Category: The Classics

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Let’s forget for a moment that you and I have both seen “The Wizard of Oz” more times than we can count. Let’s forget that it’s been parodied to death, that its been remade as “The Wiz,” that it kind of syncs up with Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” that “Wicked” ever happened (seriously, I’d like this one to actually be true) and that some of us have likely been over the rainbow to Munchkinland dozens of times.

No one needs to write or talk about “The Wizard of Oz” anymore than has already been done, but some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don’t they?

I probably hadn’t seen “The Wizard of Oz” in full for a solid five years. I knew very well that it was a classic, but its one of those movies that people give carte blanche. Would I actually love it as much as when I was younger now that I could think of things I never thunk before? On the weekend of Judy Garland’s 90th birthday, I decided to sit and think some more.

My sister asked me as we began watching “The Wizard of Oz” what I could possibly write down in my notes. “It’s a timeless masterpiece,” she said, which I responded is precisely something I would write down. My goal was to see what really makes this movie tick. It is wonderful, but why? How is it different? How would I have reacted seeing it for the first time in 1939?

“The Wizard of Oz” is a wonderfully imaginative piece of Old Hollywood filmmaking at the era’s best. It’s epic and sprawling, but economical. It’s silly, but also smart and self-aware. It’s heart-warming and light, but also creepy and surreal. It’s the kind of movie that people forget also deserves the label “masterpiece” because it’s fun. Continue reading “The Wizard of Oz (1939)”

The Up Documentaries

From left to right, Bruce, John, Peter, Andrew, Jackie, Lynn, Tony, Neil, Charles, Sue, Simon, Paul, Suzy and Nick at 21

If The Up Series of documentaries are the greatest documentaries ever made, it is because it is the finest document of life ever recorded on film.

Every seven years since 1963, Director Michael Apted has done little more than check in on a group of 14 people. He’s been at it since they were 7 years old, and now in 2012, they are 56 and the latest chapter of the series has just finished airing on ITV in England.

Apted has asked about their hopes, dreams, loves, marriages, children, politics, ideologies, jobs and families. He asks about life.

His questions are short and simple, always delivered calmly and with resolve, and yet they require some soul searching in these people every seven years. Their answers arouse memories and emotions. Through their responses in each film, we are given the opportunity to draw comparisons. We can see the child they were and the adult they have become.

No documentary has ever been this ambitious. It is likely no team of filmmakers ever will again, although there have been copycats of this series from around the globe.

But the real beauty is that these are ordinary individuals. They are as true to life as you and me. At the age of seven, they did not choose this spotlight, and some have abandoned it altogether. They were chosen because they were people, and life, above all, is something that deserves to be documented, viewed and cherished.

Below are the stories and developments behind all seven films, excluding the most recent, which has not yet been released in America.

Seven Up!

“Give me a child until the age of 7, and I will show you the man.” Continue reading “The Up Documentaries”

Rapid Response: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse

Gene Siskel would always ask, “Is this film more interesting than a documentary about how it was made?”

Such has been the guiding logic with “Hearts of Darkness,” a documentary on the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” The production hell this film went through is still unrivaled in terms of sheer difficulty and complexity, and some would argue (see: recent episode of “Community”) that the telling of such an immense story actually surpasses Coppola’s masterpiece. “Hearts of Darkness” stands for the same themes of surreal unpredictability and radical change of perspective that “Apocalypse” is about, and it is mystifying and immersive in the way it engages us with such powerful, conflicting emotions.

And yet, you likely couldn’t make a documentary as interesting as this if the subsequent film weren’t also fairly interesting. The Coppola we see has mixed feelings about his film, viewing it as a potential masterpiece with ambitions that are so great and tell so much, and yet he knows that achieving such a vision on film is virtually impossible. Almost never throughout the course of filming is Coppola completely satisfied with his actors, his sets or his own words. He hates the ending most of all, and he said as much at Cannes. Here he calls it too macho an ending, and something closer to the novel would have been more appropriate.

But he never quits in filming. The artwork is done in the process, and it is a never ending process. The art doesn’t stop when the cameras cut. Anyone working that tirelessly and following along with the art at every stage of its development could drive a person insane. But he boldly asserts that you must act as if you are going forward and finishing whatever you’ve claimed, even if it turns into a vanity project that only answers questions for you. They’ll call it pretentious, and that’s what all filmmakers fear, but if it can’t even answer questions for him, then what good is it?

