The look of [Macbeth], which is after all the most important part of a film, is seldom felicitous. Macbeth's castle has even less geography than Hamlet's film Elsinore; it looks all too often like a rain-soaked scenic railway at a fun fair, a castle hewn from papier mâché rocks, but Welles is not the first producer of the play to have difficulty with the period. A vague impression of Wagnerian timelessness sits on the costumes. Few of the voices have an American tinge and it would not matter if they had; a sort of plausible Scots burr is generally aimed at.

What of the text there is remains unaltered, for the greater part, and it is spoken slowly, not to say funereally, either as dialogue or as soliloquy, dubbed over anguished, tight-lipped close-ups of the "speaker"; this can be effective, as it has been in Olivier's Shakespeare films, but meets with the usual difficulty: i.e. that we are forced to look, to watch, when all we ought, or need, to do is to listen. In other words where Shakespeare uses his unmatched power of evoking the mood, the thought, the scene by word alone, the camera feels itself to be a shy and otiose interloper…. Welles, fine film maker, is not unaware of the camera's power to add a visual counterpoint undreamt by Shakespeare. (pp. 22-3)

[Parts] of the great poetic drama come over well…. In such episodes we have an earnest of what Welles was trying for and in part has succeeded in doing. On the other hand, imagination is checked where we are shown too literally what in the play is only brought to us as a frightening rumour…. The appalling difficulties of trying to recreate a masterpiece of one sort of medium … in terms of another, so utterly different, have not been ignored or solved. Those who are interested in the problem will find much to discuss; and those who come ignorant of Shakespeare to the cinema will probably receive an impression of portentous dismay, which is, after all, something. The attempt should not be written off as a failure, though one cannot help thinking that a more powerful effect might have been achieved if the film, properly, had been silent; simply a series of blood-curdling illustrations to a series of anonymous declamations from the sound track. (p. 23)