RUTHFULLY YOURS

A new screen version of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard reminds us that cinematic refractions of the Bard’s most famous plays are never entirely out of fashion. Though Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh (two actor-directors especially associated with adapting Shakespeare to the big screen) never made movies of the “Scottish play,” other eminent filmmakers have. In 1948, Orson Welles gave us a brogue-heavy, noir-inflected version, with himself in the title role. And in 1971, Roman Polanski opted for a highly naturalistic, often graphically violent approach, emphasizing youthful ambition taken to extremes.

But the most nuanced and unsettling screen version of “Macbeth” strays far from Shakespeare’s text, though not its spirit. Directed by Akira Kurosawa— and performed in Japanese—“Throne of Blood” (1957) is frequently cited by cinéastes and scholars as the medium’s finest rendering of any Shakespeare play. Kurosawa has been described as the “least Japanese” of his country’s great film directors, and several of his movies draw on Western source material: Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, even the American crime writer Ed McBain—in addition to Shakespeare, to whom he would return late in life when adapting “King Lear” as “Ran” (1985).

Just after midnight on Oct. 1, 1966, Albert Speer, the former armaments minister of the Third Reich, walked free from Spandau jail. Barely acknowledging Margarete, his long-suffering wife, the mother of his six children and the once-proud bearer of a Nazi award for fertility, Speer faced the flashbulbs and cameras of the world’s media from the back seat of a luxurious black Mercedes provided for the occasion by an old industrialist friend. Condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Speer was saved from the death penalty by an artful defense that separated him from the other Nazi ogres in the dock. He would spend the last 15 years of his life burnishing his image as “the good Nazi.” After three best-selling books and lucrative interviews with Der Spiegel and Playboy, among others, he died in London on Sept. 1, 1981, attended rather conspicuously by a beautiful young mistress, after a long morning of interviews with the BBC and dinner with the historian Norman Stone. Hitler’s closest companion, the architect of Germany’s wartime “armaments miracle,” had seized his time in the spotlight. He had refashioned himself as a postmodern celebrity.
Speer: Hitler’s Architect

By Martin Kitchen
Yale, 442 pages, $37.50

Already at Nuremberg, Speer had presented himself as a penitent prophet of a new age of technocracy. He used his closing statement in the dock to warn the world that the only forces that could “prevent unconfined engineering and science from completing the work of destroying human beings” were “individual freedom and self-confidence.” In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, the conjunction of technology and power had become an obsessive theme of cultural commentary, one that offered Speer two advantages. It put Allied strategic bombing alongside him in the dock while distracting attention from more specific questions about his personal responsibility for the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews from Berlin and the murderous exploitation of concentration-camp labor.

There are strong parallels between “45 Years” and “Away From Her,” a movie starring Julie Christie, written and directed by Sarah Polley and based on a short story by Alice Munro (”The Bear Came Over the Mountain”). “45Years” stars two other well-known actors from the 60’s – Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, was written and directed by Andrew Haigh and adapted from a short story by David Constantine (”In Another Country”). Furthering the link, viewers of a certain age will remember an exuberant Tom Courtenay and an exhilarating Julie Christie in a breakout performance in “Billy Liar.” Both “45 Years” and “Away From Her” deal with the dissolving threads of a long marriage; one triggered by the unexpected imposition of a tragic past love and one by the torments of dementia as it robs its victim of her very identity.

“45 Years” centers on the quiet intimacy between Kate and Geoff Mercer, a retired couple whose lives consist of walks with their dog, shared meals and time spent at home listening to music and reading. When a letter written in German arrives, we see the power of a withheld secret begin to erode the bond between husband and wife and eat away at each of them differently. All the action and revelations take place within one week that is scheduled to culminate in a party for their 45th wedding anniversary. These two are portrayed as very low-keyed, unpretentious people who don’t like to socialize much and who, at their own wedding, resented the notion of a special table for the bride and groom. One of the changes made in the screen adaption was framing a story about internal emotions around a too-large, too-festive party. These characters wouldn’t have wanted to even attend such an event, much less host it. It becomes difficult to reconcile the cranky personality of the scruffy husband with the tuxedo-clad bon vivant willing to make public proclamations about his feelings for his wife. Similarly one wonders who created the invitation list for this party – surely not the solitary, introverted Kate who eschewed the demands of raising children because her life consisted of a very tiny bond of two.