Gate of Hell

The Japanese film Gate of Hell opens with a brief history lesson, which shoves a Western audience - even one acquainted with the Heian era, when the capitol of Japan was Heian Kyo, later renamed Tokyo - even further away from the story. In the middle of a rebellion immortalized in paintings affixed to a gate that was later named Hell, an imperial palace is being overrun by rebels. A princess must be evacuated or face capture, so a volunteer is enlisted to act as a decoy disguised as the princess (wearing her resplendent kimono). One of her ladies-in-waiting, named Kesa, boldly steps forward. Leaving the palace inside a ox-drawn wagon, Kesa is escorted by a squad of samurai (who think it's the princess inside), but they are quickly overtaken by pursuers. One samurai, named Moritoh, fights them off valiantly, and single-handedly leads the wagon to the safety of a temple. Kesa has fainted from the shock of the fighting, and Moritoh has to waken her with water he spits in her face. She finally awakes after he transfers water directly into her mouth with his lips. 

The rebellion put down, Moritoh is praised as a hero and is allowed to choose his prize. Having learned the identity of the decoy princess, he names Kesa as his prize. Kesa is married, and Moritoh is told that he can't have her. But Kesa is what he wants regardless of her marital inconvenience, and he refuses to accept anything else. His demands are dismissed, but Moritoh will not be satisfied until Kesa is his.

I must have seen Gate of Hell in 1975, as part of a television series aired by PBS called The Japanese Film, hosted by Edwin O. Reischauer. Like every other film I saw in that series, it was revelatory of not just how the Japanese looked at themselves, but of an entire film industry that had been thriving in Japan since the 1920s. This is why audiences in Venice were so astonished in 1951 by Rashomon, one of a genre of films, like Gate of Hell, known in Japan as "jidai-geki," and why it won the Golden Lion. It showed the West that the Japanese film industry had fully recovered from the war. While Akira Kurosawa, who made Rashomon, was certainly thankful to the Venice jury, he later wished that perhaps they could've awarded a Japanese film set in the present, a "shomin-geki." He admired De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and hoped that Western audiences could see a film like it set in contemporary Japan. Of course, Kurosawa himself made such a film called Stray Dog, about a young cop whose gun gets stolen and his odyssey across a blistering Tokyo summer trying to retrieve it.

Unfortunately, the appetite for the more exotic Japanese films, and there were plenty of them, led to the unfortunate celebration of some films and filmmakers, like Mizoguchi, and the neglect of others. The only thing that made Gate of Hell exceptional was its use of the Eastmancolor process - a much cheaper (and much better) color process than the cumbersome and expensive Technicolor. For a full explanation of this revolution in color, I recommend Stephen Prince's essay for Criterion, "Gate of Hell: A Colorful History":

"It achieves ... a kind of hypernaturalism by accentuating color 
in sets and costumes that are facsimiles of the story’s twelfth-
century historical setting. Although the decor and lighting effects 
are naturalistic, they achieve a hieratic force through the always 
insistent color design. Based on a play by Kan Kikuchi, the film 
takes place mostly indoors, shot on studio sets that offered 
exactly the kind of controlled lighting that Kinugasa needed to 
emphasize the colors supplied by his costume designer and art 
director. Color filters on the off-camera lights simulated 
candlelight and moonlight, and high-intensity studio lights 
heightened the coloring of kimonos and armor, banners and 
heraldry."(1)

But Gate of Hell suffers from a central weakness that may or may not have been intentional - the casting of Kazuo Hasegawa as the samurai Moritoh. Hasegawa acted for Kinugasa before, beginning with the great silent film Crossroads [Jujiro] in 1928. He had been a matinee idol in the 1930s, noted for his good looks, but by the time Gate of Hell was released he was 45 and had put on some weight. The rather severe costuming in the fighting scenes early in the film required Hasegawa, like all the other samurai, to wear a period design hat with a chin strap that frames his chubby face unflatteringly. In the last scene, upon cutting off his topknot, he looks almost epicene. And I've always had the impression that Moritoh, for all his derring-do in the early scenes and his stalwart honorableness, not switching sides in the middle of a crisis, but stubbornly refusing to accept the fact that he cannot have Lady Kesa, is basically a big baby. 

Machiko Kyo is made to move in such a formal, sylized manner that she resembles a beautiful, but virtually inanimate, doll. But it was, of course, completely in keeping with the extreme demeanor of Heian court life. Of course, such a formalized world - the same world as Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji - was ideal for Japan's first exported film in color. To a large degree, the actors in Gate of Hell are nothing but exquisitely-appointed clothes horses, showing off the film's luxurious décor. 

I tried to imagine the story retold in a European setting during the Age of Chivalry, with the Art of Courtly Love and troubadours singing of extra-marital affairs with tragic consequences. But a wife's sacrificing herself for her husband because of the unwelcome importunities of a would-be lover is rather the opposite of our idea of romantic love.

Kinugasa (1896-1982) was a much bigger name in Japanese cinema in the 1920s, thanks to Crossroads and his earlier experimental film A Page of Madness, that was presumed lost shortly after its release until Kinugasa found it intact in a shed in 1971. By the time Gate of Hell was made, however, Kinugasa was considered safe enough to be entrusted with a major export production. Despite its winning the Palm d'Or at Cannes, it wasn't nearly as deserving of its success as a few other films made in 1953, including Kinoshita's Twenty-Four Eyes, or, indeed, Ozu's Tokyo Story. 

Visually resplendent on its first release in 1953, the cheaper color process it utilized caused it to fade terribly. The version I saw on video in the '80s seemed almost embalmed - flesh tones were pale blue or pale green. Lately (in 2011), some money and effort was expended on a restoration that has made it splendid again. Perhaps now we can see how the film's beautiful Eastmancolor images, far richer than Technicolor's, distracted critics from basic hollowness. Some of the more astute observers tried at the time to point this out. Having it restored is no reason to overrate it all over again.


(1) Gate of Hell: A Colorful History