Christopher Hitchens made fun of Polanski for having his name above the title and Shakespeare's name below it. I guess that was Polanski's decision.
But the movie really was Polanski's thing. After a pre-title scene, the first shot of the movie is of an actor who looks just like Charles Manson. He uses a mace to brutally murder a dying soldier after a battle. Polanski modeled the scene of the McDuffs being massacred in their castle after the time the Nazis ransacked his family's apartment. When someone suggested less blood, Polanski reportedly said "I know violence. You should've seen my house last summer" (when his wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered.)
I've seen other versions of Macbeth and this movie was way more Polanski than Shakespeare. Gives credence to the auteur theory. I don't think Kurosawa gave Shakespeare a screen credit at all for Throne of Blood.
The actual Macbeth was supposedly one of my ancestors. Once they find a royal in your family tree, it's easy to trace you ancestry way, WAY back. They traced my family back to a couple of centuries before Christ. But who knows. Until recently, you could only know for sure who your mother was. It's hard to believe that, through all those centuries, not one lady ancestor had a boyfriend.
In a way, the movie was like Roger Corman's The St. Valentine's Day Massacre which had so much killing and machine gunning that, by the time they got to the Massacre itself, it was kind of a letdown.
There's so much blood in this movie, it's silly for Lady Macbeth to worry about one damned spot.
The movie was made for $3 million in 1971. That's still only $18 million in today's money. It would be considered a low budget movie today, at least in Hollywood. How did they get so much more for their money back then?
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