MUBI

Riding back from a decisive victory, master samurai Toshiro Mifune and Minoru Chiaki encounter a demon ghost in the middle of the Spider Castle forest, who prophesizes treason and death in the coming future, an apt prediction, in Akira Kurosawa’s loose and exciting adaptation of “Macbeth”. Of course the prophecy comes true, as it does in Shakespeare’s play, but Shakespeare could never have envisioned the way Kurosawa would take down his Macbeth, with a stunning and dangerous hail of arrows, from his own men, as the rival clan use shrubbery as a cloak to advance on a defenseless castle. The arrow filled finale is justly famous, not just because of the stunning imagery, but because that’s real fear in Mifune’s face; those were real arrows, and even though professional archers were shooting them, you can’t compensate for human error. Naturally it comes off flawless, thanks to Kurosawa’s textbook editing techniques; it’s a memorable ending to what many consider, myself included, the greatest Shakespearian update in film history.