In Which It's The First Time We See You In The Doorway

The Devil's Advocate

PETER BOGDANOVICH: Despite the bad notices on Macbeth, you still spent the next four years acting in other people's films to finance and shoot Othello. I guess the best of those films was The Third Man - you even did that one for Othello, didn't you?

ORSON WELLES: Yes, I could have had a third of The Third Man if I hadn't needed cash.

PB: Besides playing Harry Lime, what else did you do on it?

OW: I wrote my part -

PB: Every word of it?

OW: Carol Reed is the kind of director who'll use any ideas - anything that's going. I had notions for the dialogue, and Carol liked them. Except for my rather minor contribution, the story, of course, was by the matchless Graham Greene. And the basic idea - though he took no credit for it - was Alex Korda's.

PB: Who produced.

OW: Yes, it's the only film Alex and I ever really did together.

PB: Did you have anything to do with the actual setups and shots in the picture?

OW: Just a very few ideas, like the fingers coming through the grille.

PB: What about the first time we see you in the doorway?

OW: Pure Carol. He had a little second unit specially set up for it, and at the end of every day we went there and tried it again, over and over, till he thought it was right.

PB: Was the last scene at the funeral your touch?

OW: No, it was not. It was a great shot invented by Carol - not by Greene or anybody else. Wonderful idea. I was there when they shot it. I wish I could pretend I'd contributed, but I was just standing there, watching them shoot it.

PB: The picture seemed influenced by you...perhaps because of the casting of Joseph Cotten.

OW: It was Carol's picture, Peter - and Korda's.

PB: Well you have the smallest part but it dominates one's whole memory of the film.

OW: That's the part, you know. Every sentence in the whole script is about Harry Lime - nobody talks about anything else for ten reels. And there's that shot in the doorway - what a star entrance that was! In theatre, you know, the old star actors never liked to come on until the end of the first act. Mister Wu is a classic example. I've played it once myself. All the other actors boil around the stage for about an hour, shrieking, "What will happen when Mister Wu arrives?" "What is he like, this Mister Wu?," and so on. Finally a great gong is beaten, and slowly over a Chinese bridge comes Mister Wu himself in full mandarin robes. Peach Blossom (or whatever her name is) falls on her face and a lot of coolies yell, "Mister Wu!!!" The curtain comes down, the audience goes wild, and everybody says, "Isn't that guy playing Mister Wu a great actor!" That's a star part for you! What matters in that kind of role is not how many lines you have, but how few. What counts is how much the other characters talk about you. Such a star vehicle really is a vehicle. All you have to do is ride. Like Jean Gabin in this last epoch of his career; he now has written in his contract that he never shall be required to bend over. Literally!

PB: Your Ferris wheel speech about Switzerland and the cuckoo clock is so convincing that we seem to agree with you even though you're the heavy.

OW: When the picture came out, the Swiss very nicely pointed out to me that they've never made any cuckoo clocks - they all come from the Schwarzwald, in Bavaria!

PB: Is it true that you unknowingly threw Lady Eden off the set?

OW: Not unknowingly. Clarissa Churchill wasn't then married to Eden; she was doing publicity for Alex. He liked having all kinds of fashionable folk on his payroll... Well, one day, Clarissa brought all these society friends of hers to visit the set, and they wouldn't keep quiet. Carol was far too nice and much too English to tell her to shut them up, so I did it for him. I didn't throw her out, but she went, and that was the end of our friendship. I'm sorry about that.

PB: Many people still associate you with that role - Harry Lime.

OW: In every way, the picture broke every known record, and the people went insane. Wherever you went, you heard nothing but that zither.

A wire from Alexander Woollcott after the Mercury's Mars broadcast (October 30, 1938), when a good part of the country was frightened into believing that New Jersey had been invaded by Martians; on the rival network at the same time were Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy; Orson had it posted in his office for years:

This only goes to prove, my beamish boy, that the intelligent people were all listening to a dummy, and all the dummies were listening to you.

PB: I've often wondered if you had an idea, before you did it, that The War of the Worlds was going to get that kind of response.

