SO I SHOW PART OF THIS FILM AT AN ANIME CON PANEL AND IT GETS BETTER/WORSE
(For those who are about to ask, it’s called Throne of Blood in English but its actual name is Spiderweb Castle and some Shakespeare scholars are big mad about it because other Shakespeare scholars consider it the best film adaptation of Macbeth ever made and we can’t have that)
THE ARCHERS DIDN’T KNOW MIFUNE’S BLOCKING. Every time you see him fling out an arm he’s actually signaling to the archers which way he’s about to go. That’s it, that’s what they had to go on. And they were shooting on location on Mount Fuji, which Akira Kurosawa had chosen SPECIFICALLY FOR ITS DENSE FOG.
However, BECAUSE this was Akira Kurosawa—if you don’t know that name think “Stanley Kubrick but earlier and Japanese and not quite as much of an asshole to his actors”—and he was insane, Mifune is also wearing real 19th-century feudal lord armor, in the sense that while it’s a modern reproduction it is completely functional. A feudal lord from the early 1800s could have been resurrected in the 1950s when this was filmed, handed this armor, and would have gone “yeah, that’s correct.” There are actually a couple of shots where you see arrows hit his torso and bounce off, or stick in the armor but they’ve very clearly only just barely stuck rather than going through.
So his torso is protected, and there’s a railing in front of him that provides some protection to his legs, and yes, this means THE MOST VULNERABLE PART OF HIM WAS ALSO THE ONLY PART THAT WOULD DEFINITELY KILL HIM: his face. I’m sure it was of very little comfort to him that the archers also weren’t very powerful shots.
Oh, and his character dies by taking an arrow through the neck. You can tell that one is a trick shot because it’s the only shot filmed from that specific angle, but I can imagine Mifune was none too eager to do it after all this.
While I’m here: you should watch Spiderweb Castle. I show it because it is a GORGEOUS retelling of Macbeth, which is relevant to my panel, but more importantly Kurosawa decided to shoot it in the style of Noh theatre drama, and that’s what I like to highlight. Although the story that inspired it is Western, Kurosawa took one look at it and went “oh that is 1000000% a thing that would have happened here” and the story as he tells it is so clearly, fully, and unashamedly Japanese in both style and tone. It’s a fantastic look into another culture and a masterful film.