Word: macbeth
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Throne of Blood. A barbarically splendid Japanization of Macbeth; both brutalized and energized by Director Akira (Rashomon) Kurosawa, the Elizabethan tragedy becomes a noh play of demonic majesty...
...quilt of comfortably literary allusions. Mostly, though, a director doing modern-dress, colloquial Shakespeare is seduced by the cheap and easy thrills he can tickle out of his audience simply by staging a series of recognition scenes. "Ah," the people exclaim with delight, "the riveter's wife is Lady Macbeth!" And if the director is lucky, no one in the theatre will pause to ask, "So what...
Throne of Blood. A barbarically splendid Japanization of Shakespeare's Macbeth; both brutalized and energized by Director Akira (Rashomon) Kurosawa, the Elizabethan tragedy becomes a noh play of demonic majesty...
...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...
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...