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. 

Stagecoach

Something bad is happening to John Wayne and, by extension, to the history and culture of which he is a part. A 1971 Playboy interview was unearthed recently in which the Duke voiced some predictable opinions about politics, the war in Vietnam, and the state of American culture. Wayne was in his 60s and he had a dim view of the youth culture ("hippies"), the anti-war protests, and the film Midnight Cowboy. He also expressed views that were racist and homophobic, which has led some younger readers - bless them - to immediately strike Wayne's name from their list of American heroes. 

In his Guardian piece on the subject, Caspar Salmon quotes the late Roger Ebert: "the film’s attitudes toward Native Americans are unenlightened. The Apaches are seen simply as murderous savages; there is no suggestion the white men have invaded their land ... Ford was not a racist, nor was Wayne, but they made films that were sadly unenlightened.”(1) 

First of all, Roger Ebert has no business apologizing for the alleged sins of John Wayne and John Ford. That is not in his job description. I don't share the views that John Wayne has been called out for, 48 years later (I'm sure there were plenty of people who disagreed with him then), but John Wayne was speaking for himself - not a representative of a country or a party or a group. And he was perfectly free to say whatever he wanted on any subject under the sun. The asininity of this kind of crying over spilt milk makes me wonder how many American "heroes" would stand up to such standards if they were examined in the harsh light of today? What made All in the Family such a funny and important television show in 1971 (the same year of Wayne's Playboy interview) was that it gave Archie Bunker a stage on which to clearly and unapologetically express his reprehensible views. But producer Norman Lear and Carroll O'Connor himself knew that, while most of their audience was laughing at Archie Bunker, some of them were laughing with him. Somehow it was more acceptable - and palatable - in 1971. So why isn't it today, considering how much more informed and "enlightened" we think we are?

Anyone with rudimentary experience, the slightest contact, with history must realize after awhile that the people who lived in the past demand the simple application of some context when we try to understand them, the things that they said and the choices they made. In many cases, it's the only way we can make sense of the past. The incomprehension of the young at what was acceptable in the past, at so many things that cause (sometimes justifiable) outrage today, is an injustice to the past. In many cases, we fall short of their standards of intelligence and civility, so how can we expect them to conform with our standards?

Now that I've got that out of the way, let us consider John Ford's classic film Stagecoach. The 1930s was an important decade for Ford. He had applied his filmmaking skills to a broad spectrum of subjects and earned considerable critical acclaim, so that by the time he returned to a genre that he helped establish as a staple of American film in the 1920s, a genre that was, until the 1960s, exclusively American, he was ripe for a masterpiece.

In the opening credits, the musical direction is attributed to Boris Morros: "Musical Score based on American folk songs adapted by ..." and it lists five names. Against a bright sky, we see a stagecoach cross the frame, followed by a troop of uniformed riders. The music is familiar, including (somewhat incongruously) "I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair". But then we see another group of riders, indians with long hair and bandanas - and rifles, and the music switches to dums and ominous minor chords - the same music used in countless Westerns whenever "hostiles" are shown. When the action begins, two riders are approaching a military outpost (in Monument Valley, which was protected as a national park, but Ford was permitted to film there as long as they left no permanent traces). Inside the command post, the news arrives that the hills are full of Apaches and are under the leadership of "Geronimo".

When the stagecoach arrives in town, we are introduced to the principal actors in the drama: Buck, the stagecoach driver (Andy Devine); Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt) on her way to join her husband; the notorious gambler Hatfield (John Carradine); Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell), who quotes (garbled) Marlowe as he is being evicted and can't control his drinking; Dallas (Claire Trevor, who got top billing in the credits), who gets kicked out of town by the Law & Order League for reasons that are left to our imaginations; the marshall (George Bancroft); and Gatewood, the bank manager (Berton Churchill) who embezzles the miners' payroll for himself. We hear of the Ringo Kid early on, wanted for busting out of jail, but he (John Wayne) doesn't appear until well into the journey to Lordsburg (18 1/2 minutes into the film, and one of the greatest entrances ever). The coach is full, but since the hills are full of Apaches, the Ringo Kid is a welcome addition. He sits on the floor of the coach.

Lucy gives birth enroute, having concealed her delicate condition from everyone, especially the Hays Office, Dallas turns out (like we didn't expect it!) to have a heart of gold, Ringo proposes to her, the embezzling bank manager is nabbed in Lordsburg, and Hatfield, for all his notoriousness, turns into a nobleman - even though he was on the verge (before taking an Apache bullet) of executing Lucy rather than see her defiled by the "savages."

Andy Devine isn't yodeling nearly as much as he did as he grew older. John Carradine finally got a plummy role he could sink his teeth into (he reminded me of Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in Tombstone). And John Wayne, who wasn't yet a star, was never more beautiful than he was in Stagecoach. Ford made him a star, just as Kurosawa did for Mifune. The chase scene, shot on the Bonneville salt flats (I once drove across it myself) lasts almost a full six minutes and is still exciting - Yakima Canutt's stunts are still unsurpassed. David Lean must've been thinking of it when he conceived the crossing of the Nefud Desert in Lawrence of Arabia. And when the scene with Bogart and Claude Rains at the end of Casablanca was done, how can anyone not have remembered the end of Stagecoach? Ringo and Dallas ride away in the wagon, leaving Curley and Doc Boone in the street.

Curley: Doc, I'll buy you a drink.
Doc Boone: Just one!

And Gatewood's bilious speech about the government, "America for Americans!" "the government must not interfere with business!" "reduce taxes!" and "what this country needs is a businessman for president!" - lines that are so presciently full of shit, coming from such a crook and coward, how could anyone not hear him and laugh out loud about our present president?

Ford made some Westerns that were more conventional (Fort Apache, probably his most boring) and others that were less conventional (The Searchers, for better and worse, stands way out). Probably because of its bigger budget, Stagecoach fits into the former niche. But for a few nice touches here (the beauty of his framing of interior scenes at mid level - ceilings! ceilings!) and there (the lighting and noise of Lordsburg at night), I find it hard to place it among his best films. I know well enough that calling a film a "classic" can be both a tribute and a kiss of death. (The only thing I don't like about Turner Classic Movies is its middle name.) The occasional process shots, done on a sound stage with rear-screen projection or merely backdrops of landscape or sky, are feeble, especially after going to all the trouble of Monument Valley.

But it's hard to resist this 80 year old film, even with its hideously Shermanesque view of native Americans (according to Sherman, the only good one was a dead one). The irony is that Ford gave them employment when he shot on location, despite the stereotypical roles he gave them as well as at a great deal less than scale as extras. But what would history be without irony?



(1) "Should we be surprised by John Wayne's racist and homophobic views?" The Guardian, 20 February 2019.

Stray Dog

When it comes to that trickiest of factors called influence, divining why a great filmmaker conceives individual shots, scenes, or whole films can be a hazardous sport. Something as innocuous as a resemblance can offer tantalizing clues about a filmmaker's inspiration. For example, when I wrote about Roman Polański's Knife in the Water (1962) on this blog ten years ago, I traced the origins of Polański's story of two men and a woman on a sailboat to scenes in Plein Soleil (1960), René Clément's devilishly stylish film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley.(1) Polański had a much smaller budget (in communist Poland) and a smaller boat, but he made a much better film.

