In the chain of theatrical versions of the play "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare, which has been going on since 1908 (a nine-minute short film) and has never stopped, there have so far been two highlights: Orson Welles' one and a half hour film adaptation from 1948, of course with the director himself in the title role, and nine years later Akira Kurosawa's one hundred and five minute transfer of the material to the Japanese Middle Ages, “The Castle in the Spider's Web Forest”, of course with the director's favorite actor, Toshiro Mifune, in the title role.

Andreas Platthaus

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Now these optical and psychological masterpieces have grown into a competitor: just as long as Kurosawa's film, just as expressionistically sparse in staged as Welles, just as black and white photographed as both forerunners, and the title role is again played by a superstar who switches between auteur and commercial cinema: Denzel Washington, of course more in demand here as an actor than as an action hero. Because the director of the new “Macbeth” is Joel Coen, one half of the famous, otherwise inseparable pair of brothers, but compared to Ethan, the more director-oriented - Joel has been shown to be the sole director of several films together. But he has never filmed without Ethan's involvement in the script. But the brother had, according to Carter Burwell, the long-time regular composer of the Coens,who also created the score again, no desire for a theatrical film. “Macbeth” is Joel Coen's first solo project, and that at the age of sixty.

She plays amazing

Now that has no meaning for the material. What else can be new about it? First of all, the cast of the second main role, that of Lady Macbeth, with an actress who not only does justice to the importance of this role for Shakespeare's tragedy, but also has to counter the star status of her counterpart. Kurosawa cast Isuzu Yamada, an actor whose heyday was a dozen years ago. Orson Welles, on the other hand, hoped for Vivien Leigh, but failed because the actress, who had become legendary through "Gone With the Wind", was married to Lawrence Olivier, the greatest British Shakespeare interpreter of the time. Welles suspected rightly that his "Macbeth" would not have found mercy in the eyes of this traditionalist,who had just played the title role in the film adaptation of Shakespeare's "Henry V". So he cast Jeanette Nolan from his Mercury theater troupe, which had never appeared in a film. Although she knew the physical force of nature of her director-lead actor, she did not know the specific challenges of the camera.

Joel Coen, on the other hand, won the most respected and, with two Oscars in four years, the most successful American film actress of the present for Lady Macbeth: Frances McDormand, who happened to be his wife and since "Blood Simple", the Coen Brothers debut in 1984, one an integral part of the wonderfully eclectic brother cosmos.

To put it right away: She plays unbelievably.