Fans of Shakespeare (text) know that Macbeth is a psychological trip into the paranoid mind of a killer. If Shakespeare had a camera, I'm sure he would've done it in the style of German expressionism (Caligari, Nosferatu, Metropolis) and used surrealistic set pieces, menacing shadows, and a barren nightmarescape to convey Macbeth's subjective descent. After all, the text takes us into the mind of the madman, shouldn't the visuals?

That's exactly what Orson Welles did here, much to the confusion of American audiences & critics when it was released. It's really a film noir Macbeth--film noir itself being a direct descendant of German expressionism where reality is distorted in order to convey mood. As Macbeth's mind sinks deeper into madness and paranoia, so the set, the lighting, and the almost painfully awkward camera angles become more pronounced. Meanwhile the castle itself becomes larger and more sinister, more like a prison or a twisted cavern (literally using Republic Film's coal mine set) than a royal palace. It really brings Welles's performance and Shakespeare's text to light.

It's a cryin shame that American audiences were too dense to get it, and at the same time European audiences were shunning Welles's grandiloquent visual style in favor of raw Neorealism. This was a case of the perfect movie made at the wrong time. But that's exactly why history will prove this to be timeless.