Throne of Blood (Toho; Brandon).
No doubt about it now: Japan's Akira Kurosawa must be numbered with Sergei Eisenstein and D. W. Griffith among the supreme creators of cinema. Rashomon (1952) introduced him to U.S. audiences as a powerful ironist. The Magnificent Seven (1956) demonstrated his mastery of movies as pure movement. Ikiru (1960), one of the screen's great spiritual documents, revealed him as a moralist both passionate and profound. Throne of Blood, a resetting of Macbeth among the clanking thanes and brutish politics of 16th century Japan, is a visual descent into the hell of greed and superstition, into the gibbering darkness of the primitive mind. It is a nerve-shattering spectacle of physical and metaphysical violence, quite the most brilliant and original attempt ever made to put Shakespeare in pictures.
Kurosawa's Shakespeare inevitably—and fortunately—involves more Kurosawa than Shakespeare. With blunt and vital irreverence the director has translated Shakespeare's words into Japanese images, Shakespeare's lords into Japanese barons. Even in Shakespeare's plot, Kurosawa has condensed detail, juggled scenes, chucked the sentimental excrescences—among them, thank heaven, the soap-operatic murder of poor little Baby Macduff. Kurosawa's intention is plainly to hack off the Gothic foliage of Shakespeare's fancy and compress his tale into that traditional form of Japanese theater known as noh. As in those vast dance-dramas of destiny, Kurosawa's actors run to the grand mythological gesture, speak in noble recitative, and are accompanied by a queer, irrelevant commentary of abstruse instruments that bip and pok and squitter on the sound track like a chorus of corpses chanting punctuation.
Compression is evident in the characters, too. Kurosawa's Macbeth is no reflective and susceptible villain, "too full o' the milk of human kindness." He is a sweat-simple soldier, as physical as his horse, and he is played with tremendous thrust and mien by Toshiro Mifune (the star of both Rashomon and The Magnificent Seven), who is surely the most prodigiously kinetic cinemactor since Doug Fairbanks. Similarly, Kurosawa's Lady Macbeth is no ambivalent amateur of crime who must "stop up the access and passage to remorse." She is simply the self and image of her husband's worser nature; she is a talking tarantula.
The structure of the film is stark but never static; Kurosawa impels his drama with demonic drive. From its first frenzied episode of plunging stallions and roaring knights, the film hurtles doomward like a great black boulder flung from a catapult. The spectator scarcely has time to realize, as the images deafen and the noises decorate his imagination, that he is experiencing effects of cinema seldom matched in their headlong masculine power of imagination. Among them:
> Several magnificent battle sequences in which the camera bounces among milling horses and screaming men like a decapitated head that still can see.
> The image of Fate in the forest, a ghost-pale crone who sits like a Norn at her spinning wheel, spinning the thread of life and croaking prophecies that fly out of her tomb-dark throat like bats.