Macbeth
1961: Paul Almond

A rather compressed black and white version of the play (85 minutes) starring Sean Connery in the title role. Ultimately, I’d classify this as Shakespeare Lite: it is a made-for-television condensation when there was an interest in bringing High Culture to the small screen, but also assuming that a general audience ought not be over-burdened with difficult thoughts or art of much complexity. The scenes are slashed mercilessly, and in so short a play, the cost is all the more apparent. Perhaps indicative is the fact that the first scene brings us Macbeth and Banquo — sliding right past the anticipatory buildup of the character that the actual play provides. Almost all the nuance of the characters is flattened to a monochromatic sameness.

The play feels as if it had been shot on a sound stage, with atmospheric fog and the wind sounds added to make it seem like a location shoot. The sets are primitive and blockish, and devoid of any kind of detail, but they are not, to my way of thinking, nearly as much of an obstruction as the more recent time-shifted productions that followed in the wake of Trevor Nunn’s once experimental versions that have become the almost compulsory orthodoxy of Shakespeare productions. The costumes are very broadly generalized, and rather silly with their projecting shoulder pieces. The film quality (at least what remains now) is rather blurry.

With these limited resources, the actors do a relatively good job. Connery himself portrays a noble Macbeth of some considerable stature in more than a physical sense. If one doesn’t begin with a reasonably powerful Macbeth, his transformation and fall from grace and morality becomes more or less insignificant. Zoe Caldwell’s Lady Macbeth is neither very engaging nor particularly frightening; then again, she’s given a savagely pruned script to work with. The porter scene is also cut, but what remains is effective, though it’s been cleaned up from its somewhat bawdy original form and largely stripped of its interpretive role. Some of the other secondary characters declaim their lines with mellifluous sonority, but yet don’t entirely seem to know what they mean. All in all, the film is definitely worth seeing if one is a completist, but not a standout in any respect.

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