Word: macbeths
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...Women's liberation-or for that matter, the most unliberated drudge in Schenectady, N.Y.-would certainly want to protest the TV-commercial image of American women as a sorority of dirt-crazed psychotics sniffing one another's laundry and kitchens ("Housitosis!") and holystoning the linoleum like Lady Macbeth. The Women's Christian Temperance Union might have some words about beer and wine ads. Eventually, perhaps, horse lovers might demand time to talk about dog foods. It is tempting to think that before long the great debate of commercials would expand to fill more and more air time...
...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...