OW: The kind of response, yes - that was merrily anticipated by us all. The size of it, of course, was flabbergasting. Six minutes after we'd gone on the air, the switchboards in radio stations right across the country were lighting up like Christmas trees. Houses were emptying, churches were filling up; from Nashville to Minneapolis there was wailing in the street and the rending of garments. Twenty minutes in, and we had a control room full of very bewildered cops. They didn't know who to arrest or for what, but they did lend a certain tone to the remainder of the broadcast. We began to realize, as we plowed on with the destruction of New Jersey, that the extent of our American lunatic fringe had been underestimated.

PB: You claimed innocence afterwards.

OW: There were headlines about lawsuits totalling some $12 million. Should I have pleaded guilty?

PB: What happened to the lawsuits?

OW: Most of them, as it turned out, existed in the fevered imagination of the newspapers. They'd been losing all that advertising to radio, so here, they reckoned, was a lovely chance to strike back. For a few days, I was a combination Benedict Arnold and John Wilkes Booth. But people were laughing much too hard, thank God - and pretty soon all the papers had to quit.

PB: What about CBS?

OW: The day after the show, all you could find were sound mixers and elevator men. There wasn't an executive in the building. During rehearsals they'd been rather edgy, but what was there to censor? We were told not to say "Langley Field" because that was a real place, so we wrote in "Langham Field" - little things like that, so they couldn't complain when the lid blew off. But as I say, we were surprised ourselves by the size and extent of it.

download the complete War of the Worlds broadcast here

PB: Is it a true story that when Pearl Harbor was announced, nobody believed it because - ?

OW: Dead right. Particularly since I had a patriotic broadcast that morning and was interrupted in the middle of it. I was on the full network, reading from Walt Whitman about how beautiful America was, when they said Pearl Harbor's attacked - now doesn't that sound like me trying to do that again? They interrupted the show to say that there had been an attack. Roosevelt sent me a wire about it. I've forgotten what - I don't have it. Something like "crying wolf" and that kind of thing. Not the same day - he was too busy! - but about ten days later.

PB: Then the Martian broadcast didn't really hurt you at all. Would you say it was lucky?

OW: Well, it put me in the movies. Was that lucky? I don't know. Anyway, thanks to the Martians, we got us a radio sponsor, and suddenly we were a great big commercial program, right up there with Benny, Burns and Allen, and the Lux Radio Theatre, with C.B. De Mille. The next step was Hollywood.

From an interview in Cahiers du Cinema, no. 87, September 1958:

Many of the big characters I've played are various forms of Faust, and I am against every form of Faust, because I believe it's impossible for a man to be great without admitting there's something greater than himself, whether it's the law, or God, or art....I have played a whole line of egotists, and I detest egotism...But an actor is not a devil's advocate: he is a lover. In playing Faust, I want to be just and loyal to him, to give him the best of myself and the best arguments that I can find, because we live in a world that has been made by Faust - our world is Faustian.

An actor never plays anything but himself. He simply takes out that which is not himself. And so, of course, in all these characters there is something of Orson Welles. I can't do anything about that. And when I play someone I hate, I try to be chivalrous to the enemy. I hate all dogmas which deny humanity the least of its privileges; if some belief requires denouncing something human, I detest it.

PB: What do you think of cynics?

OW: I despise them.

PB: Why?

OW: Don't need to explain that. If it isn't self evident -

PB: Skeptics?

OW: Well, skeptics have nothing to do with cynics.

PB: No - it's another question.

OW: I don't care one way or another about skeptics. Cynics are intolerable, I think.

PB: Which do you value more highly - your instincts or your intellect? [OW grunts] It's a key question.

OW: Isn't it better to leave these key questions to the kind of people who enjoy them?

PB: Then what must you think of psychoanalysis?

OW: About as valuable as - but considerably more expensive than - consulting your local astrologer.

PB: By, the way, I forgot, your Othello won the first prize at Cannes.

OW: Yes, and the Russian Othello got it a few years later. There must have been two Othello first prizes at Cannes.