One of the least explored aspects of Japanese cinema is the influence of European and American films. Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves sent a shock wave through international cinema when it was released in 1948. Made with very little money with non-professional actors, it was precisely the incentive many young filmmakers needed to made their own forays in their local idioms. Satyajit Ray claimed it was De Sica who inspired his Apu Trilogy made in his native Bengal. And a few years before his period film Rashomon took the West completely by surprise, Akira Kurosawa made Stray Dog, a film set in contemporary Tokyo about a young cop's struggle to retrieve a stolen pistol. Though Kurosawa claimed that his influences were Jules Dassin's The Naked City and the roman policiers of Georges Simenon, the plot of Stray Dog was clearly borrowed from Bicycle Thieves, about a poor man with a wife and child whose new job is imperiled when his bicycle is stolen.(2)

The title is ambiguous. Under the credits Kurosawa shows us a panting mongrel dog - an unrestrained, potentially dangerous creature without an owner. But "stray" is likely not an accurate translation. The French title offers a clue: Le Chien enragé. The Enraged Dog - Mad Dog or even Rabid Dog are probably closer to the Japanese nora. Assuming the thief is the dog, Kurosawa portrays him as an extreme exception, an aberration, an insult to the norm. A "stray" is a nuisance. This thief is a menace.

The film wastes no time. It opens with Murakami, a young detective, a veteran of the war (Toshiro Mifune in only his third film for Kurosawa), who reports the theft of his standard issue Colt pistol. In Japan, then as now, no one can own a gun. Cops are allowed to carry them in the sometimes dangerous pursuance of their duties, and they are available on the black market - which was thriving in post-war Japan. How many bullets were in it? the man taking his report asks. All seven, Murakami says, and then he offers to resign. His offer is denied. Murakami will have to find his pistol. Kurosawa cuts to cops firing the Colt pistol at target practice. A voice-over tells us how "compact" the Colt is. We then watch as he places it in the right-hand pocket of his white linen jacket. It's a hot summer in Tokyo.

When Murakami is getting off a crowded bus, he feels his pocket and his pistol is missing. He sees a man across the road who runs from him. Murakami gives chase but loses him at a crossroads. The man who stole the pistol is Yusa, a veteran, like Murakami, of the war. But instead of the straight and narrow path taken by Murakami, Yusa has taken the other way, into the underworld of Tokyo. Murakami is teamed with another detective, an older man named Satō, played by Takashi Shimura. A common thread in Kurosawa, the master and the acolyte, is explored again in Stray Dog. 

Yaso's movements are easy to follow - everywhere a Colt bullet turns up in a crime. Kurosawa uses the detectives' pursuit of Yusa to explore the Tokyo of 1949, still under American occupation. When they enter the underworld, the "lower depths" of Tokyo, the film takes on a lurid, almost surreal hue. As Mifune learns the ropes from Satō, he also learns how a single misstep might have led him down the same road as Yusa. We are clearly meant to see a resemblance, albeit a superficial one, between the two ex-soldiers.

By the time Murakami captures Yusa, after he has tried to shoot Satō to death, Kurosawa's Dostoevskian theme at last emerges. Yusa knows he has fallen very far from grace and he must atone for his crimes. He lies side by side with Murakami in a meadow replete with flowers and the beauty of a world that Yusa had forsaken. He screams and writhes in apparent agony, and Murakami lies there beside him, amazed. Satō doesn't die of his wounds, congratulates Murakami and tells him to look forward to all their future cases together. Their bond is cemented, and the film ends on an upbeat note. But the nightmare vision of Tokyo's dark side is unforgettable. Kurosawa will take us back there in his great suspense film High and Low (1963), which expands on Kurosawa's view of the terrible duality of the modern world - the obscene gulf between the rich and the poor, the lucky and unlucky. There is no real choice in life for so many of us. We follow the path that presents itself to us, leading us into the darkness or into the light.


(1) "Polański and his co-scenarists, Jerzy Skolimowski and Jakub Goldberg probably got the idea for the script from the yacht scenes in René Clément's Plein Soleil, in which two men, one an experienced sailor (Maurice Ronet), the other not (Alain Delon), compete for the affections of a woman (Marie Lafôret). The woman belongs to the owner of the boat, who christened it ("Marge") after her. The boat in Knife in the Water is called "Christina." There is even a knife with which Delon in skillful."
(2) There is another roundabout reference to the influence of Bicycle Thieves. In his 2011 study, What Is Film Noir?, William Park detected the influence of neo-realism on the photographic style of The Naked City. Terrence Rafferty called Stray Dog "a kind of neorealist cop movie."

Los Olvidados

In 1951, the Cannes film festival was the setting for one of the most surprising resurrections in movie memory. Luis Buñuel, who was last heard from in Europe in the mid-1930s as the director of Las Hurdes, a documentary about the poorest region in Spain, and as co-director (with Jean Gremillon) of an abortive "comedy" about the Spanish army called ¡Centinela, alerta!, reappeared with a new film made in Mexico called Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones). 

Only later would we learn about Buñuel's wilderness years in America, his working for the Museum of Modern Art in New York until a book by Salvador Dali exposed him as an atheist and he was fired, and his fruitless sojourn in Hollywood, working clandestinely on Robert Florey's The Beast With Five Fingers (1946).

In 1946, just when Buñuel thought that his filmmaking days were over and he was about to apply for American citizenship, the producer Oscar Dancigers somehow persuaded him to go to Mexico and direct movies for him. It was not, of course, anything like his avant-garde days in Paris - the films he would make in Mexico over the next twenty years were, with a few exceptions, commercial work for a mass movie market.

His first film, Gran Casino, was a musical - not exactly the most auspicious way to restart one's filmmaking career. "I hadn't been behind a camera in fifteen years," Buñuel wrote years later, "and if the scenario's not particularly gripping, the technique, on the other hand, isn't half bad."(1) The film floundered and Buñuel waited two years before Dancigers entrusted him with the star vehicle El Gran Calavera in 1949. "I agreed to do it, and although El gran calavera was impossibly banal, it made a lot of money." So Dancigers suggested to Buñuel that he make a "real" movie next. Italian neo-realism was creating all the buzz at film festivals around the world. It inspired Kurosawa to make Stray Dog, which is a kind of Japanese Bicycle Thieves, but with a stolen gun instead of a bicycle. Neo-realism also inspired Satyajit Ray to make his Apu Trilogy a few years later. Buñuel knew and admired Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine, so he decided to make a film about Mexico City's slum children. De Sica's film - and neo-realism in general - had been drawn from the devastation of Rome by the war. It's social criticism was tempered by the effects of an historic disaster. There had been no war in Mexico, unless one counts the deeply-rooted class war that condemned a majority of Mexicans to poverty. 