Coppola’s experience in the woods and swamps of the Philippines to make his Vietnam War epic changed his worldview, but perhaps the finished product of his film never answered the questions he sought. Thankfully, “Apocalypse Now” is hardly pretentious.

Director Fax Behr constructs a story from Eleanor Coppola’s documentary footage that truly gets at Francis’s psychological complexity. It’s a chronological retelling of the over 200 days they spent filming, beginning with the origins of “Heart of Darkness” as a film. Orson Welles wanted Joseph Conrad’s novel to be his first film. When the budget was too vast, he made “Citizen Kane” instead.

Coppola tried again before making “The Godfather,” but no studio wanted to deal with the ties to Vietnam. The script was again shelved for years. But after the success of both “Godfather” films, he had directorial freedom and financed $13 million himself. After 10 days of filming, he made the first hard choice and fired his then lead actor, Harvey Keitel, replacing him with Martin Sheen. Sheen was so much his character that it altered his personality. He later suffered from a severe heart attack and was read his Last Rites by a non-English speaking priest.

Coppola also juggled a collaboration with the Philippine military, his $1 million contract with an overweight, difficult and unprepared Marlon Brando, a typhoon that killed 200 local residents and the construction of a massive temple with the help of hundreds. The Gods seemed to be against this film, and Coppola’s hubris flied in his undying defiance to it all.

He really does not come across as entirely rational or sympathetic here. His requirements for a scene inside a luxuriously dream like French home (later cut from the theatrical version, but now available on Redux) sound petty when he requires that red wine be served at 58 degrees, and when all of the things that would make it perfect are not met, he shows his true personal anger and frustration.

“Hearts of Darkness’s” behind the scenes moments are so evocative of “Apocalypse Now,” such as in the caribou slaughter scene or in the infamous shot of a flair being shot high into the dark sky, and yet some of it can seem self-indulgent, complex and vague without meaning or direction. These feelings are perversions of themselves. They conflict at every turn, and so do the ambitions of “Apocalypse Now.” It’s a miracle of embattled ideas and personalities.

What’s impossible to now know is the media firestorm that circled around this project in the 1970s. Today, news would have spread much quicker, been much more fierce and may have killed the project sooner, but Coppola’s fiasco was unheard of. He was not a David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock or Cecil B. Demille. He was a new kid on the block, even if he had won Oscars just before, and this smacked of pretension beyond any.

This film also helped spread misleading rumors about the “actual ending” to the film, in which it is believed that in another version, Kurtz’s entire complex explodes. A still of this image exists in the credits of “Apocalypse Now,” and this film has marvelous footage of the actual set being demolished, but it was merely a necessity captured on film and not scripted.

“Apocalypse Now” is a masterpiece. It is one of my all-time favorites, but could it really be were it not for all this struggle? Often it is true that from great pain or great passion springs great art, and “Hearts of Darkness” embodies all the love and rage that went into this miracle of cinema.

Nanook of the North (1922)

As Robert J. Flaherty was writing the rules of what we today know as the documentary, he was also breaking them.

In his 1922 film “Nanook of the North,” Flaherty set out to document the lives of a family of Eskimos in northern Canada and returned with a remarkable, artful and emotionally charged film rivaling anything in Hollywood.

And yet modern studies of the film have questioned its authenticity. When Nanook is seen kayaking through a lake with layers of broken ice, where is the cameraman standing? When he hunts a seal but we never actually see it being killed with a spear, did the production crew just shoot it behind the gauze of editing? How much else of the film is orchestrated if Flaherty achieves breathtaking horizon shots that look like they belong at the end of “The Seventh Seal?”

These questions matter little when watching “Nanook of the North,” because the film’s central story has a touching narrative of character and survival. If he bends reality a bit through editing and staging, that’s an understandable casualty of making a good film. Continue reading “Nanook of the North (1922)”

Hoop Dreams (1994)

Some movies span many years, generations or even centuries, yet how much do they really change? In “Hoop Dreams,” we quite literally grow up with William Gates and Arthur Agee. We see them follow their dreams, hit bumps in the road, succeed, fail and simply survive. “Hoop Dreams” is one of the most personal documentaries ever made.

