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Audio Format: DD Mono Video Format: Standard 1.33:1 (B&W) Languages: Japanese Subtitles: English Region Code: 1 Year Made: 1957 Running Time: 109
 Macbeth is reimagined as a samurai in feudal Japan in director Akira Kurosawa's classic adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy. Familiar with Orson Welles's more faithful adaptation, Kurosawa chose to place a more personal stamp on his version by translating the events and characters to historical Japan. The equivalent of the tragic Scottish lord is Taketoki Washizu (Toshiro Mifune), a valiant warrior whose life is transformed by an encounter with a ghostly female spirit. The spirit offers several predictions, finally stating that Washizu will rise to power over the current warlord.
When these predictions begin coming true, he and his ambitious wife decide to ensure his ascendancy to power by murdering the current ruler. As with Macbeth, Washizu achieves his goal, but his guilt and the suspicions of others soon bring about his downfall. The shift to Japanese settings is seamless, creating a historically accurate and resonant work with a culturally distinct visual style. The supporting performances also recall Japanese tradition, particularly Isuzu Yamada's creepily unemotional take on Lady Macbeth, while Mifune proves consistently gripping in the sheer intensity of his performance. The intelligence of Kurosawa's alterations retains the drama's tragic impact, especially during the conclusion, in which Washizu makes a memorable final stand against an advancing army. Impressive in every regard, Throne of Blood seems secure in the pantheon of superior film adaptations of William Shakespeare.
In the first moments of Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa's self-assured reimagination of Shakespeare''s Macbeth as a samurai epic, we see the Japanese landscapes that provide the backdrop for the action as they are enveloped in a thick mist. In the final moments of the film, after the people's plans have been thwarted and the mighty have fallen, we see the mist roll in to reclaim the land. By framing this tragic tale of human ambition this way, Kurosawa seems to be underscoring the futility of any such determination. Unlike Shakespeare, he doesn't even pause to show us the successor to the throne. At the end of this game, nature, not any man, is the true ruler of the land. Everything about Throne of Blood is similarly focused on an earthy insistence that these ambitions are entirely unnatural. Instead of chastising her husband's masculinity as Lady Macbeth did when Macbeth balks before killing the king, Lady Washizu prods her husband (Toshiro Mifune) onward by reminding him that the king himself killed his predecessor to ascend to the throne. This radical shift in the text slides the blame from Washizu specifically onto the culture at large. He's not transgressing the rules of his society so much as living up to its skewed standards.
Kurosawa's dim view of humanity in the face of nature in Throne of Blood is reflected everywhere visually. The forest spirit that prophesizes Washizu's fate (and recalls the medium from Kurosawa's Rashomon) is only the most overtly eerie benchmark of the consistently disturbing imagery that the film offers up. The shots of her spinning her silk as she sings a mysterious dirge of doom are scarier than any Western witch ever was. Nearly every visual that the film throws at us similarly seems as if it's been calculated to stir up unrest in the audience though. Kurosawa creates here a world with a real sense of scale, but then uses filters of rainfall, sunlight, and dust to create a moody atmosphere that you can't quite shake. When the forest begins to encroach upon Cobweb Castle at the end of the film, and birds begin to assault Washizu, Kurosawa's imagery creates the same sense of dread in the audience as in Washizu since it's so disturbingly unreal. He masks the soldiers that are carrying the bushes in a thick shroud of fog so that it seems as if nature itself is approaching the castle, ready to attack.
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