Already in 1950, Mexico City was one if the most densely-populated cities in the world. Poor Mexicans in the regions surrounding the city who moved there in pursuit of job opportunities found themselves in overcrowded shanty towns where living conditions were hazardous at best. It was Dancigers who suggested to Buñuel that he make a film about the city's slum children. Disguised in threadbare clothes, he toured the shanty areas, noting down incidents, listening to people's stories. From these he cobbled together a script, with Luis Alcoriza, every detail of which he claimed was true to the lives he was portraying. The result was a pitilessly clear picture of the effects of poverty on the most vulnerable among us - the children.

Comparing Los Olvidados to Shoeshine would be unproductive. But De Sica had the advantage of a genius for directing child "non-actors," as he had already shown in his fascist-era film, The Children Are Watching Us. But Buñuel had an advantage as well. In his interview with Charles Thomas Samuels in Encountering Directors, Samuels asked De Sica why he avoided the subject of homoeroticism among the shoeshine boys. "Because the subject revolted me," he replied. On the evidence of his films alone, Buñuel appears to be attracted to precisely the things that the rest of us find revolting. In Los Olvidados, Buñuel included a scene in which Pedro (Alfonso Mejía) is propositioned for sex by an older man in the street outside a shop. (The scene is shot through the shop window, so we can't hear the dialogue, but the intentions of the man are unmistakable.) Pedro is about to leave with the man when a policeman causes them to scarper. Buñuel always had a natural fearlessness when it came to such "sensitive" subjects. Of course, it was one of the scenes that outraged Mexican critics, who thought that Buñuel had insulted the honor of Mexico.

What its detractors found most disturbing about Los Olvidados was the total absence of redemption or even remorse. El Jaibo (Roberto Cobo) and his gang attack and rob a blind man (even the blind man is a loathsome monster who fondles young girls and whose eyes look like they're glued shut) and a legless beggar; Pedro, who is rejected by his own mother, at least attempts to do the "right thing" according to society's standards, but he becomes implicated in the murder of another boy by El Jaibo. The message of the film, if it can be said to have one, is that Pedro is damned from birth by a society that will not permit him to find, let alone travel, the right path in his life.

There are telltale surrealist touches throughout the film: after the attack on the blind man, Don Carmelo (Miguel Inclán), he lies on his stomach in the dirt, and Gabriel Figueroa's camera pans to reveal a chicken (which, of course, he cannot see) in front of his face; one of the boys suckles a goat; Pedro dreams that the boy El Jaibo murdered is laughing under his bed, that his mother loves him, embraces him, and offers him a huge steak - but El Jaibo appears and steals it. As he is dying, El Jaibo dreams of a dog running down an endless street. The dreams were shot in slow-motion to heighten their nightmarish qualities.  Surrealism always had a powerfully subversive subtext, as Buñuel's films make abundantly clear.

Over a lifetime of filmgoing, Los Olvidados was always one of those films I had always wanted to see, but never had an opportunity until quite recently. The reason for this is obvious: it is, after all, such an unpleasant subject for a film. Buñuel gives us a guided tour through one of the most uninviting worlds ever caught on film. Shoeshine had at least the comfort that we were in the hands on a filmmaker who cared deeply for the fates of the boys whose stories he was telling. With Buñuel, de Sica's compassion is replaced by a kind if cruel fascination. 

There is no comfort to be found in Los Olvidados, except perhaps in the satisfaction of being shown the truth about the lives of the boys Buñuel follows. I wrote five years ago that, "To be sure, Buñuel wasn’t born to reassure us that we live in best of all possible worlds." Pedro struggles to free himself from being implicated in El Jaibo's crime, but fails and he is murdered by El Jaibo. The police arrive, too late as usual, and gun down El Jaibo. The end of Pedro, his body thrown onto a garbage dump, recalls the end of the Geoffrey Firmin in Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano: "Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine."

Despite the outrage and protests of Mexican authorities, Oscar Dancigers got Los Olvidados
a screening at Cannes and Buñuel won the Palm d'Or for Best Director. Miraculously, all of the film's enemies changed their minds about Buñuel and his career in Mexico flourished.


(1) All quotations are from Buñuel's autobiography, My Last Sigh (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1983).

Who Wants To Be a Samurai?

Anytime from the mid-1950s, after the first wave of postwar Japanese films swept across Europe and America, until the late '60s, every male (and probably every female) cinephile wanted to be a samurai. Even Ingmar Bergman admitted in an interview that he wanted to be one, and it inspired him to make The Virgin Spring. 

From the beginning of film production in Japan, the samurai had been a staple of period films, or jidaigeki. Samurai - or chambara - films were as common a fixture of Japanese film as Westerns had been in Hollywood. While the two genres are often compared, more than one critic has observed that the central action of a samurai film - the sword fight - is immeasurably more cinematic than a gunfight.

Of course, there had been dissenting voices all along from Japan that tried to remind us, in films like Kobayashi's Seppuku, a scathing attack on bushido - the samurai code, that being a samurai wasn't necessarily such a good thing. And by the time the filmmakers of the Japanese New Wave were done, the image of the heroic samurai was in tatters. Kihachi Okamoto's 1968 film, Kill!, accelerated the decline. 

In Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character, one of those reference books that, in the 1970s, was considered "indispensable" for any student of Japanese film, Donald Richie wrote: "Kihachi Okamoto made the satirical comedy Age of Assassins (Satusujinkyo Jidai, 1966) and then went on to make such ordinary period films as Kill (Kiru, 1967-68) and such unexceptional war films as Human Bullet (Nikudan, 1968)."(1) So much for Kihachi Okamoto. Except that I have seen both Kill! and Human Bullet, and though they are not up to the level of the best films of the Sixties, pace Donald Richie, they are neither ordinary nor unexceptional.

Richie must have seen dozens of period films to have arrived at a definition of what was "ordinary" that is far more exact than my own. But I have seen enough Japanese period films to know just how boringly ordinary they can be in the hands of an uninspired director. (Hiroshi Inagaki's stylistically petrified version of Chushingura [1962] heaves to mind.) 

A formulaic samurai film is one that indulges in clichés rather than avoids them, that adheres strictly to the terms of the genre without attempting to expand them or explode them. For me, a good illustration of the difference can be found by comparing two films made back to back by Akira Kurosawa: Yojimbo and Sanjuro.(2) The first is a direct and brilliant send-up of the genre, while the second, which was a sequel to Yojimbo with the same scruffy samurai played by Toshiro Mifune, is a almost a self-parody. In Sanjuro, Kurosawa was clearly capitalizing on the success of Yojimbo. Audiences expecting him to repeat himself didn't realize that such a feat was beyond even Kurosawa's powers. In artistic terms, Sanjuro is a pallid shadow of Yojimbo.

