{"id":31820,"date":"2019-08-30T08:43:41","date_gmt":"2019-08-30T12:43:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=31820"},"modified":"2019-08-30T09:39:37","modified_gmt":"2019-08-30T13:39:37","slug":"the-bootleg-files-macbeth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/30\/the-bootleg-files-macbeth\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bootleg Files: Macbeth"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOOTLEG FILES 698:<\/strong> \u201cMacbeth\u201d (1961 Canadian television production starring Sean Connery in the title role).<\/p>\n

LAST SEEN:<\/strong> We cannot confirm the most recent exhibition of this title.<\/p>\n

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO:<\/strong> On a public domain label and a collector-to-collector label.<\/p>\n

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS:<\/strong> There might be some rights issue holding it up.<\/p>\n

CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE:<\/strong> Not likely.<\/p>\n

Sean Connery celebrated his 89th birthday earlier this week and social media was a flutter with tributes recalling his star-making performances as James Bond and his fine work in films stretching from the 1960s to the early 2000s. But few people recalled Connery\u2019s role as the homicidal yet tragic Scottish nobleman who killed his way to the crown in \u201cMacbeth.\u201d Indeed, this work remains among the actor\u2019s least known and most curious efforts.
\n<\/p>\n

By 1961, Connery seemed to be within grasp of A-list stardom but somehow never quite found his way to the higher echelon of his profession. He achieved attention in Britain for starring roles in film and television productions, but a foray into Hollywood failed to ignite his career to the next level. <\/p>\n

An unexpected offer came from the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), which was planning to mount a televised version of \u201cMacbeth.\u201d Why he was chosen was not clear \u2013 his star power on this side of the Atlantic was minimal. While he brought the right accent, Connery was not celebrated as a Shakespearean actor \u2013 he had a supporting part as Hotspur in the 1960 BBC epic “An Age of Kings,” but it was hardly a groundbreaking performance and that series did not play in Canada until 1963. Earlier in his career, there were two invitations for him to play Macbeth in British stage presentations, but he turned down one of the offers (the job was taken by a then-unknown Richard Harris) and the other endeavor never made it to the stage. Connery\u2019s then-wife Diane Cilento reportedly worked hard to convince him to take the assignment. Her lobbying powers must have been extraordinary, as Connery received only $500 (Canadian) and a free hotel room for his work.<\/p>\n

It seemed that the bulk of the budget for this \u201cMacbeth\u201d went into Connery\u2019s salary and lodging, as the production is one of barest of bare-bones endeavors ever put on camera. Even Orson Welles\u2019 notorious 1948 work for the low-budget Republic Pictures seemed more extravagant in comparison.<\/p>\n

Part of the problem was the decision by director Paul Almond to stage \u201cMacbeth\u201d on sets that alternated between the abstract expressionism and shoddy carpentry. There are stairs that lead to nowhere and vast rooms conspicuously absent of furniture, and the surplus amount of shadows could lead one to think that Shakespeare\u2019s characters walked around in the dark all of the time.<\/p>\n

Also complicating matters was that this was not intended to be a reverential serving of Shakespeare, but rather a truncated revision aimed at an audience of high school student. Even worse, it was not meant to be viewed in a single broadcast, but was originally shown in five parts that were later stitched together into a cohesive whole. This telescoping of the work resulted in significant edits that resulted in characters and scenes being jettisoned. The result is a \u201cMacbeth Lite\u201d that skims the surface of the classic work \u2013 which was pretty peculiar, considering the students who were supposed to watch this were not getting what Shakespeare intended.<\/p>\n

Perhaps to speed things along, Almond also decided to record several of the soliloquies and present them as inner thoughts, with the actors emoting in mute pensiveness as their mental notes were played out on the soundtrack. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach \u2013 Welles and Olivier used it in their respective Shakespeare films \u2013 but Almond was not in the same league as those titans and the result is labored.<\/p>\n

Of course, no one would care about this \u201cMacbeth\u201d had Connery not been in the title role. He is, quite frankly, an unlikely Macbeth who never truly plumbs the emotional torture that the character endures. He spits out his words quickly and recklessly, and he never quite latches on to the emotional tumult of the character. It also doesn\u2019t help that he is saddled with a too-obvious wig and a beard that appears to have been hastily pasted on. Connery\u2019s youth (he was 30 at the time) also failed to give him the degree of aristocratic authority that the role demanded. It was no surprise that Montreal critic Herbert Whittaker questioned whether the CBC was playing too much to its youthful audience by using \u201ca young handsome Macbeth and three slick chicks for witches\u201d<\/p>\n

The one saving grace in \u201cMacbeth\u201d is Australian actress Zoe Caldwell as Lady Macbeth. Unlike Connery, Caldwell was a theater-focused performer who held her own in British stage version of \u201cOthello\u201d (with Paul Robeson in the title role) and \u201cAll\u2019s Well That Ends Well\u201d (opposite Dame Edith Evans). Caldwell captures the essence of Lady Macbeth with both intellectual and sexual ferocity, and she even survives the indignity of having the shadow of the boom microphone obscuring her face in a crucial scene. Her poise, diction and intelligence make this Lady Macbeth a performance worth studying for any woman hoping to become the star of Shakespearean work.<\/p>\n

The \u201cMacbeth\u201d episodes were telecast in 1961 over the evenings of November 30 and December 5, 7, 12 and 14. The complete version was telecast on April 23, 1962 on the CBC series \u201cFestival,\u201d an anthology series specializing in classic drama and highbrow performing arts. There is no record that it was ever broadcast in the United States. Connery\u2019s breakthrough role in \u201cDr. No\u201d was not released in North America until May 1963, and by that time \u201cMacbeth\u201d had long been forgotten by its Canadian audience.<\/p>\n

To date, there has been no official U.S. home entertainment release of \u201cMacbeth.\u201d Crummy versions have turned up on at least one public domain label, even though its copyright is intact, and on a collector-to-collector label specializing in rare works. While hardly great, it offers an interesting view of Connery right before he rode the wave to superstardom. <\/p>\n

IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.<\/em><\/p>\n

Listen to \u201cThe Online Movie Show with Phil Hall\u201d<\/a> on SoundCloud.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BOOTLEG FILES 698: \u201cMacbeth\u201d (1961 Canadian television production starring Sean Connery in the title role). LAST SEEN: We cannot confirm the most recent exhibition of this title. AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: On a public domain label and a collector-to-collector label. REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: There might be some rights issue holding it up. CHANCES OF SEEING […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":31821,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1513],"tags":[2299,2297,918,932,2298],"class_list":["post-31820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bootleg-files","tag-canadian-broadcasting-corp","tag-macbeth","tag-sean-connery","tag-shakespeare","tag-zoe-caldwell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31820"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31826,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31820\/revisions\/31826"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}