Word: thrones
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...toilers in the shadows." "American History," contends Koenig, "is customarily written as a saga of great men, especially great Presidents. It needs also to be written-or rewritten-in terms of 'second men,' the spectral figures who toil influentially in the shadows around the presidential throne." Serving as "extensions of the President's personality, his eyes and ears," he adds, they cover a range "virtually as broad as the presidency itself...
Having read in the CRIMSON the excellent review of Kurasawa's "Throne of Blood," the Japanese Macbeth, I went last evening to see it. At the end "Macbeth" is murdered by his own men, in what the CRIMSON justly described as perhaps the most terrible such scene ever to be filmed; so terrible as to achieve a quality of tragic beauty and catharsis...
Though "based on" Macbeth, Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood retains only the psychology and basic plot. Gone is the poetry (at least for someone following the subtitles, which frequently achieve complete unintelligibility) and the primitive Scottish setting (replaced by medieval Japan, with its ritual, mounted warriors, and fog-shrouded plains). Throne of Blood--the only other title that the distributors came up with was the equally unhappy Castle of the Spider's Web--may well be closer to a redramatization of Holinshed than an adaptation of Shakespeare. But it is, however classified, a stunningly effective work...
...climax that he deviates most widely and most successfully. The minutes during which Macbeth is killed are literally the most terrible I can recall on the screen. Japanese directors seem peculiarly able to treat extremes of violence, neither leering nor covering up the gore. In Throne of Blood, as in Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain or Kobayashi's Harakiri, the violence leaves one shaken and, in something close to the Aristotelian sense, purged...
Montaigne's very motto-"What Do I Know?"-appeals to these inquiring times. His convictions have a contemporary ring. "How many condemna tions have I seen," he wrote, "more criminal than the crime!" He could ridicule pomp ("On the loftiest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our own rump"), pedants ("Won't they try to square the circle while perched on their wives?") and bigotry ("If she is a whore, must she also necessarily have bad breath?"). He had a psychiatrist's understanding of the mind: "Alas, poor man! You are miserable enough...