By the time Kihachi Okamoto made Kill!, he had already distinguished himself as a versatile director in multiple film genres and was sought after by the biggest names in Japanese film. He had what can only be called a jaundiced view of Japan's past and present.  Age of Assassins, the title of his best film, could be the same title of many of his films of the Sixties. He made Samurai Assassin (Samurai, 1965) with Toshiro Mifune and Sword of Doom (Daibosatsu Toge, 1966) with Tatsuya Nakadai. In the latter, Okamoto was challenging the popular version of the well-known tale of Daibosatsu Pass (which first appeared as a serial novel by Kaizan Nakazato), made in color in 1960 with the screen idol Raizo Ichikawa in the role of Tsuke Ryunosuke. Okamoto's version was shot in freezing black & white and is uncompromisingly inky black in tone, making no concession to audience sympathies. As performed my Tatsuya Nakadai, Ryunosuke is an obvious psychotic murderer, made worse by the total absence of motivation for his evil deeds.

With Kill! Okamoto made a direct assault on the samurai as an institution in Japan. The film opens in a dusty, deserted outpost called Joshu in the year 1833 with a chance encounter between Hanjiro, a farmer who wants to be a samurai, and Genta, a samurai who quit his position two years before to become a yakuza. Both starving (we can hear their stomachs growling - at one point in harmony), they become embroiled in the criss-crossing plots of a murderous chamberlain named Ayuzawa trying to consolidate his power over a provincial fiefdom. 

Hanjiro has taken the name "Tabata" (rice paddy) because he sold his land for a sword. "Two years ago," he tells Genta, "There was a riot near my town. I saw peasants die like ants. I won't be an ant." But Genta is taking an opposite trajectory. Two years before, he was ordered to kill his best fiend for the sake of the clan. "I was disgusted with samurai life, so I left it." He watches as Ayuzawa orders his men to kill one another and recognizes it as familiar samurai treachery.

There seems to be a single prevailing message in so many samurai films - that the samurai as a class is corrupt and oppressive and it is better to be a poor farmer (or, in the case of Genta, a lowly yakuza). You find this message at the end of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, and in Yojimbo. At the beginning of Yojimbo, an old man tries to stop his young son from running away and becoming a gambler. "Who wants to be a gambler?" the father pleads. "Stay at home and farm!" 

"Who wants a long life eating mush?" his son replies. "A short, exciting life for me!" Near the very end of the film, this same young man is confronted by the nameless samurai played by Mifune. Screaming for his mother, he cowers as Mifune approaches him. "A long life eating mush is best!" Mifune tells him, as he lets the young man run away.

The same message also appears in Kill! At the film's climax, which takes place on the day of the spring equinox, all of Ayuzawa's plots end in a bloody melée. But just as Hanjiro learns of Genta's heroism and calls out for him in vain, a crowd of peasants arrive to celebrate a life-affirming festival. Ecstatic, hysterical life in the midst of death. Ending where the film began, in the same deserted outpost town (where it is now raining), Hanjiro tracks down Genta. After finally becoming a samurai, Hanjiro complains to Genta that his formal clothes make his shoulders ache and that his shaved head is "freezing." Then he tells Genta that he quit and wants to go with him, wherever he is going. Hanjiro, too, has learned what Genta knows - a very un-Eastern philosophy. As E. M. Forster put it, "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."

The film is superbly and quite elegantly constructed. Okamoto deploys a masterful technique, using the widescreen (2.35:1) with surprising ease. Tatsuya Nakadai is once again brilliant. Japanese film acting is often difficult to gauge by Western standards, but Nakadai, who was a favorite of so many great directors, including Ichikawa, Kurosawa, and Kobayashi, is remarkably versatile and a pleasure to watch. The same cannot be said, however, of Etsushi Takahashi, who plays the farmer Hanjiro. Evidently trying to imitate a horse, especially when he runs (or gallops), his facial expressions are too broad even for a partial comedy like Kill! One feels - or hopes - that no one could be that stupid. Masaru Sato's music is virtually a character in the film. Though it sometimes "telegraphs" some of the action, with a sound effect slightly anticipating the image it accompanies, it is as carefully intertwined with the action as Sato's music had been in Yojimbo and Sanjuro.

I couldn't help noticing some references to Kurosawa: there are seven young samurai (shichi-nin) who hole up on a mountain called Toride (Toride-yama, the word means "fortress," like The Hidden Fortress); Genta finds that he must defend the young samurai "to find out what I lost as a samurai," just as Sanjuro did; and, like Mifune in Yojimbo, Genta is captured and severely beaten before he triumphs using - instead of Mifune's knife - a pair of small sharpened fire tongs. These "references" may have been unintentional, but I noticed them - a clear sign that I've probably seen too many Japanese films.


(1) The Human Bullet, which Okamoto made for the Art Theater Guild, is like Soldier Svejk in the Pacific War. A young man is conscripted in the Imperial Army, but is found to be so useless, he is chosen to be a "human bullet" - piloting a surface torpedo in a suicide attack. At the close of the film, set today (1968), his skeleton is still at the controls of his torpedo, heading toward a beach crowded with unsuspecting bathers. 
(2) The story that Okamoto used as the basis of Kill! was derived from a collection of stories by Shūgorō Yamamoto - the same collection of stories that provided Kurosawa with the story for Sanjuro.

The Hidden Fortress

The life of a man
Burn it with the fire!
The life of an insect
Throw it into the fire!
Ponder and you'll see
The world is dark
And this floating world is a dream
Burn with abandon!


The word "entertainment" has been abused and overused at least as much as the word "art" - to which entertainment is supposedly subordinate. Yet a work of solid entertainment is almost as hard to find as a work of art. No one has any reason to sniffle at good entertainment. According to Stanley Kauffmann, "I know that, in a good year, 95 percent of the world’s films were trash, four percent plus were good entertainment, and there was a small fraction of seriously good films. In a good year." (1)

The late Donald Richie assured us in his monumental monograph on Akira Kurosawa that when he made The Hidden Fortress (right after Throne of Blood, his imposing transposition of Macbeth), he was aiming to make a rollicking entertainment. That he was resoundingly successful in his ambition doesn't lessen the degree of difficulty that his task presented to him. Kurosawa had already made the great films upon which his reputation rests - Rashomon, Ikiru, and Seven Samurai. The international success these films enjoyed was not enough, evidently, to earn for Kurosawa the independence that he wanted. The Hidden Fortress was so successful at the box office (it was the top-grossing Japanese film of 1958), it enabled Kurosawa to form his own production company.

What he accomplished with The Hidden Fortress is too often overlooked.  As comical creations, the two farmers, Matashichi and Tahei, approach the dimensions of Falstaff. The whole "adventure" presented by Kurosawa in marvelously muscular strokes can be seen, from the perspective of these two hapless n'er-do-wells as one prolonged calamity. We are introduced to them in the opening scene, the camera following them from a slight distance as they traverse an immense wind-scoured plain, jabbering and blaming each other for their miserable fates. Trying to enlist in the ranks of a warring clan, finding themselves mistaken for the enemy, forced to dig graves, they proceed through the course of the film from captivity to crime to scavenging, scammed by an apparent thief into carrying, like beasts of burden, stolen gold concealed inside pieces of wood to the safety of a neighboring province, not knowing that the thief is General Rokurota of the defeated Akizuki clan and the mute girl who travels with them is none other than Princess Yuki. At their worst, the two are the quintessence of cowardice, disloyalty, and selfishness. At their best, they are friends for life: believing he is doomed, Tahei even asks Matashichi if they can remain friends in the afterlife. These two miserable specimens are human beings, after all, survivors of the calamities their unscrupulous rulers bring down on them. 

