Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa's kabuki-like take on Macbeth, is one of the most involving adaptations of a Shakespeare play
The Japanese filmmaker cleverly strips the "Scottish play" of its minor characters and relocates it to medieval Japan. Toshiro Mifune's death scene is breathtaking.
On the surface, the story is the same: a witch prophesises that Macbeth/Washizu will become king/lord, and egged on by the ruthless ambition of his wife, he kills his way to the top. But the film's true greatness comes down to the Japanese auteur's disregard for strict adaptation - not so much a lack of respect, but a better understanding of a film's pacing and strengths.
By stripping Shakespeare's work of its minor characters and overlong soliloquies, resetting its Scottish roots to Japan's feudal sengoku period, and casting rough-necked frequent collaborator Toshiro Mifune in the lead, Kurosawa cleverly transposed the classic European theatrical production into a kabuki-like drama.
The result is one of the most involving adaptations of the bard's plays, a film at times tense and suspenseful, at others creepy and terrifying, and the gorgeous cinematography either wreathed in ominous fog or drenched in black-and-white blood.
But beneath the visual surface is an ethical undercurrent, initially traced from the witch's first appearance, her compelling song of the cycle of life warning the audience of the doom ahead: "All that awaits man/At the end of his travails/Is the stench of rotting flesh/That will yet blossom into a flower."