The way to approach Ran is not to think of it as a fusty "reworking" of King Lear as a samurai epic, but as a discovery of how much of a sense of epic samurai fatalism there already was in Shakespeare's work. The movie is, indeed, based on King Lear, but it has not been turned into a lockstep product; far too much personal passion and bitterness has been brought to it for it to be a mere reading of the play. It is easily Kurosawa's best film next to The Seven Samurai or Ikiru, far grimmer and more pessimistic than those two movies but no less masterful or compelling.
This was Akira Kurosawa's fourth movie since 1965, made almost twenty years after that, and produced at a time in his life when any spiritual similarities between himself and Lear were probably unignorable. After his long-winded but essentially earnest Red Beard, he was dismissed in his own country as being too genteel and old-fashioned to be worth banking on. The cinematic tastes of his country were leaning heavily towards the newly-discovered genres of the ultraviolent gangster movie and "pink film" (soft-core erotica). Unable to find financing, he turned to fellow directors of his and created a production company collective with them. The first film produced from this organization was Kurosawa's Dodes'ka-den, which failed commercially and destroyed any other chances for the company to get off the ground. He worked for 20th Century Fox for a brief time on their Pearl Harbor movie Tora! Tora! Tora!, but either quit or was fired depending on what version of the story is told (and none of his work was included in the final print regardless). In disgrace, he then attempted suicide, slicing open his arms in the same manner that his brother had, but did not succeed.
