Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood carries Macbeth into feudal Japan, but Stephen Prince says that calling the thing an adaptation takes something away from what was done: Kurosawa's radical move is to put Noh theatre in Shakespeare's place. By Prince's account the parallel Kurosawa sensed was with the Sengoku Jidai, where rival clans devoured one another and no central political power existed, and the striking emptiness in the film is what sumi-e composition becomes in cinema. In High and Low he took only the founding idea from an American crime novel: men set out after a businessman's son and kidnap his chauffeur's son by mistake. The difference Geoffrey O'Brien points to is this: in the novel the shoe company executive refuses to pay the ransom and still gets away with it, while in the film Gondo, after resisting, accepts the obligation to save the child and his place in the world drops considerably. The 1959 Berlinale gave the directing Silver Bear to The Hidden Fortress.