PB: They must like the play.

OW: Yes - it's very big in the south of France! Did I tell you how I'd found out I'd got the prize?

PB: No.

OW: You see, you cannot release a picture without what is called a "certificate of origin," for which the picture has to have a nationality. And you also need that in order to get it into a festival. The Italians and the French, and the Americans - who might have been able to enter Othello, didn't want to; they had their own pictures. So, because it had been shot in Morocco, I entered it as a Moroccan picture. Well, you're never told if you've won until the end, you know, but I was sitting in my hotel room, and the director of the festival, Robert Favre Le Bret, called me on the phone and said, "What is the Moroccan national anthem?" And that was how I knew I'd won the first prize. Because they always play the national anthem of the winning country. And, of course, there is no Moroccan national anthem, or wasn't then, so they played something out of Chu Chin Chow or something, and everybody stood up. There was no Moroccan delegation or anything. I think I'm the sole winner in the Arab world of a great international prize.

You can find the first and second parts of the Orson Welles journey here and here.

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"Criminal Intent" - Robyn (mp3)

 

In Which We Make The Film Fantastic

You can find the first part of the Orson Welles journey here.

Orson Welles v. Hollywood

PETER BOGDANOVICH: You like Pasolini?

ORSON WELLES: Terribly bright and gifted. Crazy mixed-up kid, maybe — but on a very superior level. I mean Pasolini the poet, spoiled Christian, and Marxist ideologue. There's nothing mixed up about him on a movie set. Real authority and a wonderfully free way with the machinery.

PB: Do you remember Marco the Magnificent?

OW: Belgrade in the deep winter of — what was it?

PB: Sixty-four.

OW: A great year. The producer was the man who inspired Catch-22, Raoul Levy. According to Raoul Levy, yes, he was the original Yossarian. Fascinating type — you had to like him.

PB: Didn't he commit suicide?

OW: Well, he threatened to in front of Norm Geves' house and the gun went off. The Marco Polo film was sort of a suicide, too. He made that picture twice: The first time, with Alain Delon, he went broke and almost shut down the Yugoslavian film industry in the process. Then he got some more money together and made it all over again with Horst Buchholz. In both versions he had no script at all. Most of us just made it up as we went along. I did write a long scene for Omar Sharif, though. He was standing around looking gloomy because he'd been forced to be in that thing by Spiegel, to work out his contract from Lawrence of Arabia.

So I borrowed a typewriter and did what little I could. Tony Quinn came to town with his own private writer. He played Kubla Kahn, who, it turned out in Tony's authoritative version, was kindly, brave, benevolent, good, handsome, and irresistible to women. There was no grace or virtue which was not written into that character. And then he played it like Charlie Chan.

PB: At one point it was announced that you were going to direct The Bible for Dino De Laurentiis, thought it always seemed a little unlikely.

OW: Well, at first it was going to be Fellini and Bresson and myself — all three of us. Then, for a moment, Dino tried to persuade me to do the whole picture. Well, I couldn't really imagine doing the Garden of Eden, just for a start. And really, I didn't want to be responsible for the whole picture. So I got some kind of golden handshake for the script I'd done for the Abraham and Jacob sequences, and that was that. Bresson and Fellini weren't so lucky — they're still suing him, I think.

PB: Did you actually work with Bresson or Fellini preparing the picture?

OW: Well, we were photographed together. Repeatedly.

OW: I'd decided to throw a party for all the little Hollywood grandees from the old days who'd been friends and whom I hadn't seen in so long, having been in Europe for almost ten years, to show that I still remembered my friends — Sam Goldwyn and Jack Warner and all those kinds of people. And I was late. I'd been shooting Touch of Evil and I thought, "I won't take time to remove this terrible, enormous makeup that took forever to put on" — padded stomach and back, sixty pounds of it, and horrible old-age stuff. When I came into my house, before I had a chance to explain that I had to get upstairs and take my makeup off, all these people came up and said, "Hi Orson! Gee, you're looking great!"