Even the wonderful “Up” series of documentaries does not feel as ambitious as Steve James’s film does, despite the drastic time difference. The slow, gradual storytelling of just over four years in the lives of two inner city Chicagoans going through high school with a dream of playing basketball feels more dramatic because we know every step that got them from point A to B. They were starry-eyed kids idolizing Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas, and when we leave them in college, it’s enough to know that their lives and their ambitions are not the same.

James started filming “Hoop Dreams” as a short film about two 8th graders’ difficulties of getting into a private school to play basketball. He could not have known he would become wrapped in the lives of these kids for over five years and 250 hours of footage. Such elements of surprise always make for the best documentary filmmaking.

But it’s easy to see why he would become so attached. The way James depicts the Gates and Agee families is to view every character as a good person with good intentions. He never pigeon holes one kid into the good guy role and the other into the bad path. The editing even shies away when we get the sense that some of the people in William and Arthur’s lives are not as upstanding as they seem, notably William’s absentee father, Arthur’s drug addicted father and Arthur’s lazy, gangbanger friend, who is never actually interviewed. Even Coach Gene Pingatore of St. Joseph High School is merely tough and is working hard for the kids, despite all the legal backlash the school would eventually file against this film.

That’s the initial beauty of “Hoop Dreams,” that although there are hardships, there are no bad intentions. And because the film follows these characters for so long, it allows anyone who did wrong to redeem themselves on camera. It asks everyone the big questions of “what if?”

These smaller stories of regret are the ones that go forgotten in this three hour long film filled with other heart wrenching and victorious imagery. One figure that surprisingly stood out to me was the high school basketball scout who discovered both kids. He promised Arthur a scholarship at St. Joseph’s and sent him on his way, but when his basketball career did not go as planned, the school revoked the money and the Agee family was left in financial turmoil. A lesser film would’ve forgotten and shunned the man responsible for the Agee’s hardship, but James doesn’t. It’s so sympathetic because we know both sides of the story.

James is not the finest commentator when it comes to narrating some of the pivotal basketball games, but he is a crafty storyteller. In the freshman and sophomore years of Arthur and William, it’s obvious to us that one kid is having more success than the other. Arthur is provided a bleak trajectory, and William is on the road to stardom. James may not have predicted their changing luck any more than we can, but his nuanced game is in then flipping their victories both on and off the court. While Arthur still maintains financial difficulty, his team is soaring to the State Championship on his back. As for William, he’s been given summer camp opportunities, basketball scholarships and a peaceful family life from the bench as he recovers from a knee injury.

This is a tough, realistic story without Hollywood predictability. It’s bittersweet and passion filled. By looking at two characters, we see that pandemonium on the basketball court goes two ways.

It also captures the spirit of Chicago better than most films ever made (“The Blues Brothers,” “Ferris Bueller,” “High Fidelity” and obviously “Chicago” all come to mind, but somehow pale in comparison to this) and feels as inspirational as most sports films without feeling like a movie obsessed with the game. The film is at its best in the Gates and Agee homes rather than on the basketball court, and it stays focused on their family drama without ever becoming systemically focused on the broken scouting process (in some ways, it even begins to recall “Moneyball”).

As is true of most documentaries, the story never ends when the cameras stop rolling. With such an emotionally charged story, we’re bound to ask where William and Arthur are now 18 years after its release, and it can be hard to hear how quickly their goals dissipated in college or how their families have passed away. Arthur’s father Bo was shot in an alley in 2004, and William’s brother Curtis died the day before 9/11.

Infamously in 1994, “Hoop Dreams” was denied a nomination for Best Documentary for an Academy Award. The body of people selecting the nominees shut off the film after just 15 minutes. But in 2012, things have not changed. James just again returned to Chicago with his film “The Interrupters,” about Chicago cops working in some of the same places Arthur and William grew up. That film too was denied inclusion on the Academy’s documentary shortlist for nominations.

It’s been said that no one would ever dare write a fictional screenplay of “Hoop Dreams’s” story, and similarly that something so ambitious could not be done again today. And although the ‘90s music and fashion has horribly dated itself, James’s story is universal and timeless. This story is being told every day in every city in America, and it’s the next generation of documentarians’ job to find them.

The Breakfast Club (1985)

I just went upstairs to do my laundry, and before I knew it, I had watched “The Breakfast Club” from beginning to end.

I’ve seen it a number of times and perhaps did not glean anything new or radical from this viewing, but it remains a smart, infectious and frankly spellbinding film.

