Throne of Blood (110 mins, PG) Directed by Akira Kurosawa; starring Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada
Akira Kurosawa, who died three years ago at 88, is having his prodigious 50-year career celebrated these next two months by a complete retrospective at the National Film Theatre. He was a great humanist and moralist whose work was both peculiar to Japan and universal. Whether set in the past or present, his films make us look again at society and history and, above all, to look into ourselves. Rashomon won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951 and was the first Japanese picture to be shown widely abroad. The title entered the language as a term for the uncertainty of facts, the impossibility of arriving at absolute truth. But to those taught during the Second World War that the Japanese were subhuman, undifferentiated monsters, Rashomon and the films that followed constituted an unforgettably transformative experience. I recall seeing it in 1952 at the seedy Futurist Cinema in Lime Street, Liverpool, where it was being exploited as an erotic Oriental movie about rape. It affected me as no film has before or since, and I emerged with my ideas about Japan, its people and culture completely changed.
The Fifties and Sixties were Kurosawa's greatest decades and the movie with the most screenings in the season (more than 30) is Throne of Blood (1957), first of his three Shakespeare adaptations, the others being The Bad Sleep Well, a social melodrama transposing Hamlet to corporate Japan (1960) and Ran (1985), his King Lear. Following Macbeth closely and made in the heightened Noh style, Throne of Blood stars his most frequent collaborator, the commanding Toshiro Mifune, as General Washizu, a warrior in a rain-drenched, windswept, fog-shrouded medieval Japan.
The interior scenes are sharp, precise, hypnotic. The exteriors, of horses galloping through the forest, or of cavalry men charging up hills of volcanic ash to Cobweb Castle, the film's Dunsinane, have an exhilarating dynamism. The images are unforgettable - the meeting with the witch, a wraithlike figure spinning in the forest, for instance, or the death of Washizu in a storm of arrows that turns him into a human pincushion. The death of Boromir in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings is the latest homage to the death of Kurosawa's Macbeth.