PB: What happened when you first got back to Hollywood?

OW: Nothing; that was the trouble. I had really a very unhappy time — the worst — getting no work. I went a year with almost nothing, just sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring. And then I got a couple of jobs: The Long, Hot Summer, which I hated making — I've seldom been as unhappy in a picture; and imagine Man in the Shadow, a Jeff Chandler Western and a true deep-dyed B. He was a terribly nice, sad fellow whom I liked very much, but that was really hitting the bottom, you know, playing the head of a big ranch. And then came Touch of Evil and a tremendous high point — I thought I had it made and was going to stay and do a whole series of pictures with Universal.

PB: Didn't you do some television while you waiting around?

OW: Yes, I did a pilot for Desilu — The Fountain of Youth — which they couldn't sell.

grant withington's shot-by-shot remake of The Fountain of Youth

PB: But it was later sold as a special and won the Peabody Award in 1958. It's really the best television show I've ever seen — created for the medium, as you said. I especially like what you did with the ticking of the clock all the way through. And didn't you do another pilot around that time?

OW: Yes, and I did a half-hour thing about Dumas called Camille, the Naked Lady and the Musketeers.

PB: For Desilu?

OW: I made it for myself. I spent my own money. I wanted to do a series of half-hour portraits of people. This was just me telling the story of the three Dumas, with pictures of them and drawings by me. In a purely narrative form, but quite visual in spite of that. Nobody would have any part of it. I thought I could sell it — syndication or something. Not a chance; nobody would look at it. I don't know what's ever happened to that, I wish I could find it.

At that dinner party I mentioned earlier, I showed them these two shorts — and Sam Goldwyn walked out of the first one and said, "I didn't come here to see a lot of shorts." I don't know what possessed him that night.

Then I spent a fortune — I wanted to do thirty-six weeks on the life of Churchill — which was later done with Richard Burton narrating. I must have spent $12,000 on research and things like that, and the tax people wouldn't let me deduct it. They said, "What did you do? You didn't sell it. You say you worked in your home — that's what every movie star says."

PB: What was Martin Ritt like directing The Long, Hot Summer?

OW: Well, he's the one who said to me, "I want you to relate to those windows," and I said, "Marty, you mean you want me to look at them?" But I enjoyed very much working with Joanne Woodward — we had nice scenes together — and with Angela Lansbury. I love her. But I wasn't very happy, although the picture was an enormous success. That's the one where the critic for the New York Times wrote, "Orson Welles, believe it or not, was quite good."

PB: Did you know Faulkner yourself?

OW: Yes. That movie, of course, had nothing to do with the book The Hamlet. It was largely an imitation of Tennessee Williams, using the name Faulkner. But I knew Faulkner pretty well.

with daughter Chris

PB: What kind of man was he?

OW: I don't really know — I never saw him anything but wildly drunk through the years. He must have been sober to produce that great body of work.

PB: You like his writing?

OW: Not as much as other people do, but I admire him, yes. I prefer the others - his rivals of that generation — Fitzgerald, I'm very fond of Hemingway, and I'm a great fan of a very underrated American writer, John O'Hara.

PB: What do you think of Fitzgerald's Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon?

OW: It always seemed to me to be a great failure of a book by a great writer.

PB: Well, it wasn't finished.

OW: But even what's there — I don't think he understood Hollywood for a minute. I don't think he knew what he was talking about.

PB: You wrote a good article for Esquire around that time about the death of Hollywood.

OW: I remember that the editor felt he had to write a little thing in his column, that after all, Hollywood had treated me well.

PB: An apologia.

OW: Yes. I've never complained about Hollywood, but I'm not really one of the outstanding beneficiaries of the system.

PB: That must be one of the great understatements of —

OW: Nor did I think my article was very bitter about it. It seemed to me that his comments were totally unnecessary.

Some excerpts from Orson's piece, Twilight in the Smog, published in Esquire, March 1959:

It was Fred Allen who said in his fair-minded way that "California is a wonderful place if you're an orange." I guess what Fred was actually referring to was the general region of Los Angeles, or, as it's called, Greater Los Angeles (greater than what?). Like so many of us, this was the part of the state he knew best and liked the least.

