MACBETH (1971) Axe in the groin! Axe in the groin! The girls laughed, the guys groaned in phantom sympathetic agony. I can't believe we watched this movie IN CLASS in grade 11. I'm sorta of two minds regarding Shakespeare's play. I still have boundless affection for it, since it was my (and that of countless other teenaged boys) eye-opener that Shakespeare wasn't nearly as stuffy or boring as I was fearing it would be. Macbeth has probably done more to get young men into Shakespeare than any other play. And yet, as I get older, while the play's themes and ideas ring with greater resonance, its means and methods start to reek of cheese. Nevertheless, c'mon, it's Macbeth! Roman Polanski's version of Macbeth was made at a gruesomely appropriate time in his life, considering Charles Manson's cult's then-recent (no idea if the film had been completed yet) butchering of his wife and (unborn?) child (never got the details on this; never asked). While many see the extreme violence in this movie as indicative of a reaction to that, Macbeth is a gruesome play (even if the grue is often implied) and any filmed version of it is going to have its share of entrails. At any rate, certain scenes will inevitably have a creepy, saddening resonance here (such as the killing of Macduff's wife and child) that they wouldn't in other productions. Y'all know the story, so I won't repeat it here (and if you don't, you've got some reading to do). Jon Finch plays Macbeth, and does it well...once he goes stark raving evil. He even grows a beard for the changeover, like the evil Spock. One doesn't much get an appreciation of just how right and just a man Macbeth is before his turn to evil, but then, that's straight from the play. Macbeth's manipulative wife is played by Francesca Annis, who here wastes not even a moment in suggesting murder once her husband makes all the facts known to her. And a fine Lady Macbeth she is, retaining a kind of sexy appeal even when we men have figured out that she's just about the last person we'd want for a wife. For that matter, she makes me reconsider whether I want to ever get married at all. To be sure, the violence throughout the film is bloody, graphic, and often gratuitous (like the opening post-battle scene where one poor bastard gets flailed just for trying to get up). The action scenes nicely balance excitement with cringe-inducing pain; not many fancy stage moves here, this is a movie where everybody wants to kill each other. At the climax when Macbeth is impaled on a sword, it's done at a REALLY painful-looking angle...and it still doesn't kill him! Ow, goddammit, ow! Story-wise, it's usually considered poor form to criticize anything based on a Shakespeare play, but I still have problems with the cheesy witches and all of what a professor of mine once semi-affectionately called "ooga-booga stuff". Banquo's ghost is done well, and I liked Macbeth's artsy visions when he visits the witches on the heath for the second time, but these are the things which make the play wear a little thin for me. I guess Polanski writing (with Kenneth Tynan) new scenes to flesh out Macbeth in his pre-evil days would've been a little much. Executive-produced by Hugh Hefner, some people must surely have been led into seeing this by talk of all the full-frontal nudity, but beware - most of it's from ancient women and way-too-young boys. But on the plus side, yes, you do get to see Francesca Annis's bare bottom. And who wouldn't like that? The direction from Polanski is wonderful, not only for steeping everything deeply in the extreme earthiness in which the play should rightfully be mired, but in the appropriate stark hopelessness of the barren Scottish surroundings and pastimes (i.e. drinking 'til you pass out, and bear-beating. You don't want to do those at the same time.). You couldn't have set Braveheart in this Scotland; Mel Gibson would've looked around, got depressed, and moved to Ireland (where, of course, Braveheart was filmed). The only thing I would've changed is how the soliloquies are handled; these things have a power when spoken that just cannot be duplicated by voiced-over thoughts. Macbeth does not strike me as one of the more "filmable" Shakespeare plays, since its supernatural elements so easily go over into cheese (and indeed, even Polanski can't pull it off indefinitely). The true horror of this play isn't from the blood or the ooga-booga stuff, but from the shattering understanding that actions always have consequences, and doom comes to all men, no matter how charmed their lives - Polanski chose to play that down a little in favor of the violence, but the theme comes through loud and clear. At any rate, this is certainly the most wild n' wooly (in a good way) version you'll find. The worst, incidentally, is called Men Of Respect and it's hilariously bad, transposing the film's setting to modern gangland life as was trendy for people filming Shakespeare at the time. I always thought this might make a fun black comedy set in the corporate world, where Spot was the name of Duncan's dog, who sees the murder, and...yeah, it's a lousy pun, but even Shakespeare was certainly not above lousy puns. (looked like Kenneth Branagh was gonna do it, too...for a while) Not everything works, and nobody's EVER gonna top Kurosawa's "Birnham Wood comes to Dunsinane" scene in Throne Of Blood, but Polanski's Macbeth is one of my favorite filmed versions of Shakespeare. It's raw, and messy, and nasty, and why the hell would you want a version of Macbeth to be any other way? Check it out - even if you don't like it, you still get to see a guy get an axe in the groin. BACK TO THE M's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE