Orson Welles | 103 mins | TV | 4:3 | USA / English | PG
Twelve years on from his innovative, acclaimed, career-bolstering ‘Voodoo Macbeth’, and with the infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast and films like Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and The Lady from Shanghai now under his belt, Orson Welles tried to interest Hollywood in something they’d only attempted a handful of times since the advent of talkies: a Shakespeare adaptation.
“Tried to interest” and “attempted” are not inapt phrases here. After failing to elicit interest in an adaptation of Othello, Welles switched to pitching the ever-popular Macbeth as “a perfect cross between Wuthering Heights and Bride of Frankenstein,” interesting Republic Pictures because of their desire to move from producing low-budget Westerns to being a prestige studio. The end result was Welles had to shoot his film in just 23 days for only $700,000. The end result was a movie that struggled against Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, released the same year, and for which poor critical reception led to nearly 20 minutes of cuts and the remainder being dubbed to change the actors’ accents.
Restored in 1980, the original version is a compromised but interesting adaptation. Welles has chopped and changed the play, cutting scenes, transposing others, assigning speeches to different characters, even creating new ones. This array of modifications scandalised critics at the time, though nowadays it’s much more common for film (and stage) versions of Shakespeare to mess around with the text as needed, usually to make the works a manageable length. Macbeth is one of the more sensibly-sized plays, however, though I suppose this is the legacy of Welles’ 23-day schedule.
The low budget and quick schedule affect the film across the board, for good and ill. There’s much dramatic staging, with grand sets and doom-laden lighting. The shadow-drenched cinematography may well be a result of the cheap production, but the resulting effect is marvellous. Indeed, all the camerawork is great. There are some striking long takes, including the majority of the night of the murder occurring in one long unbroken shot. The costumes, on the other hand, look like a ragtag bunch of Past Clothing from the studio’s store… which is because they essentially were.
Welles chose to have the cast speak with Scottish accents, which unfortunately end up a bit squiffy. I suppose it’s an attempt at authenticity at least, and if you don’t allow them to bother you then they won’t bother you. I certainly wound up not noticing them after only a few minutes. In spite of that, many of the performances are quite strong. Of their era — they can be a little stagey and histrionic, lacking the subtlety we might expect today — but good. The dialogue was pre-recorded for the sake of the schedule, with the actors miming their lines on set. Seems like a ridiculous idea, and no doubt had an effect on performances, but I only noticed it once in the entire production.
Much of the score (by Jacques Ibert, after Welles failed to secure Bernard Herrmann for contractual reasons) is appropriately atmospheric, but at one point it goes all Comedy. 
Macbeth himself is hardly in possession of all his faculties at that point, acting like a drunkard; but rather than make the sequence appropriately sinister (it’s in this state that he orders the execution of Banquo and Fleance, for example), it plays up the silliness, which is a shame.
For a variety of reasons, stemming from both the production situation and Welles’ creative choices, this is a flawed film. That said, its successes outweigh its problems to create a memorable adaptation that is justly regarded as one of the more significant films in Welles’ oeuvre.
A black and white Swedish movie in which a knight ponders the existence of God while playing chess with Death? Yep, here we have the stereotype of arthouse cinema. Let’s be honest, it lives up to most of those expectations.
On the more easily-appreciable side, it’s beautifully shot by Gunnar Fischer. It had to be made quickly, on a tight budget, and for that reason Bergman found it imperfect and rough in places. This may be true, but regardless, there are numerous striking compositions, and even more occasions where the rich black-and-white photography looks stick-it-on-your-wall gorgeous. I only watched it on Tartan’s old DVD and, even with mixed feelings about the film itself, I’m sorely tempted to pick up one of the Blu-rays.
If you were looking for the archetype of an epic movie, Lawrence of Arabia would be a strong contender. It has a wide scope in just about every regard, from the desert locations that stretch as far as the eye can see, to the thousands of extras that fill them, to the glorious 70mm camerawork that captures it all, to the sweeping story that also contains a more personal throughline, to the 3½-hour running time.
