Mifune

Today is the centenary of Toshiro Mifune’s birth. The only reason I know of him is thanks to Akira Kurosawa, who saw him as the embodiment of the man of action that made so many of his films unforgettable. Incredibly, TCM honored him in a 24-hour marathon (ongoing as I write this) of ten of the films he made with Kurosawa. I’ve been lucky enough to have seen every one of them over the many years of my filmgoing life. But I must admit that I don’t really regard Mifune as a standard of greatness in film acting, the way I think of Marcello Mastroianni and Max von Sydow. He was very good in just about the same type of role in film after film. He is powerful, yes. But his very power limited him.

When Dwight Macdonald saw Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he wrote: “Toshiro Mifune plays Macbeth; at first his style is exciting, but it soon becomes monotonous, all that snarling and baring of teeth, those vulpine laughs.” Harold Bloom remarked that Kurosawa’s film, despite dispensing with all of Shakespeare’s poetry, was the closest film to Shakespearean that he had seen. I find myself standing somewhere in between these opposing opinions. 

By the time he got around to seeing Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Macdonald was even more skeptical not only of Mifune’s talent but disappointed by Kurosawa, from whom he expected a great deal more:

A satire (or a parody) needs a norm to be successful. Mifune isn’t it, even though he rescues the peasant’s pretty wife (by treacherously carving up her six guards) and is on friendly terms with the peaceably-minded innkeeper and cooper. Tigerish as always, Mr. Mifune is just another wild beast let loose on the unhappy town. (I don’t understand his reputation as an actor; he seems to me to be permanently stuck in his first role, that of the bandit in Rashomon.)”

While I don’t hold completely with Macdonald’s views of Mifune’s performances (and Kurosawa’s films), he does have a point. He was, however, apparently ignorant of the fact that, prior to his playing the bandit in Rashomon, Mifune played, in four other films for Kurosawa, a small-time gangster in Drunken Angel, a crusading doctor in The Quiet Duel, a police detective in Stray Dog, and an artist (painter) in Scandal. Granted, his international reputation was kick-started by Rashomon, and he became largely typecast by the 1960s. It is as a sword-wielding samurai – albeit the most awe-inspiring – that Mifune will be remembered.