Word: macbeth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...MACBETH...
Shakespeare's Thane is a man possessed by his own craving for power. He is destroyed by the evil within himself, not, as Polanski would have it, by witchly auguries of doom. Polanski is most at home dealing with black magic, and Macbeth's second meeting with the witches ("Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble . . .") is expanded into a veritable convention, with dozens of naked, withered old crones cackling and drooling all over themselves. It looks like a remnant of Rosemary's Baby. Polanski's affection for the supernatural is so unrestrained that many of the movie...
Polanski takes occasional excursions into outright fantasy, as when Macbeth has a feverish dream following his second meeting with the witches. But the scene is visually uninspired and mechanically clumsy. Faces and images swirl up out of the hags' cauldron, spin about, dissolve, disappear, as if in some hybrid of hallucinogenic nightmare and the kind of antique special effects that looked awkward over 25 years ago in Hitchcock's Spellbound...
Francesca Annis makes an interestingly brittle Lady Macbeth, but Jon Finch's Macbeth seems to be consumed by tuberculosis. In the climactic battle with Duncan, Finch looks as if he was having some trouble hefting his broadsword. But the supporting cast (Martin Shaw, Terence Bayler, John Stride) is fiery, and Polanski manages most of the violent confrontations with brio...
...comedies and musicals. Nowadays, such things appear mainly in the continuing fad for nostalgia, as exemplified by Ken Russell's new version of The Boyfriend. For the rest, a striking number of film producers arc celebrating Christmas with a new wave of violence and bloodshed. Among the entries: Macbeth, Roman Polanski's first film since Rosemary's Baby; Dirty Harry, a tough police melodrama starring Clint Eastwood; and, once again, Sean Cannery as James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever. Here is a look at three of the season's most interesting films-and their directors...