Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant 1957 film Throne of Blood takes William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and sets it in feudal Japan with most interesting results. Often considered one of Kurosawa’s best and one of the best film adaptations of Macbeth, Throne of Blood is a chilling B&W epic with Noh staging and brilliant direction. Kurosawa was an admirer of Noh, the 14th century form of Japanese musical theatre, and used many elements from it to stage his characters and build his scenes in his films. Throne of Blood uses Noh theatre influences clearly, even in the editing and in the characterizations.
Like many of Kurosawa’s movies, the plot may be as much about his life as it is about the Shakespeare play he uses as a source. Despite not having the play’s script to work off of, Kurosawa designed Throne of Blood by following the events very closely and using personal experiences and thoughts to draw in the details. His lead characters are more sympathetic than those found in the Shakespeare play, but they are not necessarily relatable. In Throne of Blood, motivations to do evil are explored and presented as a lesson to be learned.
Of paramount important to Kurosawa here is the lust for power of his main character, Washizu Taketori (Toshirō Mifune). Throne of Blood is not a mere remake of Macbeth, but rather a planting of a human story in the soil of the Shakespearean masterpiece. Like all Kurosawa films, his use of literary and historical sources is apparent but never overpowering. Washizu models many elements of Noh theatre as a character, as Mifune’s makeup and facial expressions embody the character with life and vibrancy. This makes Mifune’s Washizu less an individual and more a typology. He is defining himself merely through his role.
Kurosawa uses the elements of Noh so boldly in Throne of Blood because he wanted to strip away the emotion of Macbeth and let the emotion instead embody itself in the landscape and texture of the film. Dealing in character types, then, makes the direction more appealing for someone like Kurosawa because, as we see when the “trees” move, it allows the scenery and the natural setting to come virtually alive in response to the characterizations. A common vision in Kurosawa films, the horse going wild, further illustrates the emotion he finds in nature.
Washizu is an ambitious lord, doubtlessly, but most of his drive comes from the whispering of his wife, Lady Asaji (Isuzu Yamada). Yamada inhabits Asaji eloquently, dressed up and made up in classic Noh fashion and expressing the archetype of the manipulative wife with care and attention. With Mifune and Yamada, the acting is so strong because it chooses not to be merely emotive. The performers and the director instead make the choice to inhabit these roles, to make them exist, and to let nature run its course. Egged on by Asaji, Washizu does many evil things to procure and maintain his status as the Great Lord over Spider Web Castle. In the end, however, he meets his doom at the hands of his own men. There is no Macduff here.
Kurosawa wants us to see the characters and to learn the lesson told by the story. Like old-fashioned mythology, Throne of Blood exists not for empathetic reasons but rather for reasons of teaching and learning. Thinking of Kurosawa as wanting to impart a lesson of the folly of human behaviour to his audience conjures up gentle visions of the master storyteller. With Throne of Blood, those gentle visions become a sweeping composition of cinema. His film is cold and distant because it must be. Like Noh, Throne of Blood needs to distance itself from the audience in order to pull itself closer in other ways.
So the beauty of Throne of Blood lies in learning the lesson about human greed, manipulation, and murder. As the bodies pile up to create Washizu’s throne, the implications are clear. Kurosawa’s storytelling and mythologizing is in top form with this one and it is another jewel in a brilliant career. The performances are solid from top to bottom, especially with Mifune and Yamada’s connivances and chemistry. There is pure evil in those bones, I say, and Kurosawa’s gift for putting distance between good and evil is legendary. Throne of Blood is certainly one of Kurosawa’s strongest tales and its texture, cinematography, characterizations, and performances are brilliant.
10/10
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