The crucial scene is the fire festival, in which ordinary farmers and townsfolk build a bonfire and dance and sing ecstatically around it. Princess Yuki is entranced by her first close contact with her subjects, the common people whose lives would never otherwise have caught her attention. Later held captive and awaiting execution, the princess tells the disgraced Yamana general Hyoe Tadokoro (played by Susumu Fujita, unforgettable as Sanshiro Sugata, the hero of Kurosawa's very first film): "The happiness of these days I would have never known living in the castle. I saw people as they really are, I saw their beauty and their ugliness with my own eyes." Then she sings the song she first heard at the fire festival: "The life of a man - burn it with the fire!" 

One could argue that, like the surviving samurai at the conclusion of Seven Samurai, Princess Yuki and General Rokurota are the losers. The real winners are Matashichi and Tahei, rewarded with one measly piece of gold (one ryō), who are going home to their village, having learned that their humble lives as farmers are immeasurably preferable to the perilous adventures they have endured - that a living dog is better than a dead lion. 

Kurosawa's command of his material can best be seen in its minutiae. The great crowd scenes in the ruins of Akizuki castle reveal the mastery of the director, with every single character - among hundreds - delineated, every actor locked into his role, no matter how tiny. Watch how the armed guards swagger, with each showing off his ability to control the crowd of captives, but also hiding his terror at their sheer number. When the slaves rise up against the guards at night, we are caught up, just like Matashichi and Tahei, in an irresistible tide of movement. 

I first saw The Hidden Fortress in a movie theater in the 1970s. Since then I have seen it a few times on home video and lately on DVD on a 16:9 LED TV. It's like first love - trying to re-capture the original experience of watching a film where it belongs - on a big movie theater screen. Alas, the experience can't be re-created. It's a new experience, accompanied by different people in our lives. I feel blessed that I came of age as a filmgoer a decade before video gave us the irreplaceable pleasure of taking our favorite films home with us. But it's the memory of that first event that stays with me, that I hold in my heart.

Ah, lost innocence! When I saw The Hidden Fortress in the 1970s, I was unaware that it inspired George Lucas to make Star Wars. I have since learned that Lucas borrowed plot elements from Kurosawa's story not just for Star Wars but The Phantom Menace as well. I suppose that my immunity to Star Wars and its sequelae is due to the fact that I was 19 when it was released - a well-adjusted adult having finished my first year of college. In his review of Star Wars, Stanley Kauffmann wrote: "This picture was made for those (particularly males) who carry a portable shrine within them of their adolescence, a chalice of a Self that was Better Then, before the world’s affairs or—in any complex way—sex intruded."(2)

Out of gratitude to Kurosawa, Lucas helped finance a film Kurosawa made in 1980 called Kagemusha. It was a funny kind of gratitude, since the film was cut by almost 20 minutes for its US theatrical release.

Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, whose Japanese title translates as "Three Villains in a Hidden Fortress," is honest-to-goodness entertainment. It makes the word clean again.


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, "Old Ark, New Covenant," The New Republic, July 5, 1981. Kauffmann made this remark in his review of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which didn't measure up to his standard: "I don't want to be a child again, not even for two hours. I reject the Raiders pact."
(2) Stanley Kauffmann, "Innocences," The New Republic, June 19, 1977.

Remastering the Film

When Charles Thomas Samuels (1936-1974) was writing his unfinished book, Mastering the Film, which was to be his overview of film from the perspective of its greatest directors, he arrived at a list of twelve filmmakers, each of whom had created at least two great films and had arrived at an individual style. The twelve filmmakers were Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, Clair, De Sica, Fellini, Hitchcock, Olmi, Reed, Renoir, Truffaut, and Vigo.

The structure of Samuels' book appeared to force some of his choices upon him. His prejudices took care of the rest. For example, Samuels was honest enough to admit to feeling "deracinated" by the work of Asian filmmakers, and disqualified himself from passing judgement on them. Clearly, Jean Vigo did not live long enough to show us the full extent of his gifts. What remains is tantalizing but ultimately unsatisfying. I agree with Vernon Young's assessment of the work of René Clair, which he epitomized as "champagne on corn flakes." My own estimation of Bresson's work is common knowledge to readers of this blog. I would add that his hatred of actors is typical of filmmakers who insist on absolute control of every aspect of the creative process. Antonioni hated actors as much as Bresson, but at least he recognized that he needed their contribution to his work. The less said about Hitchcock, the better. His influence on the work of Truffaut was deleterious in the extreme.

Due perhaps to a lack of enthusiasm from publishers, the reception of his book of interviews with many of the his chosen filmmakers, Encountering Directors (1), and his own unforgiving self-criticism, ultimately resulting in his suicide, Samuels came nowhere near to finishing Mastering the Film. Tantalizing fragments were published posthumously both in his honor and to provide financial relief for his surviving wife and children.

I hang on to the memory of Samuels if only because film criticism on the level at which he was writing for publications like The American Scholar and The Hudson Review remains extremely rare, and because, knowing the lengths of his commitment to what he wrote and what he was writing about, I know that I will never be as good a critic as he was.

The following exchange between Samuels and Michelangelo Antonioni, included in Encountering Directors, reveals just how much Samuels expected of film, and one of the reasons that his splendid book was so slighted by journalistic reviewers:

Samuels: By the end of L'avventura, Sandro recognizes that his promiscuity is harmful to Claudia, with whom he has had the one intense relationship of his life, so far as we know. Do you mean us to believe that his ensuing guilt (inspiring him to tears) is an error because what makes him feel this guilt are conceptions of romantic love and personal responsibility that have become irrelevant burdens?

Antonioni: Sandro is a character from a film shot in 1960 and is therefore entirely immersed in such moral problems. He is an Italian, a Catholic, and so he is a victim of this morality. What I said awhile ago is that such moral dilemmas will have no right to exist in a future that will be different from the present. Today we are just beginning to glimpse that future, but in 1960 we lived in a country with the Pope and the Vatican, which have always been extremely important to all of us. There isn't a school in Italy still, not a law court without its crucifix. We have Christ in our houses, and hence the problem of conscience, a problem fed to us as children that afterward we have no end of trouble getting rid of. All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.

Samuels: I don't think you're proposing something that's only a matter of time. Would it indeed ever be good to dispense with the bag of tricks, as you call it? I wonder if we shouldn't be more proud of this tradition going back to Homer than of the trip to the moon. Speaking only for myself-no, I'm sure I speak for others, too-the ending of L'avventura is so powerful because Sandro has the conscience to regret what he has done. To feel such regret, one has to believe in the supreme importance of human responsibility, and I can't conceive of art without that belief.

