Kumonosu Jô (1957) Cobweb Castle (USA: Throne Of Blood) - Dual Audio Remaster

Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Starring Toshirô Mifune.
Includes choice of two alternative English subtitles by Linda Hoaglund and Donald Richie.
You come to a film like Cobweb Castle slightly cowed. The names Akira Kurosawa and William Shakespeare are enough to make the most pompous film buff swoon. After all, how could you not acknowledge this duo's supreme reign over the worlds of foreign film and drama? It simply has to be stunning, right?


And, in fact, it is. Even when you strip away everything you know about the director of Seven Samurai and the author of Macbeth, you're still left with a thrilling epic about ambition and murder, shot in crisp, memorable images with intense actors (one of which, of course, is famous enough in his own right to have an obscure Swedish comedy named after him: the incomparable Toshirô Mifune).


Kurosawa's take on the timeless Shakespeare drama, easily transplanted into feudal Japan, is supremely stylized. Wildly exaggerated faces and gestures in the tradition of Japanese Noh theater create a purified reality, as if the film was looking for the distilled essence of the drama.


Shot in 1957, the film alters moody castles, stark interiors, and the forest where the spirits stir Lord Washizu's desires. In one famous sequence, the samurai ride in and out of a never-lifting fog again and again. Lady Macbeth, here known as Lady Asaji (Isuzu Yamada), is wicked cold and manipulative. Her alien makeup only increases the uncanny sense that her desires are all too familiar.


With one or two brief exceptions, Cobweb Castle doesn't offer the extended battle scenes fans of Kurosawa's 1985 Ran might expect. That movie, an adaptation of King Lear, remains the benchmark for bloody Shakespearean samurai slaughter. Here, the director's attention is focused closer on the characters, and the film's rhythm alternates dreamy long takes with furious fast-cutting action.


Cobweb Castle also features the most evocative approach of Great Birnam wood on Dunsinane - here Mount Fuji - that I have seen in any adaptation of Macbeth. As Michael Jeck points out on the fine commentary track, Kurosawa even one-ups Shakespeare as a writer when he provides motivation and ties the noose of ill fate ever tighter around Macbeth/Washizu's neck.


In terms of narrative, Cobweb Castle stays close to the original, focusing on the overreaching ambition of samurai warrior Washizu (Mifune). Visually, though, Cobweb Castle spectacularly transforms the source play - turning it into a terrifying journey through darkness, evil, and despair.


As the tyrannical usurper, Mifune is amazing, strutting around the frame with a maniacal restlessness that stems first from repressed ambition and then from guilt-ridden anxiety. Constantly straining against some invisible leash, Mifune's Macbeth is a man whose desires cannot be contained within the film's claustrophobic spaces (forts, castles, and fog-clouded battlefields).


Taking the strict formality and stylized action of the Japanese Noh drama as a starting point, Kurosawa crafts a series of incredible sequences, full of striking contrasts. The scene where Lady Washizu sends her husband off to perform the murderous deed is breathtaking in its pure simplicity - the camera lingers over her motionless form as she waits for him to return, taking in each subtle flicker of her face, capturing her emotional turmoil in all that doesn't happen, before exploding in a frenzy of activity as she leaps to her feet.


Such contrasts occur repeatedly, from the shifts between light and shadow, to the juxtaposed sequences of military action (as hundreds of soldiers charge the fort), and Mifune's solitary ravings. The film's closing scene captures Washizu's fatal flaw perfectly, as the bubble of his ambition is finally burst by a hundred arrows. No wonder it has become an iconic moment in cinema history.