Anyway, as the citrus people are first to admit, smog has taken the fun out of life even for the oranges...

According to the map, Hollywood is a district attached but not belonging to the City of Los Angeles. But this is not strictly accurate: Los Angeles — though huge, populous and rich — has never quite made it as a city. It remains a loose and sprawling confederation of suburbs and shopping centers. As for downtown Los Angeles, it's about as metropolitan as Des Moines or Schenectady...

There has never been a real metropolis that did not begin with a market place. Hollywood is a way station on a highway. Drive as far as you like in any direction: wherever you find yourself, it looks exactly like the road to an airport. Any road to any airport...

Is Hollywood's famous sun really setting? There is certainly a hint of twilight in the smog and lately, over the old movie capital there has fallen a grey-flannel shadow. Television is moving inexorably westward. Emptying the movie theaters across the land, it fills the movie studios. Another industry is building quite another town; and already, rising out of the gaudy ruins of screenland, we behold a new, drab, curiously solemn brand of the old foolishness.

There must always be a strong element of the absurd in the operation of a dream factory, but now there's less to laugh at and even less to like. The feverish gaiety has gone, a certain brassy vitality drained away. TV, after all, is a branch of the advertising business and Hollywood behaves increasingly like an annex of Madison Avenue.

Television — live, taped or on film — is still limited by the language barrier, while by nature and economics moving pictures are multi-lingual. Making them has always been an international affair. Directors, writer, producers, and above all, the stars come to Hollywood from all over the world and their pictures are addressed to a world public. The town's new industry threatens its traditional cosmopolitanism and substitutes a strong national flavor. This could not be otherwise since our television exists for the sole purpose of selling American products to American consumers.

With the biggest of the big film studios limping along on economy programs administered by skeleton staffs, the gold-rush atmosphere which once was Hollywood's own dizzy branch of charm is just a memory.

In its golden age — in the first years of  the movie boom — the mood and manner were indeed much like that of a gold rush. There was the frenzy and buccaneering hurly-burly of an earlier California: the vast fortunes found in a day and squandered in a night; the same cheerful violence and cutthroat anarchy. All of that Western turbulence has been silenced now.

You can find the previous entry in this series here.

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In Which We Prefer To Be Called Mr. Welles

Yon Orson Welles

PETER BOGDANOVICH: OK, then, speaking of "maximum discomfort," how did you come to do Macbeth in only twenty-three days?

ORSON WELLES: Because we couldn't get the money to do it in twenty-four. Actually, principal photography took twenty-one days. It kept us pretty much on the tips of our toes. I slept two hours a night in a motel next door to the Republic lot.

Our best crowd scene was a shot where all the massed forces of Macduff's army are charging the castle. There was a very vivid sense of urgency to it, because what was happening, really, was that we'd just called noon break, and all those extras were rushing off to lunch.

PB: Do you think the film suffered from having been made so quickly?

OW: Of course. Larry Olivier's big-budgeted Henry V and Hamlet didn't do us any good, either. I'd imagined, in my innocence, that allowances would be made for the modest size of our canvas. I should have known better. Too bad. If we'd been a bit more successful, we could have done a lot of other, more difficult subjects in the same way.

PB: I like small-budget pictures.

OW: Too bad there aren't more of you.

PB: I made my first picture on a tiny budget -

OW: That's how I'll make my last one.

PB: But I was interested to know whether you would've liked to have made-

OW: I'd love to make Macbeth again with lots of Hugh Hefner bread, as Polanski's done. Who wouldn't? Nowadays people go to Shakespeare - at least they went to Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet. Even in England, where the Bard, you know, has always been box-office poison - in the cinema, I mean.

PB: Even Olivier?

OW: Sure. Henry was his only really big one commercially, and the non-English receipts were what made all the difference. As for me, I wish I'd had just one chance at a Shakespeare movie where the money was just normal...Othello was made, you know, in the way we could have got it made. We all got pretty good at following the records.

