Half of the Coen Bros. to Direct Another Macbeth

By Steve Evans

Most intriguing film news of the day... Joel Coen, sans brother Ethan, is set to direct yet another film adaptation of Macbeth. He is also writing the screenplay, again, without his brother. This represents a first in their 35-year collaboration. Two-time Oscar winner Frances McDormand, Joel's wife, is to play Lady Macbeth. Two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington is in talks to co-star in an undefined role. Would be interesting if Denzel played Macbeth, as that would represent a refreshing reversal of so many white dudes playing Othello in blackface through the years. Conversely, Denzel playing Macbeth will inevitably raise questions, like, what's a brother doing in 11th century Scotland? That would be in keeping with Coen's Dutch-angle sensibilities. 

Whatever he's up to, Coen will need to jazz it up a bit, because Orson Welles and Roman Polanski, who made their own versions in 1948 and 1971, respectively, will be tough to beat. Yet another version with Michael Fassbender in the title role was released just four years ago.

I mention all this because why Joel Coen would want to make his solo directing debut with a Shakespeare adaptation -- a play that's been filmed more or less definitively many times before -- has got to be one of the great curiosities of the cinema in the last 25 years.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2019 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

Dali Dreams

By Steve Evans

Today being Salvador Dali’s birthday, our film du jour might be Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog; 1929), which he co-directed with fellow Surrealist Luis Buñuel. And you should check out this silent short, widely available online. It's one of the more interesting cinematic experiments conceived by Dali, who died in 1989. But right now let’s look at Dali's contribution to Spellbound (1945), a lesser film from Alfred Hitchcock starring Gregory Peck as a mental patient who fears he’s committed a murder and Ingrid Bergman as the psychiatrist trying to help him.

The film quotes Shakespeare at the opening (The Fault... is Not in Our Stars, But in Ourselves...), setting the stage for an ambitious look at psychoanalysis. Instead, Spellbound soon dives into what I can only charitably describe as stagey melodrama. It’s mostly a dull film. Redemption comes in a stunning dream sequence designed by Dali, replete with his signature melting objects and hallucinatory imagery. Hitchcock always worked with the best talent money could buy, and here his work with Dali constitutes a real save, because without it Spellbound is of interest only to Hitchcock compleatists.

The famed dream sequence lasts a mere two minutes, but was rumored to have been 20 minutes long before producer David O. Selznick demanded major cuts. Selznick and Hitchcock clashed frequently throughout the production and they never worked together again, although five years earlier Hitch had delivered a Best Picture winner to Selznick with his first American film, Rebecca.

Decades later, Peck conceded in an interview that he and Bergman had enjoyed a brief, torrid affair during the filming of Spellbound. Bergman was relentlessly unfaithful to her doctor husband throughout her 13-year marriage, finally divorcing him in 1950 to take up with Italian director Roberto Rossellini, who she divorced in 1957. Peck’s marriage lasted another 10 years after his dalliance with Bergman and he married a French journalist the day after his divorce was final. I mention this merry-go-round of musical beds only to underscore how life often imitates art, as the plot of Spellbound reveals, and that in this particular case the goings-on behind the camera were more interesting than the story being filmed in front of it. Except for that Dali dream sequence.



Cinema Uprising copyright © 2016 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.