Joe Macbeth

“With every death in this house, Macbeth will rise,” presages fortune teller Rosie (Minerva Pious) who serves the role of Shakespeare’s three witches in Ken Hughes’ adaptation of “the Scottish play,” Joe Macbeth. Goaded by his power-hungry wife Lily (Ruth Roman), gangster Macbeth (Paul Douglas) murders grotesque mob boss Big Dutch (Harry Green), which sets him on a path of subsequent killings and intensifying guilt. Set in America but shot in England by an established director of British crime films (see, for example, The Deadliest Sin, 1955), Hughes’ film might suffer a bit from a miscast Douglas but more than compensates with plenty of noir atmosphere and beautifully sculpted scenes, like the poisoning of Big Dutch, the candlelit dining table where Macbeth upbraids his thugs, and the final shootout sequence in the pitch black of Macbeth’s lake house while the halyards clang by the docks outside. Perhaps Hughes’ master stroke is the evening scene in which Lily swims out to the raft to retrieve the murder weapon and then drops it in front of her nervous husband’s face. For another Macbeth-themed noir, take a look at Andrzej Wajda’s strange, dreamy Siberian Lady Macbeth (1962).