As such, the film hangs on the performance of O’Toole. We’re told Lawrence is an enigmatic figure and his depiction arguably supports that — we never fully get inside his head; we’re always observing him. And yet that’s no bad thing, because even as Lawrence’s confidence waxes and wains, as his allegiances shift and alter, we can feel what he wants to achieve, why he thinks he can. He attempts the impossible and succeeds, which is why he later attempts a bigger impossibility, and must leave the pieces to the more level-headed men, who didn’t have his genius but can therefore play the political game better than he.
A similar legacy is left by those behind the scenes. Maurice Jarre’s score is the reference point for many a period desert epic — indeed, his music is so synonymous with such settings that it has arguably transcended its source to simply be what music for those locations and times is. It graces a film edited with class by Anne V. Coates, where scenes are allowed to play in luxuriantly long takes at times, while at others smash edits throw us from one location to another. This is undoubtedly supported by F.A. Young’s cinematography, where the wide frame can encompass so much action that there’s no need to cut amongst close-ups; and which can show the world in such majesty that you want it to hold for long, lingering takes. Even viewed on the small screen, the 70mm photography shines, especially on Blu-ray.
As with any great film, Lawrence of Arabia is at least the sum of its parts. Replace any of the artists I’ve mentioned, or surely many more, and it would not be the film it is. In fact, when working on such a scale, this is more than a film — it’s an experience. And if that sounds pretentious, well, tough. If you haven’t experienced it yet, try not to leave it as long as I did.
Without meaning to spoil anything, Wolf is rated R for “language and werewolf attacks”! I love the ludicrous specificity the MPAA indulge in sometimes. I know the BBFC’s famous “mild peril” is pretty useless, but at least they draw from an academic- and objective-sounding pool of phrases in their summaries, rather than throwing in ‘advice’ that is meaningless (there are perfectly PG werewolf attacks in other movies).
It’s those early sections where the film is at its best, when it tries to stay grounded in some form of realism. Any time it gets too Fantasy, it begins to get a tad silly. The climax in particular seems to come from a different film: Wolf abruptly moves from being an office politics drama with a fantasy edge, to a full-on manwolf-vs-manwolf brawl. As a straight dramatic director, Mike Nichols doesn’t seem to quite have the chops to pull off this fantasy/horror stuff without it beginning to look daft. That might not be entirely his fault, however, as reportedly the film was delayed by months to re-shoot the entire third act. Perhaps originally it had something more in-keeping? That said, he did want Michelle Pfeiffer to wear a red-hood sweatshirt during the finale! She refused, fearing it would harm the film’s credibility. She was right — it’s quite silly enough as it is.
I can only presume there were hefty paydays for Nicholson and Pfeiffer, both megastars at the time, and possibly Christopher Plummer’s supporting role, maybe Nichols, and on scoring duties (obviously), Ennio Morricone. And maybe those re-shoots were really extensive. Or perhaps they spent it all on the nighttime aerial photography of Manhattan, which is gorgeous — that would’ve been worth it.
After a decade locked away in motion-capture madness, Robert Zemeckis returned to the realms of the real with this Oscar-nominated drama. Its most high-profile nod was for Denzel Washington, starring as an airline pilot who miraculously crash lands his plane, but is revealed to have been high during the flight. Cue a film that attempts a grown-up account of addiction, but fumbles it, in the process missing the more interesting story of the crash investigation.
Most action-thrillers are cast from the same mould; it’s the decoration which dictates whether the final product is a Steven Segal or a Jason Bourne.
