theimpossiblescheme:

I could honestly write an entire freaking essay on the Orson
Welles movie version of Macbeth.  Like how the Weird Sisters are given
infinitely more power than was ever hinted in the original play and how Macbeth
begins to take on more and more of their worldview and even their iconography
even as they’re pushing him forward to his doom.  How there’s an added subtext of Christian
prayer versus pagan magic in the added character of Alan Napier’s Holy Father
and how much more important Macbeth’s line about not being able to say “amen”
after killing Duncan becomes with it.
How Lady Macduff is directly contrasted with Lady Macbeth in some scenes
as the gentle, compassionate, and relatively chaste light feminine against the
violent, cruel, and seductive dark feminine.
How the character of Malcolm is made so much more tragic and pathetic by
the decision to remove the scene where he’s testing Macduff’s loyalty, showing
him more as a boy playing at being king rather than the man who would be king.  How it’s arguably both more and less of a
tragedy because Macbeth is made into a hapless puppet playing out a prophecy
that he himself shaped, and the line “Peace, the charm’s wound up!” is moved to
the very end to reflect that fact.  How
there’s a ten minute long unbroken shot
from the moment Macbeth first goes into Duncan’s chamber to the moment the
alarm is sounded to wake the castle, and you can just cut the tension with a
knife the entire time…

One of these days, I will have the energy to write that
essay.

Also the moment where the witches all raise their odd, forked sticks in perfect synch and croak “hail” in a flat, dead voice is TERRIFYING.