Throne of Blood
Everything in Akira Kurosawa‘s Throne of Blood is spot-on, as usual. The leads — Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada as the ostensible Macbeth and Lady Macbeth — are impeccable as Kurosawa blends the Shakespeare tragedy with Japanese Noh performance, with a dose of John Ford western for good measure.
It’s a tightly crafted, brilliantly acted, pared-down adaptation of Macbeth set in feudal Japan.
What more can be said about the 1957 film (or any of Kurosawa’s other 29 films, for that matter) that hasn’t been said?
So rather than re-analyze Throne of Blood, I want to ask a question I think about often as I’m watching, in particular, foreign films: How much am I missing?
In film club, most of the movies we watch were produced years ago, in other countries, and in languages other than English. We’re viewing them from a 2020s, American perspective. We’re not watching the movies in the context they were produced.