PB: Like a musical?

OW: They spend money on musicals. But, yes, we had those clicks. Wherever the pauses were, there were clicks on the recording so you knew when to start moving your lips again.

PB: What was the famous problem with the Scottish brogues?

OW: A slight "burr," that was. People didn't like it, so in the end we took the whole show into the dubbing room.

PB: Why did you want the burr?

OW: If Shakespeare could tune in on us now with a time machine - or a time radio - he'd think that modern English actors were speaking in a foreign tongue. All our spoken English had become another language. So how do you speak Shakespeare? Oxbridge? West End? BBC? There are a lot of his gutsier moments which suffer very much from that particular refined, upper-class, southern-English way of speaking, which is mainly what we hear now. It's marvelous when a well-spoken Irish or Scotch actor does Shakespeare. Even the right sort of American voice, too - as long as those middle consonants are kept vigorous. Anyway, why shouldn't all the Scotsmen in Macbeth sound like Scotsmen? The Scottish lilt and color is so right for all that gooseflesh and grue. If I could make the picture in heaven, I'd make it with a Scottish burr all over again.

PB: But?

OW: Feldman had been so nice about everything that, when he asked for the Scottishness to be muffled, I muffled it. That meant postsynching, of course, and made splendid nonsense of my whole proud experiment in miming to playback.

PB: Evidently there was some objection because it was difficult to understand.

OW: In fact, it's easier to understand with Scotch accents, because that speech is clearer, purer, more incisive. It's just a great excuse for people who don't understand Shakespeare anyway to blame it on the burr.

PB: One could say that you made Shakespeare entertaining and exciting, as opposed to a cultural treasure - the way Shakespeare is taught.

OW: Yes, and performed - except by the old Mercury (if you'll excuse me) and the very newest generation of directors in the English theatre.

PB: Your Shakespeare book is still a tonic.

OW: It's terrible what's done to Shakespeare in the schools. You know, it's amazing that people do still go to him after what they've been through in the classroom.

Some excerpts from Orson's introduction to The Mercury Shakespeare:

Shakespeare said everything... He speaks to everyone and we all claim him but it's wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn't properly belong to us but to another world, a florid and entirely remarkable world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer's ink, and was vigorously dominated by Elizabeth...

About sixty years earlier, Columbus had bumped into a couple of new continents and the Conquistadors were busy opening them up and exploiting them. Down in Italy...men had taken the hoods of the dusty, dusky old Middle Ages off their heads and had begun to look around. Books were being written instead of copied; people had stopped taking Aristotle's word for it and were nosing about the world, taking it apart to see what made it run. All kinds of established convictions were being questioned and money in huge sums was being made. This bustle and uncertainty and excitement had gotten across the channel and into the moist English air...

To know something about Shakespeare we must know something about that England in which he was born; still more important we must know something of that peculiarly pure theatre he found in London and for which he wrote. It was neither new nor clumsy. It was not a rude thing but rather, like the classic theatres of high convention in China and Japan, a refinement. England's stage came out of the church when the actors got too entertaining,. It lingered for a couple of hundred years in front of it in the marketplace and then moved into the inn yard...

Poetry has since then been neither necessary nor possible because when you can make the dawn over Elsinore with a lantern and a pot of paint there's no call for having a character stop in the middle of the action and say a line like, "But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill," even supposing you could write a line like it. You can't see and hear beauty, fully, at the same time...because poetry is its own scenery and because we've stuck to physical scenery and isolated our actor from his audience...we've stuck to prose. Before the Restoration, theatres were courtyards around platforms where you went to hear and be heard. Since then they've been birthday cakes in front of picture-frames where you go to see and to be seen....

PB: Would you agree that Shakespeare was the biggest influence in your life?

OW: After you. Next.

PB (laughs): Well, you once said that you think Shakespeare was a pessimist.

