Macbeth

First let us correct the list of Vitagraph adapatations - Macbeth (1908),, Othello (1908), Romeo and Juliet (1908), Richard III (1908), Antony and Cleopatra (1908), Julius Caesar (1908), The Merchant of Venice (1908), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1909) and Twelfth Night (1910). The Comedy of Errors (1908) was a comedy with absolutely no connection with the Shakespeare play of the same name.

All the nine plays, except Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night can be viewed in synoptic footage - that is to say footage deliberately chosen to represent the entire progress of the play rather than merely surviving fragments - deposed by Vitagraph for copyright purposes and now available as part of the Library of Congress paper print collection.

Julius Caesar, King Lear, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night also survive in separate more or less complete versions.

These reveal how really rather impressive these adaptations were. Relatively closely shot in the distinctive US style that Vitagraph was a pioneer in developing, they generally compare very favourably with the French and Italian versions made at around the same time. They are notable for their very careful work on costume and mises en scene (a mixture of studio sets and location shooting) and their naturalism in acting style,

The three bearded witches are a shade over the top and I am unimpressed by the superimposed dagger that Macbeth sees before him (he has the Vitagraph logo on the wall behind him) and, in this film, the fight scenes are unfortunately filmed in the studio with a painted backdrop, but the interior scenes and the forest scenes look impressive.

This was the first film version of Macbeth (apart from a probably apocryphal tale of Forbes Robertson being filmed in a scene from his stage production of 1898 and a reproduction of the duel scene by Mutoscope in 1905) and it is a shame that, as yet, we have neither the Calmettes production for Pathé nor the Caserini production for Cines (both 1909) readily available for comparison. The Calmettes film with Paul Mounet as Macbeth does perhaps survive between the clenched buttocks of some French archive.