hy do ? As a dare, to confront the challenge of one of Shakespeare’s most problematic plays? To “beat it into submission,” as Sir Laurence Olivier once put it? To face and overcome the curse of “the Scottish Tragedy?” Kurosawa Akira came up with an original answer in (1957), which was to transfer the play’s medieval Scotland setting to feudal Japan and explore its theme of the fatal hubris of ambition as a means of reflecting, 12 years after the end of the Pacific War, on the folly of Japanese imperial ambitions. In their robust and suitably bloody (1971), Roman Polanski and his estimable co-screenwriter Kenneth Tynan took the play at face value, refusing to treat it like a “classic” but like the very flawed script that it is. You can take various approaches with —you just better know why you’re doing
