Throne of Blood (1957)

Murderous ambition will pursue
Beyond the grave to give its due.

For more than one reason, Throne of Blood can be regarded as the film that inaugurated the second half of Akira Kurosawa's illustrious career. Numerically, it's the 16th feature (of 30) that he produced in his lifetime. It was also the first film he made after the global impact (financially and culturally) of Seven Samurai had been fully reckoned with, though he released I Live in Fear between the two samurai epics. Kurosawa would continue his practice of alternating historic and contemporary themed films for several more years, but this is the point at which his reputation became more clearly attached to the big-budget costume dramas that he would ultimately rely on to re-establish himself as a top-flight director decades later, after his reputation and film-making opportunities declined for reasons I still don't fully understand. (But we'll get to all that here at Criterion Reflections, eventually!)

With Kurosawa now firmly entrenched in the movie-going world's popular imagination as "director of Rashomon and Seven Samurai," a certain pressure must have been felt to come up with something massive, memorable and innovative as those two masterworks. Throne of Blood feels simultaneously bigger and more stripped down, a timeless transcultural epic with an outcome that ultimately hinges on the fragile interconnections between individuals irreducibly estranged from each other, a slice of medieval history where fate and the supernatural seem to have as strong a guiding hand as the tribal forces and personal ambitions that we see at work in the narrative.

The common, and justifiable, take on Throne of Blood is that it's Kurosawa's adaptation of Shakespeare's play Macbeth. Anyone familiar with the story elements of Macbeth will quickly recognize their appearance here: Two valiant generals lead their troops to push back a mutinous insurrection, but before they can return to their sovereign's camp to receive their accolades, they're encountered by occultic figure(s) who utter a mysterious prophecy concerning them. One would swiftly assume the throne of the domain, while the other's son would ultimately succeed him as potentate. Though both men express skepticism afterwards, chalking up the strange apparition to battle fatigue, circumstances quickly fall into place that indicate the prophecy may be accurate. The man foretold to replace the current lord tells his wife about the prophecy, and she goads her husband into taking the brutal murderous steps that will guarantee the oracle's final outcome. But this exercise in treachery, while yielding short-term benefits of power and prestige, ultimately drive the couple to madness, and their fall is swift and harsh. An eerie, ghostly pall hangs over the proceedings as actors and audience alike find themselves locked into an unrelenting meditation on the dark inner workings of human nature, particularly whenever ambition, paranoia and a lust for control are involved.

However, if you want to see Macbeth on film, I recommend Roman Polanski's version over Throne of Blood, even though I think Kurosawa made the superior film. Saying that Throne of Blood is the best adaptation of Shakespeare or even just Macbeth on film, as literary critic Harold Bloom famously did in one of his books on Shakespeare, is characteristically hyperbolic and an insult to Shakespeare, imo, because it implies that Shakespeare's writing and dialog are secondary to his plots. (It also reveals Blooms ignorance pertaining to cinema.) Besides, there are numerous differences between the play and Kurosawa's film. I won't take the time to spell them out here. If you're curious, Michael Jeck's info-heavy but annoyingly pedantic commentary track on the Criterion DVD points them out, or you can check out this essay (or pay for a few other "cheat sheets" available on the same topic.)

Focusing directly on Throne of Blood then, what we get from Kurosawa is an absorbing period story set in medieval Japan that incorporates theatrical elements from the Noh tradition, returning for the first time (I think) to that source since making The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail ten years earlier. This lends the film a highly stylized sense of formality that enhances the emotional power achieved by Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada in their roles of depraved couple of Washizu (the Macbeth figure) and his wife Asaji. Mifune is in his prime here, demonstrating enormous versatility (and courage) as he transitions back to the image of commanding strength and robust virility he showed in Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy after appearing as a man physically wrecked and emotionally paralyzed by dread of radiation in I Live in Fear. His ability to project physical dominance and fearless courage, both before and after his entanglement with the prophecy and Asaji's sinister calculations, makes his inevitable fall all the more tragic as we see how easily a loyal and seemingly virtuous commander can be seduced into treason and unbridled arrogance.

In terms of scale, Kurosawa wisely avoids the trap of trying to top Seven Samurai with his follow-up samurai epic, trimming the running time by nearly a hundred minutes and focusing the action on a smaller and less complex set of central characters. But with the larger production budget afforded by Seven Samurai's popularity, he created a memorable environment in Spider's Web Castle, a massive set built on Mt. Fuji's high-altitude volcanic wasteland. We first see its ruins in a haunting opening shot, where a mournful chorus sings a dirge about the castle's grim fate and a fog bank rolls in, then back out, revealing the castle at an earlier point in time before its destruction, almost as if the buildings we see are ghostly mirages themselves. The practical necessity of putting a fortress in such a blasted chaotic landscape isn't addressed - according to the story, the fortress sits in the middle of a dense, labyrinthine forest - but the atmosphere conjured by the black soil and swirling fog matches the barrenness that Washizu and Asaji's power-play ultimately produces. (Side note: This is the second straight movie on my blog about a couple atop an empire without an heir to pass it on to, but considering how the siblings at the center of Written on the Wind turned out, natural inheritance is no guarantee of stable succession either!)

