extras for the "crowd" scenes, but they also give it that stark and stifling atmosphere that MacBeth needs.And that is not to say that this version of MacBeth is not cinematic. Welles's style as a director is, as always, one of style over substance. He is great at visual tricks and aesthetic shots, but didn't really understand the nuances of cinematic expression. But MacBeth is a Shakespeare play which can stand a bit of style over substance. It's not Shakespeare's best story, but it is a very poetic piece, with elements of myth and the supernatural. Welles's quick cuts, roving camera and baroque shot composition actually suit the material, creating some beautifully haunting and rhythmic sequences. The scene of MacDonwald's execution is a fine example, a hypnotic montage of grim faces, MacBeth running to embrace his wife before a gallows, and the drums constantly beating out an eerie tension. Later there is also the dynamic battle sequence, given impact with some rapidly-edited dolly-in shots.Now let's look at Welles the performer. His acting is not exactly world-class, but he really gets into the swing of it. I think more than any other role he played, you can actually forget that it's Welles and just see the character. And he certainly makes a better Scot than he did an Irishman in The Lady from Shanghai. His Lady MacBeth, Jeanette Nolan, was originally a radio actress and unsurprisingly her best asset here is her voice, at times coarse, at others sibilant, every consonant crystal clear, and absolutely full of the character. Despite her lack of experience she seems able to do the visual, physical acting as well. The rest of the cast are uniformly decent – theatrical yes, but never excessively hammy. No-one is trying to steal the scene here.The end result is probably the best film adaptation of MacBeth. It's also an adequate vehicle for Orson Welles's overtly stylised directorial style. The feel of a horror-tinged folk tale is all about this one, and while it doesn't breathe the same life into the bard that Olivier could manage (both as an actor and a director), it is a worthy and enjoyable effort.