Sean Bean and his ragtag band of knights investigate an unaffected village during Ye plague-adled Olden Days in this folk horror from the director of 
Dawn of the Dead is the 
Romero has said he considers his zombie movies to be about the time they were made; a little snapshot of the world (or the US, at least) at the time. Thus consumerism is only one of Dawn’s targets, albeit the easiest to spot. Romero was ahead of his time here: gigantic out-of-town malls of this type were, apparently, new propositions at the time the film was made, and the one that stars here was amongst the country’s largest (it still exists, I believe, but now it’s considered a little’un). It’s not just the zombies who are critiqued either. Our protagonists choose to stay in the mall because it apparently has everything they could ever need, even though it also has the constant threat of the undead. On their first trip out for supplies, they’re as interested in expensive watches as food and tools. As time goes on it only gets worse: they turn their little attic apartment bit into a chic pad, with stylish chairs and all the mod-cons. In a world where the apocalypse has happened, they’re not fighting for their very survival, they’re living the high life. They even ‘rob’ the mall’s bank, “just in case” money is still worth something.
The men, meanwhile, help shape a commentary on society’s desensitisation to violence. There’s disgust early on at having to shoot these human-like creatures in the head to get rid of them, but so unrelenting is such a task that it becomes everyday. This and the consumerism thread come together in the final act, when a gang of bikers invade the mall: declaring that the place is their possession, one of our ‘heroes’ has become so used to killing the living dead that he now has no trouble opening fire on the plain ol’ living.
I also don’t hold much truck with that “the effects are bad” waffle. I mean, really, what do you expect? The film’s 35 years old! And y’know what, it’s not that bad. OK, the zombie’s skin tone is a little blatant — special effects maestro Tom Savini has said he was aiming for grey but it registered as rather blue on film. Then the blood is a vibrant red — well, loads of older films have that garish red blood, what of it? In fact, it was specifically requested by Romero, who wanted a comic-book-y colour to match what he saw as a comic-book tone to the violence. Then there’s all the flesh-eating gore, which is by turns heightened to the point of silliness and gorily realistic — the stuff with the guts towards the end… Savini was a war photographer in Vietnam and that in part inspired his effects work. You want to argue with a guy who’s seen the real thing that his work doesn’t look as ‘realistic’ as some post-millennial computer nerd’s hyper-CG version of things?
I have to say, the more I think and write about Dawn, the more I come to like it. It’s not really perfect — the biker climax comes almost out of nowhere, and I’m not convinced they were the most effective way to explore an ending. Perhaps this is where the “snapshot of the times” idea begins to fall down: distanced from the time in question, how resonant are those themes? Is that why modern viewers, coming to the film for the first time, miss them? (That’s not to discount the fact that most modern genre film viewers aren’t looking for grown-up viewing, but kids’ movie-style brightly-coloured action — with added gore and swearing to prove it’s actually for adults, despite the lack of adult thought or consideration required. Ironically, these once-B-movie cheap horror/thrillers are now, thanks to their political undertones, more suited to the art house crowd. I see why so many venerate ’70s cinema.) But (to get back to this paragraph’s point) there’s so much in Dawn, so much more than either a zombie kill-fest or a criticism of consumerism, that thoughtful reflection — and, I’m sure, future re-watches — are only to its benefit.
Immediately after viewing, I’d say I didn’t like Dawn as much as Night. Though it has many qualities I admire, it also felt a little less focused and more sprawling. The first I found tense and chilling — a Horror movie, albeit one with observable dramatic and thriller-ish elements. Dawn is, at heart, a Drama — it’s about the people in this situation, that situation happening to be an extreme horror one. But on reflection, the bits I was less sure of pale behind the things it does right.
Helmed by acclaimed director Nicholas Ray (
On the plus side, Bernard Herrmann’s score is unequivocally excellent, particularly the pulsating opening theme and the insistent action climax.
1956: global superstar Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) comes to England to star opposite Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in his latest directorial effort, 
The supporting cast is a veritable who’s who of recognisable British faces, stars of screens both big and small. Barely a speaking part goes by without an actor you’re certain to recognise. I’d list them but, honestly, there are far, far too many. Despite Marilyn coming with a hefty entourage, Williams is the only American in the cast, meaning American accents are lumbered (to varying degrees of success) upon Zoe Wanamaker, Toby Jones, Dougray Scott, and Dominic Cooper. Hey, of course Dominic Cooper’s in it — is it even legal to make a mid-budget British movie without him now?
100Films.co.uk 