I could not begin to write as comprehensive a study as Samuels devised. But if I were to come up with my own list of filmmakers to include in such a study, it would look like the following.

Gianni Amelio (b. 1945)
Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)
Bruce Beresford (b. 1940)
Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)
Jean-Pierre Dardenne (b. 1951) Luc Dardenne (b. 1954)
Federico Fellini (1920-1993)
Shohei Imamura (1926-2006)
Hirokazu Koreeda (b. 1962)
Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998)
Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963)
Jean Renoir (1894-1979)
Vittorio De Sica (1901-1074)
Bertrand Tavernier (b. 1941)
Jan Troell (b. 1931)
Zhang Yimou (b. 1951)


Several filmmakers who did not make my list, for one or another reason, would make my list of Honorable Mentions: Claude Autant-Lara, Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Claude Chabrol, Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi, David Lean, Louis Malle, Ermanno Olmi, François Truffaut, Carol Reed, Andrzej Wajda, and Lina Wertmuller. I will expound on my choices next week.


(1) In his interview with Bresson, Samuels quoted a proverb that best explains the critical reception of Encountering Directors: "A jackass can look into a mirror, but a philosopher can't look back."

Sight Unsound

In 1962 , Dwight Macdonald - political radical and cultural conservative - was asked to contribute to a poll being conducted by Sight & Sound for, to use their own words, the ten "best films of all time." Macdonald duly submitted his list (1) with the following comment, "What no Chaplin, no Stroheim, no Dovchenko, no Pudovkin, no Clair, no Pabst, no Murnau, no De Sica, no Rossellini, no Visconti, no Fellini, no Ford, no Wellman, no Flaherty? Well, it's your idea." He then wrote a piece for Esquire about the poll, comparing the previous list from 1952 to the results of the 1962 poll (2).

Since I like exercise for its own sake, and since there have been four more Sight & Sound Critics' Polls since Macdonald compared the first two, I will try to bring Macdonald, who has been dead - and sorely missed - since 1982, up to date by examining the polls, their consistencies and inconsistencies. I have expressed my own opinion of such polls elsewhere (3), but there is a mania for them among critics and filmgoers, which is a direct reflection of the absense of serious thinking and discussion about films.

The point of conducting the critics' poll only every ten years is, I suppose, meant to bestow on it some sense of historicality. But by waiting so long between polls, during which time a new generation of critics has appeared with their own pet peeves and axes to grind, not to mention a new generation of filmmakers that has its own ideas about what a film should be, the very notion of consensus is challenged. I am, for one, rather glad that there were no pollsters in the 1940s, '30s and '20s to remind us what a wilderness the film world was before De Sica and Kurosawa, Renoir and Carné, or even before sound was added to sight. Trying to imagine what a 1932 Critics' Poll would have looked like (4), with its purists hanging on tenaciously to the lost art of the silent film, while newcomers dismissed them as prehistoric, is proof of how far film has come in a relatively brief period of time. But even such attempts at comprehensiveness have not prevented the poll from being topical.

In the 1972 poll only five titles survived from the '62 poll: Citizen Kane (#1), Ugetsu (#10), La Regle du Jeu [why the pretense of titles in French but not in Russian or Swedish or Italian?] (#2), Battleship Potemkin (#3) and L'avventura (#5). The rising and falling fortunes of old artists was more to blame than the introduction of new talent. The rest of the list shows the extent to which the reputations of two filmmakers dominated critical thinking then: Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (in the shattered edit, tied for #8) and Ingmar Bergman's Persona (tied for #5) and Wild Strawberries (tied for #10). The dropouts were Greed, Bicycle Thieves, Ivan the Terrible, La terra trema and L'Atalante. (5)

The disappearance of Greed from the poll was encouraging. Stroheim's star would never rise again, not even after the 1999 "restored" version was released to some acclaim. Nor would Visconti's, whose La terra trema was a rather unsettling combination of neo-realism and homoeroticism (Visconti had a predilection for casting catamites in all his films). Ivan the Terrible seems almost sclerotic today. L'Atalante is utterly charming and would reappear in the 1992 poll at #5. Periodically, certain films are re-discovered when restored prints are made available, as with L'Atalante, The Rules of the Game, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vertigo, Sunrise, etc.

Of the new additions in the '72 poll, the most pleasant surprise is Keaton's The General (tied for #8). the realization of Keaton's superiority to Chaplin, even if it does not lessen Chaplin's genius, was one of the most heartening mutations in cinematic taste of the past fifty years. What puzzles me is the rather back-handed tribute paid Ingmar Bergman, whose Wild Strawberries and Persona are considerably overrated. The biggest movement on the '72 poll was the appearance, at #4, of Fellini's 8 1/2.

Not surprisingly, then, by the time the '82 poll appeared, both Bergman films had dropped out, along with Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, although it would reappear in '92 tied for #10. Welles still clung to the cat-bird's seat with his Kane and Ambersons. Between '72 and '82 an unprecedented seven films clung to a place in the polls: Kane (#1), Rules (#2), 8 1/2 (#5), Potemkin (#6), L'avventura and Ambersons (tied for #7) and The General (tied for #10). Three new titles on the '82 poll show the direct impact of the auteur theory: Singin' in the Rain (tied for #3), Vertigo (tied for #7) and The Searchers (tied for #10). That all three are American genre films did not seem to faze the critics who voted for them. The happiest addition was Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (tied, unbelievably, with Singin' in the Rain). None of the films on the list happened to have been made during the intervening ten years, which is a trend that continued through the present 2002 poll.

Five titles survived the next decade for the '92 poll: Kane (#1), Rules (#2), Vertigo (#4), The Searchers (#5) and Potemkin (in a four-way tie for #6). Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc reappeared in the tie for #6, along with L'Atalante, which makes me wonder if the critics were beginning to keep tabs on the old polls. Kurosawa, #3 in '82, is replaced by Ozu's Tokyo Story. Though magnificent, it seems to be the token Japanese title of the decade. The victims of the interim decade were Singin' in the Rain, 8 1/2, L'avventura, Ambersons, and The General. Two new titles to the poll were Ray's Pather Panchali (#6) and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (#10). The Kubrick film that belongs on the poll is, of course, Dr. Strangelove. But the pseudo-intellectuality of 2001 made the critics seem smarter than they are. The Ray film is obvious lip service, since he died in April of that year.

Having lived with the choices for the latest poll, published in 2002, for seven years, I am as astonished at the persisting critical reason represented by Kane (#1, as usual), Rules (#3), Tokyo Story (#5), Potemkin (tied for #7), and 8 1/2 (tied for #9) as I am at the growing critical aneurism that put Vertigo at #2, The Godfather(s) at #4, 2001 at # 6, and Singin' in the Rain at #9. But where discrimination is most needed, and most to be expected, as when a person involved in the life of international film who has some knowledge of its history and the ability to distinguish between the films that conform to his subjective tastes (gustibus) and those that take powerful exception to them, is called on to submit his list of the Top Ten Films, it is sorely lacking in at least half of those critics consulted by the British Film Institute. But like all the other arts, the talent necessary to make a great film, and to a lesser extent the faculty needed to recognize it, is a matter of only a few. The size of an audience for, say, The Passion of Joan of Arc is miniscule compared to the number of viewers who flock (which best describes it) to see the latest X-Men or Tarantinto film. In fact, to adapt the Matthew Arnold maxim, you can clear a crowd faster with the word "Ozu" than with a firehose. But many critics like to pretend that there is a middle ground on which a popular film can also be deemed art, and that this extremely narrow ground is as broad as the Susquehanna River Valley.

