Roman Polanski's Macbeth [is] all but the worst Shakespeare ever filmed. If it wasn't as Now as Tony Richardson's Hamlet or as West-Side-Storyish as Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet … it was more blatant than either and distilled even less poetry, verbal or visual. (p. 170)

Polanski's setting is a panoramic slaughter-house in which the language is only impedimenta unreasonably holding up the "action." When, in a brief intercut moment, Banquo observes, "It will be rain tonight," and the murderer, felling him with a blow, remarks, "Let it come down," the director should cry, "Cut!—and print it!" To extend this encounter to a prolonged combat and knifings in the creekbed, like a Western sequence, is to dissipate hopelessly the terse irony of that inspired figure of speech. All the way, this film gets further and further out instead of driving steadily inward to the lining of the metaphor and the...