John Hughes’s classic is in my mind still the finest movie ever made in examining the way teenagers think, act, react, lash out, lie, communicate, argue, love and live.

“The Breakfast Club” is 27 years old, and it has not even begun to date itself. If there were to be a remake, it would be wise to update the story with GLBT discussion, social media and smart phone communication, hipsters and douchebags, racial diversity and attentiveness to how wired the youth generation is. What would get those five people talking if all of them had iPod, cell phone and internet access? It would also have to star Jesse Eisenberg or Michael Cera (Brian), Josh Hutcherson (Andrew), Elle Fanning (Claire), Chloe Moretz or Aubrey Plaza (Allison) and, well, I really can’t say who would take Judd Nelson’s part, so maybe some shining newcomer, but I digress.

But truthfully, this film doesn’t feel a day old. The character types in “The Breakfast Club” are broadly enough drawn that they still feel relatable today. They’re types, but not stereotypes, and the beauty of the film is in how it offers depth to all five of them, favoring Bender as a mysterious thug type early on but expanding to observe the inner conflict in them all.

Hughes never makes an outright point about teenagers, as they’re no more capable of understanding life than he or his audience is. But he does tell us that there is complexity, rebellion, pain and humor in us all, and with a little hard pressed honesty, we can see it. At the end of the day, we’ll do the same as Dean Vernon (Paul Gleason) will do after he reads Brian’s paper, and interpret these characters any way we want to.

I’m realizing now that “The Breakfast Club” is more of a cult favorite than it is a critical darling. It was the pinnacle film of the brat-pack era, and critics weren’t overly receptive to it. They saw Hughes’s ploy of putting all his characters into one room and forcing them to talk out their differences to be little more than a plot device. They saw it as a rehash of countless one-act plays on stage, and they would be right. How many movies today would even dare to do something so simple? Continue reading “The Breakfast Club (1985)”

The Exterminating Angel (1962)

“The Exterminating Angel” must be the simplest allegory film ever made. A group of wealthy individuals attend a dinner party, retire to the drawing room and then cannot bring themselves to leave.

The message? All of us are sheep to the conventions of society. Stripped of those conventions, human dignity slowly deteriorates until we reveal ourselves as nothing but animals.

And yet the concept is so simple that we think there must be more to it. Luis Bunuel tried to teach us with his first film, “Un Chien Andalou,” that we read too deeply into narrative, and yet here we make the same mistake to look for a riddle where there is none. Surely there must be some other force withholding them, but then again these are the conventions of society, this time established by Hollywood, taking over.

Bunuel doesn’t wait long before hinting at surrealism. The large dinner party enters into the foyer of a luxurious mansion, and the host looks around for his butler, strangely not there. Fail to pay attention, and you’ll miss Bunuel virtually repeat the moment.

The group’s conversation is all mildly peculiar, either subtly perverse or mysterious. One couple is madly in love, another is dying of cancer and a third has just recovered and is now infatuated with the doctor.

These details matter to an extent, but typically in one-room movies such as this, some characters are heavily developed while others serve as supporting players. Bunuel’s film uses all of his people as blank slates, individual chess pieces in this elaborate and silly game (watch the movie and you’ll understand that reference).

At first their inability to leave starts as simple social criticisms. Petty judgments about removing a suit jacket are whispered throughout the drawing room, and although everyone is tired, no one wants to betray the hospitality of the host by being the first to leave.

They all remain over night, and the following morning Bunuel has his characters call attention to their predicament. Each has their own perspective as to why they stayed, whether they were too tired or just enjoyed the company too much. But there’s no real answer to explain what halts these people in their tracks, and still no one can bring themselves to do anything about it.

Bunuel’s characters are slaves to their own impulses to be polite and sick at the thought of doing otherwise. They have conviction to act but no follow-through or backbone.

They predictably blame their blue-collar servants, who mysteriously left the mansion before the party began. One goes so far as to suggest that lower income people simply experience less pain. The next reaction is to jump to bizarre conclusions, like no one has come to save them not because they are idiots and hypocrites but because something in the world has gone horribly wrong.

Bunuel drew similar comparisons to the elite class in “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” but in that film all the characters do is leave the party, never actually sitting down to eat.

And at the end of the day when characters have withheld food and medicine, hidden away in closets and plotted to murder the host, we realize these are cruel characters in a cruel film, no matter how nice and polite they try to come across.

