The New Pictures, Nov. 1, 1948

Macbeth (Mercury Production; Republic), as Actor-Director Orson Welles tells it in this movie, is not quite the great tragedy of a noble man gone wrong; it is more the story of a dead-end kid on the make. Like an energetic small boy tinkering with an alarm clock, Orson breaks down the drama into bits and pieces—and cannot seem to fit it together again. Nonetheless, it is an interesting, unconventional try.

Shakespeare's Macbeth is a turbulent melodrama, full of spooky claptrap, but its central figure gives it the dignity of classic tragedy. Welles has kept the claptrap, but his Macbeth is no once-honorable soldier whose muddled aspirations trap him into a crime against himself (the murder of King Duncan, in the play, also destroys the murderer's ability to live with himself). Orson has robbed the play of tragic impact by substituting a conniving heel who kills as he climbs.

Wonder-Boy Welles has an imaginative way with a camera. His stark and gloomy settings create a fine mood for tragedy. The 11th Century Scotland of this movie is a rough, barbaric country with a castle jutting out of the sharp rock; hard-eyed horsemen gallop like wild west villains across the foggy landscape; the wide palace courtyard is full of mud puddles and pigs. Welles has thus succeeded in surrounding the plot with an atmosphere that makes all the crude violence believable; photographically, this mood is sustained. Dramatically, it is often violated, both by transpositions of text and by some of the performances.

Orson's fascination with the echoes of his own voice on the sound track (a hangover from Citizen Kane) sometimes makes his Macbeth resemble an unmannerly uproar in a coal mine. The on-again-off-again use of a Scotch burr by some of the actors, including the star, does not help; but the production's main fault is that Welles and his leading lady (Jeanette Nolan) play their roles, for most of 95 minutes, at the top of their lungs.

In those rare moments when Orson swaps his own resonant roars for the sounder music of Shakespeare (as in the reading of "Tomorrow, and tomorrow . . ."), he is very good indeed. More often, he shares with the rest of his cast a tendency to throw good Shakespeare after bad.

The Three Musketeers (MGM) has more ups & downs than the Berlin airlift. When it keeps to the stratosphere of high-spirited comedy, it is an engaging, exuberant film version of the old Dumas swashbuckler.* When it tries to settle down and take itself seriously, Musketeers hits a few air pockets.

Gene Kelly plays D'Artagnan as an irrepressible, tongue-in-cheek Gascon who is knee-deep in gory swordplay. But his comrades Athos, Porthos and-Aramis are derring-doodlers. Athos (Van Heflin) is a self-pitying alcoholic, grieving over his betrayal by a buxom babe known around the French court as Lady de Winter (Lana Turner). Porthos is just a fortune hunter, and Aramis is ready to forswear the world.