Word: macbeths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Macbeth, from Shakespeare with Polanski's assistance. Cinema Ken more Square. 644 Beacon St., daily...
...SECOND miscalculation is subtler but perhaps more revealing. Throughout the film Polanski has recourse to a separation of sound and image as stylistic device. Again and again, Macbeth is present on screen, silent and pensive, while the appropriate speech is read over the sound track. The result is the creation of a melancholy and self-conscious character, and with this one peculiar mannerism, Polanski manages to turn his Macbeth from unthinking warrior into a brooding, almost Hamlet-like figure...
...between such attempts at stylistic experiments that the film succeeds most. Macbeth is a horror story, sordidly realistic, brutal and bloody, and here the Polanski of the cinema of cruelty is completely at home. The murder of Banquo and the appearance of his bloodied ghost at the supper table, the discovery of the slaughtered Duncan, the madness of of Lady Macbeth, and Macbeth's final battle with Macduff--in all these scenes Polanski approaches a Shakespearean enjoyment in the sheer physical stuff of tragedy...
THERE IS A second side of Polanski's conception, though: Macbeth as fairy tale, one man's dream of kingdom fulfilled and the most genuine achievement of the film may be Polanski's respect for the fantastic. As gruesomely explicit as are the scenes of murder and madness, a feeling for the benign possibilities of the supernatural lies always in the background. This is certainly most due to the color photography which consistently catches the pastoral qualities of the countryside (a far cry from the studied bleakness of the landscape in Peter Brook's recent King Lear). The clean, brilliant...
...Tynan-Polanski Macbeth is hardly definitive, and it may, in fact, point more to the hazards of adaptation than to the rewards. If never satisfying as a whole there are individual shots in the film, even entire sequences, where Shakespeare, Polanski and Tynan are of one mind, and then it all comes right for a moment...