Throne of Blood

Throne of Blood

Criterion Collection, $39.95 So it's come to this: dueling translations. "In Japanese, subject is largely absent, tense often irrelevant," writes Linda Hoaglund in Throne of Blood's DVD booklet. "I brazenly stray from literal translations." Hoaglund, who was raised in Japan, and her seven Kurosawa interpretations for Criterion over the years speak (or rather, read) for themselves. Donald Richie, author of The Films of Akira Kurosawa, uses an "undertranslator," maintaining, "I doubt that any translation is so thoroughly compromised as that of film dialogue subtitles." Hers: akin to Kurosawa's visuals, bold, melodramatic. His: formal, like the culture, yet animated by action-adventurisms. Nihilistic. And if any Kurosawa perfection casts senselessness as destiny, it's the cinematic emperor's upstaging of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Richie's book reveals Kurosawa wanted to follow Rashomon (1950) with what became Throne of Blood but instead killed seven years with trifles such as Ikiru and Seven Samurai, because Orson Welles had already beaten him to the dagger. Welles, however, didn't have Toshiro Mifune as a 15th-century samurai warlord heading the chilling Isuzu Yamada to furnish the Spider Web castle in crimson. Kurosawa, according to Michael Jeck's illuminating but unbearably pompous audio commentary, also had what amounted to a blank check following Samurai's epic success, and it glows -- from the first frame to the last. As Stephen Prince sets down in the disc's liner notes, Kurosawa's is an apocalyptic vision, which explains how Throne of Blood grims past black-and-white into a perpetual gray and black-hole abyss. Gray like the fog that lifts at the beginning of this thinly veiled ghost story. Black like Mount Fuji's volcanic soil. Black like Mifune's terrorized eyes. Black like man's ambitious follies. In the face of this, in unwashed hands and beheaded best friends, on witches' prophecies and spirits' screams, who notices divergent translations in different fonts? Only the chorus.