Attempting to rise above their standard B-movie fare, Republic Pictures agreed to produce Orson Welles’ adaptation of Macbeth. The extremely low budget compressed shooting into a brisk twenty-three days and most likely intensified the film’s raw, stylized edge. Dramatically angled within stark, jagged sets, Welles’ Macbeth cinematically wrenches Shakespeare’s original into an eerie, brutally expressionistic nightmare featuring an exquisitely choreographed ten-minute tracking shot of the play’s initial transgression. Here, the dark soliloquys hang in the looming fog and the curse of the three witches echoes to point toward a dark cycle rather than an end. Feeling cursed himself, Welles once again endured the studio’s disfiguring his creation with crude edits and replacing the actors’ quavering Scottish burrs with English-accented dialogue. It was not until 1980 that UCLA and Welles’ assistant Richard Wilson fully restored Welles’ original vision and also restored his reputation in the eyes of critics who immediately switched from complete dismissal to an embrace of the timeless tragedy as one of the director’s finest creations.