King Lear
1985: Ran

This is a Japanese version of the Lear story, with sons instead of daughters. It’s a magnificent example of a cultural transposition of the fundamental story that works despite the enormous gap implicit. It’s a gigantic film, with the kind of austere gravity one finds only in the best western productions. It is not Kurosawa’s first attempt to work with Shakespeare: his earlier black and white Throne of Blood (lurid and sensationalistic as the title may sound) is in some ways one of the finest tonal expressions of Macbeth ever made. Of course in both cases, the language of the original is lost: they are in Japanese. But they are both a kind of testimony to the universality of the stories Shakespeare has built.

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