No music critic who is worth reading would argue that Beyoncé is a good singer. No decent food critic would state that pizza is good food. No theater critic worth a damn would claim that Spamalot is a good play. And yet film critics routinely hand out praise for trash like Inglorious Basterds (or is it Basturds?) and The Dark Knight.

While I understand that such things as the Sight & Sound Critics' Poll is compiled from extremely divergent sources, and that de gustibus non est disputandum, I believe there is good reason to question the sanity of a critic who thinks that Touch of Evil and L'Avventura can be mentioned in the same breath. Placing a film like Vertigo or The Searchers alongside The Rules of the Game and Tokyo Story is tantamount to saying that Patricia Highsmith is the equal of William Faulkner or a Japanese manga is comparable to Kawabata.

Singin' in the Rain is a good musical, but it belongs to a genre and is subject to a specialized set of standards that Citizen Kane, obviously, is not. No one would think of judging Seven Samurai according to the quality of its songs or its choreography. And no one would argue, who has any reason at all to argue, that Silk Stockings is a poor musical because its characters and its situations are unbelievable.

So when Sight & Sound persists, as it has for the past sixty years, in proudly publishing the results of its Critics' Poll, with films like 8 1/2 and The Passion of Joan of Arc sticking out between recognizable rubbish like The Godfather(s) and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the significance of the poll is seriously compromised, if not nullified.



(1) Macdonald's list: 1. The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith) 2. Intolerance (D.W. Griffith) 3. October (Sergei Eisenstein) 4. Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton) 5. The Gorky Trilogy (Mark Donskoy) 6. The Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir) 7. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles) 8. Les Enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné) 9. Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais) 10. L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni. (see http://jdcopp.blogspot.com/2007/12/sight-and-sound-ten-best-films-in.html)
(2) The polls can be viewed here: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/.
(3) See http://tangodelviudo.blogspot.com/2008/12/critical-cretinisms-top-tens.html.
(4) If I had been around in '32, and lived in Paris, my list would look like this (in no order): The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer), M (Lang), I Was Born, But... (Ozu), The Gold Rush (Chaplin), Potemkin (Eisenstein), L'Age d'Or (Buñuel), Sherlock Jr. (Keaton), The Blue Angel (Sternberg), Le Million (Clair), The Phantom Carriage (Sjöström).
(5) A conspicuous lacuna: from 1952 to 2002, there has never been a film from the French New Wave anywhere near the top ten.

Red Beard

[Holy Week delayed my appearance in my favorite internet cafe, what with the owner closing up shop and going to Manila to be with her family. (Yes, I manage this blog from other people's computers. Which also accounts for occasional lapses in proofreading!) So here goes another previously published piece.]

Red Beard
by Dan Harper

…this may well be my last chance to insist, with any hope of a hearing, that Red Beard is an overpowering experience. I recognize that fewer people all the time go to films wishing to be overpowered. Soon I’ll have nobody to talk to…
– Vernon Young (1)

Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard was both a culmination of his filmmaking career and a dead-end. It was his last film to be shot in black-and-white and his last collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune, with whom he had worked so closely in 16 films. But it was also the last of his statements about humanity – more specifically his last great positive statement. Subsequent upheavals in his personal and professional life were so devastating that Kurosawa apparently gave up hoping for a solution to the dire problems chronicled most forcefully in such films as Stray Dog (1949), Ikiru (1952), The Lower Depths (1957), and most recently at the time of Red Beard's release, High and Low (1963) – namely, how to alleviate what George Orwell called “the offensive contrast of wealth and poverty”(2) . In Red Beard, however, Kurosawa was still searching for – and sometimes finding – answers to the seemingly endemic suffering of humanity.

A simple account of the story can give no indication of the effect of its telling. In 19th century Japan, a young doctor, Yasumoto, arrives at a free clinic to pay his respects to a friend of his father’s. Niide, whom everyone calls Red Beard, runs the clinic, and he coolly informs Yasumoto that he has been sent to replace another doctor who is leaving the clinic, and he is to begin his work immediately. Yasumoto is at first astonished, then terrified by the news, and tries to escape without ever quite succeeding. So strange and overwhelming are the problems he encounters among the clinic’s many patients – and so fascinating is the character of Red Beard – that Yasumoto finds himself somehow unable to leave.

Kurosawa’s strategy for the film is similar to that used in The Lower Depths – concentrating on the reactions of a few individuals to a tableau of numerous minor characters, each one propelling the story forward by adding another layer to the veristic details, and greater depth to the film’s theme. If it is less kinetic than most other Kurosawa films (even in its few outdoor scenes, the film’s frame is largely enclosed to include only the principal players), Red Beard is all the more engrossing for its concentration on character and emotion.

Kurosawa establishes a setting in which human suffering is most concentrated – a clinic for the poor – and draws the spectator, like Yasumoto, into the grime of their lives, shows us their faces, and tells us their stories of pain and unhappiness. And like Yasumoto, we are overwhelmed by it, astonished by it, repelled by it, but unable to turn away from it. Stephen Prince, in his book The Warrior’s Camera, sees Red Beard as “a deeply spiritualistic film”, in which “suffering is spiritualized”(3). Perhaps giving a nod to the then current Bresson-Ozu vogue, Prince goes on at some length to suggest that Yasumoto finds some karmic transformation in the film. Unable to alter the social conditions that result in the suffering he finds in the clinic, Yasumoto (at Red Beard’s behest) can only find relief – and release – in some Zen, monk-like detachment.

Yet Red Beard is above (or, perhaps, beneath) such mystification. Kurosawa never seemed interested in any hereafters. The closest he ever came to one is in the demented fantasies of the squatters in Dodes’ka-Den (1970), grotesquely contrasted with the horrible world they must live – and die – in. And while he may have despaired of finding an Earthly Paradise, Kurosawa knew only too well the dimensions of Hell. The film he made before Red Beard was called High and Low in the West, but Heaven and Hell (Tengoku to Jigoku) in Japan – the two poles being the rich and the poor. Kurosawa showed how the two worlds barely touch, until a corporate boss must descend from the serene heights of his luxurious home to find the criminal who mistakenly kidnapped his chauffeur’s son. When Kurosawa explores individual responsibility, it is never simply a matter of personal delicacy. The aim of Watanabe’s last deed in Ikiru is the redemption of a small part of the physical world he lives in, not his own soul.

