Orson Welles's Macbeth (1948)

These are people who have more life in them than any human being ever had.  But you can't simply dress up and be them, you have to make a world for them.
---Orson Welles on Shakespeare's characters.

For all the problems of Welles's Shakespeare films one thing he gets right are the worlds he creates for Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952), and Chimes at Midnight (1966).   These films suffer from low budgets and, surprisingly, often have compromised soundtracks. In the case of Macbeth Welles recorded the sound in advance to save money, using hit-or-miss Scottish accents.  The film was financed by Republic Pictures --best known for B Westerns --in order to enhance their prestige.  But after its initial release it was cut by twenty minutes and a new soundtrack was recorded, jettisoning the accents.  Now Olive Pictures has restored the cuts and the original sound recording and we can enjoy Welles's film in all its passionate beauty.

Welles's Macbeth looks very much like a horror film in the manner of Val Lewton, a low-budget producer in the forties who produced films of fatalism and psychological fear, such as the beautiful I Walked With a Zombie (1944), at RKO, where Citizen Kane and King Kong were both made.  Welles uses John Russell as his cinematographer and the stabbing of Banquo in Macbeth is similar to the stabbing of Detective Arbogast in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), where Russell was also director of photography.  Russell and Welles do an impressive job of turning sets for Westerns into Macbeth's dark and violent world of the 11th century.

Welles did a all-black version of Macbeth in the theatre in 1936 and one can certainly see a relationship between Macbeth and Charles Foster Kane, both of whom seek power at the cost of everything and everybody else in their lives.  Both men look in a broken mirror that shows how distorted things have become with their lives and loves.  I have seen few films or theatrical performances of Shakespeare that bring his characters and their environment as alive as Welles does in Macbeth.