They’re biting criticisms, and Bunuel uses careful tact and pacing as their actions get stranger and more perverse. He slowly drowns us in madness and never goes for a punch line. In this way, the level of absurdity becomes so great and yet we believe it all to be plausible.

The film’s greatest paradox however is its ease and simplicity. The characters both inside and outside the room seem to echo what the audience may be thinking. “There must be something else going on! It shouldn’t be this easy for us to just leave!”

Consider the rescue squad just outside the mansion. A captain says he sent a team of soldiers to go inside but not one of them could make it. A crowd of curious onlookers storms the mansion demanding to know what’s happening, and even they halt just at the gate’s entrance line. All of these people are perplexed by the obvious simplicity of the situation, and that’s what halts them. Society has dictated there should be complications, and when someone like a child can actually break through the barrier with ease, no one seems to fully understand why.

“The Exterminating Angel” is hardly as surreal as “The Discreet Charm” or “Un Chien Andalou,” but there must be skeptics coming across Bunuel and being infuriated by his clever, almost manipulative scenarios. They feel there must be a puzzle piece he’s not telling us when we see a bear and three sheep wandering the mansion, but we know better.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

“An upper-class sextet (Fernando Rey, Paul Frankeur, Delphine Seyrig, Stéphane Audran, Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Cassel) sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts repeatedly thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.”

This is Netflix’s plot description of Luis Bunuel’s surrealist masterpiece “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” which I didn’t even read ahead of time. The film is deliciously bizarre and mind-blowingly obtuse without any real sense of a plot. I wondered if Netflix could fill in the holes for me in a cohesive way I could not, although at the end of the day the concept is so wonderfully simple that I would have had no trouble telling you precisely what Netflix had said.

Think about Bunuel’s film for a second: If you have watched it but didn’t really get it, was there any moment on screen where you really didn’t know what you were looking at? Every bizarre joke Bunuel plays on these upper class twits is plainly coherent, and his game with the audience is making us wonder if it has any meaning beyond the literal.

One of the film’s best moments comes when the group goes to dinner at an army colonel’s house only to find the food is fake and the table rests on a stage in front of an audience. One character is stunned motionless, and he wakes realizing this was only a dream. “I was on a stage, but I didn’t know the lines,” he says. Neither do we, even though we know exactly where we are.

The bourgeoisie are Bunuel’s targets throughout every surrealist set piece, each of them mindlessly wandering through their lives with an entitled sense of direction and with nowhere to go. Bunuel literally calls attention to this by showing us all six of them doing just that down an empty road in the country.

And yet Bunuel’s talents as a filmmaker come in blurring the line between reality and fiction. At a certain point when the nightmares haunting these characters are quite literally dreams within dreams (“Inception,” anyone?), we begin to question everything we’ve seen until that point. Every time you can begin to grasp a sense of a running plot or a character motivation, something comes out of left field to disrupt that train of thought.

Don Raphael Acosta (Fernando Rey) is the ambassador to a fake European country, and we learn he’s having an affair with one of his friends’ wives. The moment is interrupted by the husband himself, who is even then blindly unaware, and the story diverts to another theme of a sexy, hippie protestor aiming to assassinate the ambassador. When her voice is blared out by a pair of plane engines, we realize lower class people have no voice in the proletariat. But even that hardly fits when in just the next scene an entire platoon practicing war games invades the bourgeoisie dinner party with stories and pot smoking.

Bunuel relishes in stringing us along, and it is this ambition more so than adding punchlines to his screwball scenarios that he’s interested in. Each set piece is so wild and yet addressed so dryly, and we watch with almost perverse fascination more than gleeful irreverence.

“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” was Bunuel’s most successful film. In 1972 it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, earned a screenplay nomination and was also a box office hit, or at least as much as a foreign surrealist film can be a hit. And yet the film is not too far away from his infamous short film he made at the very start of his career with Salvador Dali, 1928’s “Un Chien Andalou.” That short film too is a string of insane set pieces that are not visually nonsensical but play with our minds in ways we cannot process. In both films’ collections of all of these horrific dreams, some are sadistic, some are serene and some are surreal, but all of them display a level of remarkable imagination that is still unmatched.

The Age of Innocence (1993)

Perhaps the movie furthest away from Martin Scorsese’s oeuvre is not “Hugo” but is the late 19th Century period romance “The Age of Innocence.”

