Art house theaters around the country celebrated Akira Kurosawa’s 100th birthday with a summer long celebration of the scion of postwar, action-based samurai cinema in 2010. That retrospective featured a dozen movies spanning the master’s entire career. With the New Year’s Day release of Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, now is a great time to look back on Kurosawa's intense, masterful and varied takes on The Bard.
Ran (1985) looks like Kurosawa took a time machine back to Sengoku-period Japan where he filmed the tragedy that unfolds in the aftermath of an aging warlord abdicating his rule to his three sons. With no CGI Kurosawa gives us a ravishing epic packed with extras colliding in jaw-dropping battle scenes that crash and slash and burn and bleed with impeccable realism. Kurosawa’s best film is based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, and the family and political drama in Ran are more than a match for the go-for-broke action. Although Ran includes some of the most over-the-top military clashes ever filmed, what makes this movie standout in Kurosawa’s filmography is its still formality. While Kurosawa pioneered multiple-camera shooting techniques to capture his over-populated fighting scenes, Ran is mostly made-up of long, locked-off shots that evoke the slow pace of feudal Japanese life, giving viewers an opportunity to luxuriate in Ran’s ravishing color palette, and wonder at the dynamic designs of the great Emi Wada who won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design for her work on Ran.
Kurosawa took on Macbeth with Throne of Blood (1957). The director’s adaptation pairs The Bard’s story about ambition and deceit with a distinctively Japanese visual style heavily influenced by the aesthetics of Noh theater. The great Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada play General Washizu and his wife Asaji – characters based on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. While Kurosawa borrows from Shakespeare’s characters and plot points he doesn’t bother to actually translate the play’s original poetry into Japanese. Instead it’s Asakazu Nakai’s cinematography that brings much of the poetry to the film’s frames with balanced compositions of characters in stylized poses – Nakai brought this same sensibility to Ran 28 years later. Production designer Yoshiro Muraki makes Nakai’s work easier here with his gorgeous black castle walls awash in fog and mist like something out of a Japanese scroll design.
The Bad Sleep Well (1960) also features Mifune, but this time in a modern tale about a young executive who hunts down his father’s killer. This adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet reminds me of Michael Almereyda’s excellent telling of The Dane’s story (Hamlet, 2000) in it’s re-casting of feudal Denmark in favor of contemporaneous capitalism and business culture. I love an intriguing corporate drama as much as the next movie lover, but Kurosawa ups the ante here by borrowing a film noir look for this film, bringing a sharp and sinister atmosphere to this exploration of greed and corruption. It’s interesting to note that The Bad Sleep Well was the first movie created by the director’s own Kurosawa Productions. I wonder if the pressures of financing his own movies was one of the elements providing the dark currents that inform this treacherous tale?
What other directors have created Shakespeare adaptations you've enjoyed? Why haven't we seen The Muppets: Hamlet or Panos Cosmatos' A Midsummer Night's Dream? Comment your faves or adaptations you'd love to see in the comments.