OW: Yes, but, like many of us, he was also at least a part-time idealist. The optimists are incapable of understanding what it means to adore the impossible. Shakespeare, remember, was very close to the origins of his own culture: the language he wrote had just been formed; the old England, the old Europe of the Middle Ages, still lived in the memory of the people of Stratford. He was very close, you understand, to quite another epoch, and yet he stood in the doorway of our "modern" world. His lyricism, his comic zest, his humanity came from these ties with the past. The pessimism, of course, is closer to our modern condition.

PB: You also said he wasn't interested in the bourgeoisie.

OW: That was an age, you see, where there was lots of room at the top. In his plays, the common folk are mainly clowns.

PB: You'd say he was a snob.

OW: He was a country boy, the son of a butcher, who'd made it into court. He spent years getting himself a coat of arms. He wrote mostly about kings. We can't have a great Shakespearean theatre in America anymore, because it's impossible for today's American actors to comprehend what Shakespeare meant by "king." They think a king is a gentleman who finds himself wearing a crown and sitting on a throne.

PB: You had a lot of very long takes in Macbeth.

OW: They were enormously long: never shorter than five minutes and often right up to a full reel in length. I think about five reels were like that - in other words, without cuts.

PB: Which Hitchcock did later in Rope.

OW: Well, we'd already done it in Ambersons. Originally we had a whole reel that was a single take -

PB: At the dance?

OW: Yes, and that was cut into for a few stupid seconds by some cloth-headed expert in a darkened room. By the way, I saw Roddy McDowall the other night and he said, "Whenever I want to really enjoy myself I get a print of Ambersons and run it again." And I said, "You idiot! You're in a pretty good picture of mine called Macbeth. Why don't you run a print of that?" "Oh?" he said. I had to remind him he was our Malcolm, and very convincing he was, too.

PB: In terms of schedule and budget, which is cheaper - long takes or a lot of short ones?

OW: That depends on what you've got to work with - your equipment and your cast. If you have a big efficient unit, a long take is certainly cheaper than a short one. If you have a small unit, it's the opposite.

PB: Do you think the length of shots or the angle of shots has a subconscious effect on an audience?

OW: I never think of an audience for a movie. That's the advantage of film over the theatre - when you do a play, you make it for an audience; when you do a movie, you make it for yourself.

PB: To please yourself?

OW: Well, it's impossible to conceive of what a movie audience is: a bunch of Sikhs; a band of Bedouins; a tribe of gypsies; four hundred widowed ladies from Ohio on a bus tour... What is that audience? How can you set out to please it? You can't address yourself to it, because it's inconceivable. So you make it for yourself.

The best bet that can be said of Welles' Macbeth is that it proves at least one Hollywood producer is willing to tackle Shakespearan tragedy. If Welles has failed utterly to live up to the standard set by Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, he has at least failed honestly.

Newsweek, October 18, 1948

Orson Welles' Macbeth is made over and above all tradition, with evident changes in the orders of certain scenes, with scenery and costumes which are purely imaginative and in reality far more truthful to the Shakespearean spirit than those in Olivier's Hamlet. While Olivier only tried to adapt a theatre production for the cinema, Welles tried to use every possible dramatic means to express himself in a wholly new manner.

Jacques Bourgeois, La Revue du Cinema, October 1948

orson's harlem performance of 'macbeth'
Shakespeare wrote Macbeth as a melodramatic tragedy. Mr. Welles has demoted it into a rather shabby Class B adventure story in costume.

Marjory Adams, Boston Globe, October 8, 1948

I love too much natural settings and natural light not to love also the fake light and cardboard settings of Macbeth.

Robert Bresson, quoted in Le Figaro, November 12, 1948

Responding to Dick Wilson's suggestion that he write an answer to the American critics, Orson cabled him from Florence on October 19, 1948:

Dearest Dick...Cannot imagine what you expect me to write for newspapers beyond simple apology for having been born. Please advise. - Orson.

"Vain and Careless" - Natalie Merchant (mp3)

"The Land of Nod" - Natalie Merchant (mp3)

"Griselda" - Natalie Merchant (mp3)

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come.

— Macbeth