The 1993 film is an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s famous novel, and yet Scorsese makes it his own by reaching out to a complex, passion filled protagonist struggling for identity in a vicious, rough world. “The Age of Innocence” may lack the violence or blood of some of his masterpieces (this one deserves to be up there with his best), but it’s a biting and bittersweet character drama in which people are trapped within a rigid society of rules and tradition beneath luxurious decorum.

First off, this is a drop dead gorgeous film. “The Age of Innocence” may be 20 years old and the setting may be over 100, but Michael Ballhaus’s cinematography and Dante Ferretti’s production design haven’t aged a day. Every frame is lusciously picturesque, but the world Scorsese depicts is bleak, flat and two-dimensional. We see Newland Archer’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) wedding photo to May Welland (Winona Ryder) as it is being taken, and at that moment we realize how much this character’s world has been turned upside down. Constantly this dichotomy between the film’s look and its tone makes for a gripping experience.

Newland’s engagement to May is one dictated by society to be a good match, but Newland is in love with a woman who has just returned to New York from Europe, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer). She’s an outcast because of her crumbling marriage and her subtle defiance for other social norms. “Why should America be a copy of another country,” she asks as she and Newland bemoan New York’s stringent and too utterly polite traditionalism.

The powerful difference is that none of this is really what it seems. “Everything is labeled,” Newland says, “But everybody is not.” “The Age of Innocence” has a devilishly engaging twist near the end in which we learn how the entire society has politely turned on him and Ellen and composed one marriage necessity that here plays out like a death sentence. This is a movie that calmly obliterates you. Continue reading “The Age of Innocence (1993)”

Throne of Blood (1957)

You could do a thesis studying Lady Washizu’s eyes in Akira Kurosawa’s underrated masterpiece “Throne of Blood.” Isuzu Yamada is brilliant as the feudal Japan equivalent of Lady Macbeth, at once appearing sinister and manipulative just in the way she controls her body’s stillness and gaze into nothingness. And when you realize she’s capable of overcoming the powerhouse acting of even Toshiro Mifune, you realize how eerily wonderful this entire film is.

“Throne of Blood” is possibly the best Shakespearean adaptation ever made, rivaled only by Kurosawa’s own “Ran,” which adapted “King Lear” rather than “Macbeth.” It’s a loose retelling that takes liberties with the story and especially the language, but Kurosawa’s interest lies not in making a poetic character drama but a tight, haunting genre picture that finds poetry in its cinematography.

Lady Washizu never dances around the kill or be killed paradox running through “Macbeth,” and her character rapidly develops as someone capable of eating away at every inhibition we carry. What Mifune’s character Washizu is left with is his own hubris and apprehensions, all compiling to build toward his tragic (and awesome) death.

Despite Shakespeare’s powerful tragedy, the story is almost a side factor to Kurosawa’s enchanting mash-up of Japanese Noh Theater and Western movie imagery.

Interior shots are particularly theatrical, and the camera beacons and teases the audience and the characters by starkly isolating them to the point of vulnerability. The framing is impeccable in the dinner scene in which Washizu awaits his guest of honor and rival Miki (Akira Kubo), and there’s no question from Kurosawa’s off-kilter camera how crazed and engrossing the lengthy, uncomfortable moment is.

As for the exteriors, Mifune is a commanding presence unlike any actor Japanese or American, and yet Kurosawa is capable of dwarfing him with thunderous surroundings, eerily luminous lighting amidst forestry and the Godlike effervescence of the film’s evil spirit. Kurosawa captures fog in his shots like few directors, and in smaller scope scenes he controls it even further to skillfully mask the studio space as we venture into the evil spirit’s ghastly hollow.

But above all else, “Throne of Blood” is famous for its unbelievable finale. An over-confident Washizu barks at his men to enter into a losing battle, and his archers betray him in a hellfire of arrows. The scene is done with real arrows and without special effects, and it has the power of engulfing us in madness as we watch. It’s also followed by one of the best movie deaths ever as a defeated Washizu staggers aimlessly with an arrow jutting from his throat.

How “Throne of Blood” could be little seen or underrated amongst Kurosawa’s oeuvre is beyond me. He made it in 1957 shortly after his triple play of “Rashomon,” “Ikiru” and “Seven Samurai” and didn’t exactly break new ground in storytelling or action direction the way he did in those films. But as a cinematic masterstroke first and Shakespearean adaptation second, it deserves a place amongst Kurosawa’s finest.