No./12 Something Coen-y this way comes

How The Tragedy Of Macbeth was a Coen/shakespeare fusion foretold

THE PRICE OF AMBITION

Macbeth’s fatal flaw is political ambition, and then going on a killing spree. Likewise: Johnny Casper takes over the rackets in Miller’s Crossing; Norville Barnes ascends the corporate ranks in The Hudsucker Proxy; Llewelyn Moss grabs the cash in No Country For Old Men; and Ed Crane, noodling Californian barber in The Man Who Wasn’t There, is seduced by the dry-cleaning business.

WITCHES, GHOSTS AND DREAMS

A triumvirate of wackadoodle hags sets Macbeth on his path to ruin — and so we see the bumbling escapees of O Brother, Where Art Thou? waylaid by a trio of siren-like washerwomen, while in

A Serious Man, harried Larry Gopnik seeks answers from a trio of increasingly circumspect rabbis, and a prophetic spirit or ‘dybbuk’ comes calling in that film’s folktale opening. Meanwhile, Norville Barnes is instructed by an angelic Waring Hudsucker, Barton Fink’s loopy-loo neighbour Charlie Meadows is generally taken to be an apparition, Ed sees flying saucers in The Man Who Wasn’t There, and Tom Regan chases his hat in Miller’s Crossing.

LADY MACBETH

There are numerous echoes of literature’s scheming spouse and her slippery marbles. Maude Lebowski is a cool customer big on spots in her strongly vaginal avant-garde paintings.

Doris Crane goes crackers in The Man Who Wasn’t There. But the prime example is surely Walter in The Big Lebowski, whose advice to BFF (né spiritual spouse) The Dude is the root cause of the escalating crisis.

BEST-LAID PLANS

As Loren Visser, devilish private eye in Blood Simple, muses: “Something can always go wrong.” It’s an axiom of both Shakespearean and Coen landscapes that no-one ever gets away clean. See: Blood Simple, Fargo, No Country For Old Men et al. THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH IS IN SELECT CINEMAS THIS WINTER AND ON APPLE TV+ FROM 14 JANUARY