After realizing that we'd never featured an Akira Kurosawa on Hit Me With Your Best Shot, we obviously had to. Ran (1985) was tempting but it gets a lot of attention already. So we opted to watch his other Shakespeare inspired masterpiece, Throne of Blood (1957) which is still the best Macbeth movie even if its more Macbeth-inspired than traditionally adapted.
If you've never seen it, give it a shot. It's gorgeous and haunting and unlike most Shakespeare films grippingly compact at only 110 minutes.
Hit Me With Your Best Shot(s)
Throne of Blood (1957)
Director: Akira Kurosawa; Cinematographer: Asakazu Nakai
Click on any of the 11 images to be taken to its accompanying article
Throne of Blood teaches us how to watch it.
-Antagony & Ecstasy
The minute we see Isuzu Yamada as Lady Asaji in this cold spare room, we know exactly where things will go...
-Scopophiliac at the Cinema
One of my favorite ideas in these Japanese stories is that the living and dead (or the supernatural) could live together, without a hereafter.
-Cal Roth
What Shakespeare does with language, Kurosawa and Noh do with movement.
-Dancin Dan on Film
Kurosawa injects into the tragedy of Macbeth an incredible sensorial expressiveness of poetic dimensions by placing it in mystic version of feudal japan.
-Magnificent Obsession
Fujimaki's own splatter-painting.
-The Film Experience
The staging of the two actors is just brilliant...
-Zev Burrows
The camera becomes like a piece of stagecraft
-Film Mix Tape
the vast space and the wealth that implies, as well as the ample room for Washizu and his wife to contemplate their guilt
-Film Actually
The movie builds with precision, early shots foreshadowing what is to come
-I/fpw
My favorite scene in Macbeth and they do it very well here
-Rachel Wagner
The End.
NEXT TUESDAY NIGHT WARNING: "NOW a warning?" It's Death Becomes Her (1992), rereleased in a collectors edition. Please join us for what will surely be a fun group of screengrabs