The other big budget touch, and a sign of even grander proportioned things to come, are the "cast of thousands" battle scenes featuring hundreds of soldiers in period uniforms and mounted cavalry. A solemn funeral procession at the one-hour mark adds to the pageantry, showing Kurosawa's confidence in allowing long slow-moving scenes to pull the viewer deeper into moods of claustrophobic and inevitable doom. Earlier in the film, another fog-shrouded scene depicts Washizu and his ally (at the time) Miki, simply riding their horses in and out of the mist, a simple cinematic maneuver that perfectly communicates the confused disorientation that's overtaken these normally resourceful and resilient men. Adding to the eeriness, musical director Masuru Sato layers shrieking bamboo flutes, clattering percussion and strenuous, howling vocalizations to the soundtrack. It was Sato's first collaboration with Kurosawa, who succeeded the deceased Fumio Hayasaka, composer for all of Kurosawa's previous films dating back to 1949's Stray Dog, as well as Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff. Given the crucial role that music played in Kurosawa's cinematic efforts, this was a big transition, but Sato proved capable of the task, handling these duties for Kurosawa for the next decade or so.

And speaking of transitions, this was the first role where an aging Takashi Shimura steps back from prominence and dwells clearly in Mifune's shadow as the younger man's star power completed its unstoppable eclipse of his senior actor. As one who's come to greatly respect Shimura the man and artist via exposure to his films, observing this passage seems significant enough to me to warrant a brief mention.

An unusual distinction of this Criterion DVD is the offering of dueling subtitles. I've watched the film with both and even though the liner notes give each translator (Linda Hoaglund and Donald Richie) the platform to explain their interpretive principles, I couldn't distinguish enough of a difference to recommend one over the other. But here are transcriptions from both versions of one of the film's more poetic passages, troubling lyrics croaked out by an old ghost turning a spinning wheel.

Hoaglund:

Strange is the world

Why should men receive life in this world?

Men's lives are as meaningless as the lives of insects

The terrible folly of such suffering

A man lives but as briefly as a flower

Destined all too soon to decay into the stink of flesh

Humanity strives all its days to sear its own flesh

In the flames of base desire

Exposing itself to Fate's Five Calamities

Heaping karma upon karma

All that awaits man at the end of his travails

Is the stench of rotting flesh

That will yet blossom into flower

Its foul odor rendered into sweet perfume

Oh fascinating, the life of Man, oh fascinating

Richie:

Men are vain and death is long

And pride dies first within the grave

For hair and nails are growing still

When face and fame are gone

Nothing in this world will save

Or measure up man's actions here

Nor in the next, for there is none

This life must end in fear

Only evil may maintain an afterlife for those who will

Who love this world, who have no son, to whom ambition calls

Even so, the false fame falls

Death will reign; man dies in vain

So even though Throne of Blood doesn't exactly hand out the reward of a fun time at the movies, the sheer virtuosity of the creative talents involved and the depth of themes it touches on make this a most worthwhile film to immerse oneself in and revisit from time to time. The way Kurosawa alternates between austere interior compositions where emotional tensions internally devour the psyches of their inhabitants to his trademark exteriors of hard rains, whipping winds and kinetic tracking shots is breath-taking in its command. Echoes of Rashomon (camera pointed up into the trees) and Seven Samurai (rapid cuts of men charging on horseback across the screen), and of course the "wipes," deepen the impression that Kurosawa's distinctive cinematic vocabulary leaves on any who choose to study him closely. And then there's that climactic death scene, where Washizu, at the end of the short tether that fate has leashed him to, flails to find an escape route between the attacking armies amassed outside his fortress and the newly-rebellious soldiers just now realizing that their commander has led them to their own slaughter. Ignoring Washizu's last call-to-arms, his archers now turn their bows toward the insane general in their own futile effort to blot away the horrific stain of a Throne of Blood, unrighteously usurped. Kurosawa's finale, altered from Macbeth in that there is no noble scion who steps forth to restore honor to the desecrated throne, only a ruined castle and foreboding words of warning etched on a forlorn and desolate pole, points toward a pessimistic mindset - that collective efforts to improve and redeem society from past injustices don't prove sufficient to erase the injustice and suffering that accompany evil's triumph, brief as it may seem. That tendency toward nihilistic conclusions may mark the ultimate reason as to what makes Throne of Blood a more definitive marking point in Kurosawa's career. Even the cynicism noted at the end of Seven Samurai and I Live in Fear contains at least a spark of ambivalent resignation. Throne of Blood scans its blighted horizon and sees... only darkness.

But hey, why end things here on such a dismal note? Here's the obligatory YouTube clip, but with a rudely comedic twist. It's that famous "firing real arrows, Mifune's not really acting" death of Washizu scene, though presented here without - let me emphasize that, WITHOUT - its accompanying original soundtrack (and slightly sped up.) I know it will strike some as highly inappropriate, even blasphemous if that's a fair word to use (and I don't think it's that far off the mark, Kurosawa being so highly venerated and all) but just relax and go with it. The regular trailer is easy to find, but substantial scenes from the film, not so much. But if any readers would prefer a more reverent or representative clip, leave me a comment and I'll do my best to find one for you.