Could this not simply be Kurosawa’s protest? Just as in Ikiru, and just as emphatically, Kurosawa appears in Red Beard to dramatise the pointlessness of living in a world where no single life can effect positive change. Until, of course, Watanabe discovers his chance and lives to see the playground constructed. So, in Red Beard, Niide succeeds in winning Yasumoto over to his daunting and unrewarding task – the steadfast and diligent caring for those whom no-one else will care for. That is Red Beard’s triumph, and that is what provides the uplift at the end of the film. But what sort of dubious triumph is it to attain karmic serenity when surrounded by suffering whose cause may be unavoidable but for which a palliative measure – compassion – is at hand? Yasumoto is, in fact, given the choice of merely accepting things as they are – the mono no aware approach – or of never surrendering in one’s battle against abject suffering, no matter how incurable or inescapable it is. As Vernon Young remarked on seeing Red Beard: “Suffering is an absolute value, not to be impugned by democratic hedonism nor bewailed by accusing a God in hiding.” (4)

The film has its shortcomings, to be sure. There are moments when an overwhelming sentiment verges precariously close to sentimentality. The film’s music, for example, is unsubtle and gets a little soupy at times. This is a charge levelled at many Japanese films, good and bad – one has only to recall the scene in Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp (1956) when Japanese and American soldiers on opposite sides of a battlefield spontaneously join in singing “There’s No Place Like Home”. And even Niide admits he has gone a little too far when Kurosawa has him resort to a savage (and hilarious) judo display while rescuing a 12-year-old girl from a brothel. But if he was occasionally guilty of laying it on a little thick, “Kurosawa’s art”, as Vernon Young states, “is principally the sum of his conviction”.

Kurosawa, even as Japan was emerging into economic prosperity, sought out his heroes among those who were overlooked by progress and economic reformers. He stated, “I think that the terrible reality that I describe in Red Beard is exactly that of Japan today. How to explain the contrast, the discrepancy between what one sees, the appearance of prosperity and the deep reality?” (5)

Red Beard stands as Kurosawa’s most powerful testament to the challenge that his brother Heigo set for him. In an oft-related anecdote, Kurosawa accompanied his brother through the ruins of Tokyo after the great Kanto earthquake of 1923. Turning away from the sight of the dead and dying victims of the quake, Heigo told his younger brother, “If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened. If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.” (6) In his greatest films, Kurosawa exhorts us all to do the same.

© Dan Harper, March 2006

(1) Vernon Young, “International Film: Tensions and Pretensions”, On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art, Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., New York, 1972, p. 302 (originally published in 1967 in The Hudson Review).

(2) George Orwell, The Penguin Essays of George Orwell, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1984, p. 188.
(3) Stephen Prince, The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1991, p. 235.
(4) Young, p. 304.
(5) Quoted in Prince, p. 247.
(6) Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, trans. Audie Bock, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1982, p. 54.

Recovered Memory

The last time I was in Korea I experienced something so strange that it left me puzzling over it for days. In 1998 I was stationed at Camp Casey, a U.S. Army post adjacent to the city of Tongduchon. Along with an official Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that dictated matters of jurisdiction and the limitations of U.S.-Korean relations, there was an unofficial policy that would send American servicemen into the local community for brief periods, to give the Americans a glimpse of down-home Korean life, and give Koreans some assurance that we were not all drunken vandals.

One day in early September I was "volunteered" to take part in one such excursion. A group of about ten of us were taken to a rice farm and we were quickly put to work harvesting the rice. We removed our troop boots, rolled our BDU trousers up to our knees and stepped into the cold mud of the rice paddy. We were each given a sickle and shown how to cut the rice plants and place them in a pile at the end of each row.

Once I had begun to work, something other than the cold mud sent a chill through me. I suddenly had the distinct impression that I had harvested rice some time and somewhere in exactly the same way. I was not particularly expert with the sickle, which needed sharpening, but I was moving quickly and rhythmically, unlike the other soldiers who were doing what soldiers always did - appearing to be working while not working at all.

For the rest of that day and for several days after, I wondered about that strange feeling I had experienced in the rice paddy. I knew with some degree of certainty that I had never set foot in a rice paddy before in my life. So where had that feeling come from? My mother had once told me how she had been walking with a friend down a street in Stuttgart, Germany in the 1950s, and she had experienced something like what I had done in the rice paddy. Nearing the corner of the street, my mother stopped and told her friend that she had been there before and to prove it she described in detail what was around the corner. Despite aerial bombing only a decade before, what she and her friend saw when they rounded the corner was close enough to how she described it that she came to believe that it must have been a memory from a "former life".

Not at all prepared to accept that my experience had no logical explanation,* I simply left the experience unresolved and went on with my daily duties. Then, on September 6, I was in a bar on Camp Casey when I saw a picture of a familiar face on the TV screen halfway across the room. I could not hear the sound for the loud music in the bar, so I walked quickly over to the TV. The man in the picture was Akira Kurosawa and the news was reporting his death at the age of eighty-eight.

And then I made the connection in my head - that I had not physically harvested rice myself, but I had seen barley harvested in the same way in Kurosawa's film Seven Samurai. It was the scene, just after the film's intermission, in which the character Kikuchiyo, played magnificently by Toshiro Mifune, flirts with a young girl who, along with many other villagers, is harvesting the barley. Kikuchiyo hands the girl his sword, which seems enormous in her hands, takes the sickle from her and starts cutting a row of barley, laying the cut plants at the end of the row. The scene takes place at a point in the film when we have already learned that Kikuchiyo is a farmer's son, so his handling of the sickle attests to this revelation.

Somehow this scene had sunk into my memory only to resurface years later as an actual experience. Such is the power of art, in which fictional characters are as real as living people and events in their fictional lives mingle with our own memories. For a whole morning, up to my knees in cold mud in a Korean rice paddy, I was Kikuchiyo, the son of a farmer who wanted to be a samurai so much that he gave his life defending a village that was not his own against a band of bandits.


* It has always amused me when people come forward to report UFO sightings. When they think they have exhausted every possible explanation for what they have seen, they resort to an impossible one.

Thoughts on Seeing Seven Samurai Again

I watched the Kurosawa film Seven Samurai these past two nights with my sister. I still have no idea how she could've been my sister and not been subjected to this 3-hour film by me (exactly 3 hours and 23 minutes, and with intermission it's closer to 3 1/2 hours). People sometimes exaggerate in these matters, but I can fairly accurately estimate that I watched the film, from beginning to end, possibly 15 times in the last 35 years. (I regret to admit that I've read Moby Dick only once.)

Again I was enthralled by Kurosawa's boldness and genius. Once again I wept at certain scenes - Watanabe's learning how the farmers had been eating millet instead of rice, Kikuchiyo's showing off of the samurai armor, the bloody and wet penultimate scene, which shows the merciless cruelty of war more effectively than any other film. In fact, Kurosawa's film once again demonstrated how ridicuously lacking are American films of any comparable depth and gravity. The John Sturges Western remake, The Magnificent Seven is stupid and stolid next to the original. In fact, it exists, as Vernon Young once put it, in another world - one divorced from art and even intelligence.

So, what did my sister think of the experience? I believe in her heart of hearts she saw the greatness of it. But she would probably never admit it to me.