Macbeth on AllMovie

Breaking with their usual videotape tradition, the producers of NBC television's Hallmark Hall of Fame decided to commit its 1960 production of MacBeth to film. Maurice Evans stars as the fatally ambitious Scots warrior, with Judith Anderson as Lady MacBeth and Malcolm Keen as Duncan, whom MacBeth murders in order to further his own advancement. The production was a restaging of Hall of Fame's live presentation of the play, which was telecast in 1954. So impressed were Shakespeare scholars by Evans' interpretation of Macbeth that few complaints were made about the rather ruthless cutting of the Shakespearean text. This George Schafer-directed MacBeth was eventually released theatrically in Europe, its running time expanded by outtakes and newly filmed footage.