Dynamic Duos: Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune

This is part of the Dynamic Duo blogathon, which is being held by Once Upon a Screen and The Classic Movie Hub. Pay em a visit. Lots of good film writing to be had.

When I finally settled on doing a piece about the long collaboration between Akira Kurosawa and Toshirô Mifune, I wasn't really thinking about the sheer hubris of such a thing. I mean, I've read Stuart Galbraith's book on the two, The Emperor and the Wolf, and at 850 pages, that sucker is a brick. And I want to distill Kurosawa and Mifune into the three to four thousand words of a blog post? Madness. This is complicated, too, by the fact that neither man was the other's favorite interpreter. Kurosawa made 16 films with Mifune (25 if you count films that Kurosawa wrote but did not direct). Compare that to the two dozen films Mifune made with Hiroshi Inagaki or the two dozen films that Kurosawa made with Takashi Shimura and you have a seriously compromised premise. Indeed, Shimura is arguably the director's on-screen avatar of himself in Ikiru and Seven Samurai and Drunken Angel, so I probably ought to think hard about the underlying premise that holds the Kurosawa/Mifune collaboration as being definitive for both men, because it's possible that it's wrong. Be that as it may, when you think of Kurosawa, you will inevitably also think of Toshirô Mifune eventually. That's a meme in action for you. And, really, their collaboration is like chocolate and peanut butter. Regardless of whether it's definitive or not, it most surely is tasty.

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Some Thoughts on Seven Samurai

Note: A slightly different version of this piece was written for another, long defunct blog. My apologies to anyone who may have read it before.

One of the hallmarks of a legitimately great movie is the ability of that movie to reveal hidden depths after multiple viewings. The greatest movies are bottomless wells in this way. Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) is one such film. It still functions as one of the best action films ever made. It still functions as an archetypal hero’s journey. It still functions as a probing drama. It reminds me of the description John Steinbeck gave for East of Eden in his introduction to the book: it’s a box into which Kurosawa poured everything that he was.

With this week’s viewing, I noticed that it functions as epistemological inquiry. It never dawned on me before that great whacks of the film are based on misrecognitions. This begins practically at the outset, in which a bundle of twigs turns out to be a peasant carrying a load on his back and continues through Takeshi Shimura’s samurai masquerading as a priest, Toshiro Mifune masquerading as a samurai, and so on. When this thought dawned on me, my first instinct was that it was accidental until I caught myself in the realization that Kurosawa also made Rashomon, in which epistemology is the whole point of the movie. Once this thought occurred to me, I started to realize that most of Kurosawa's films are based on epistemological themes, from the mistaken identity that sets off High and Low to the impostor in Kagemusha. It's the director's dominant theme, it seems, usually hiding behind the other concerns that are in the foreground.

I also noticed that the camera occasionally functions as an echo of the blocking of the characters. During the duel near the beginning of the film, the camera moves not like a camera on a track, but like an additional samurai, watching the action. It mirrors the hyperactive loser of the duel, actually, and when he dies, the film speed slows down, as if the camera movement during the duel and the film speed during the aftermath have put us into his skin. Interesting. I was also very conscious of the way Kurosawa frames shots of groups. Groups of non-samurai always seem to be in motion, fleeing something or running towards something else. Samurai almost never hurry, and are often static against the tide of villagers or bandits. Kurosawa–in this film in particular–is often compared to John Ford, but a more apt comparison is Howard Hawks, who composed shots of groups as a means of building communities. Kurosawa rarely separates the seven samurai when they are in a scene together–he generally keeps them all in the same film frame, even at the end when four of them are marked by gravestones.

I could probably spend a lifetime with this film.

How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth.

During Akira Kurosawa's long eclipse during the 1970s, a period during which he made one film as an exile and made one suicide attempt, the director occupied himself with refining the designs and storyboards for two films he didn't know if he would ever make. At the time, he had only made two films in color, and one can imagine him beginning to burst at the possibilities of color that he might never get to realize on screen. The two films* that eventually resulted from this long obsession play as if the director had taken a gun, put it in his mouth, and splattered both his disillusionment and his pent up ambitions onto the screen in eyeball-searing color.

My local art house has been running a Kurosawa retrospective this summer, consisting of six films. Of these six, I own five of them and have seen all of them on the big screen at one point or another. The sixth is Ran, Kurosawa's 1985 version of King Lear, which I have only ever seen on television and don't own. I skipped the others, but went to Ran.

There is a valedictory quality to Ran. There are so many disparate theatrical elements plucked from his long career and from his national cinema that it seems as if Kurosawa, in this one film, was trying to live up to the criticism that his career was like watching the history of Japanese cinema running in reverse. The theatricality of it is at odds with his early films, but of a piece with them, too. The theatricality of it was always there in films like Seven Samurai, but it was hidden, perhaps because they were in black and white. A great many of the shots in Ran seem decorated rather than composed, as if the director had spent years and years working and re-working them. The volume of Kurosawa's art from this period shows that this is indeed what happened. The director enlisted his friend, Ishiro Honda, to realize many of these pieces on screen, thus, perversely linking this particular apocalypse with the various catastrophes inflicted on Japan in Honda's kaiju films.

There are odd notes, from the androgynous Fool (the actor who plays him was in fact a noted female impersonator), to the grandly theatrical make-up worn by Tatsuya Nakadai, to a Tôru Takemitsu's score that sounds like nothing Japanese at all and most resembles Jerry Goldsmith's Planet of the Apes score. This is a weirdly feminine movie, too. The aforementioned Fool is part of it, but the movie hinges on the two female characters, Lady Sue (Yoshiko Miyazaki) in the role of the murdered innocent and Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada) as a descendant of Lady Macbeth. Lady Sue has hardly any screen time, but the pivotal role of the murdered innocent is implacable in a Shakespearean tragedy. Lady Kaede, on the other hand, steals the entire movie from all comers, even the wildly overacting Nakadai. I categorize this all as odd because Kurosawa was never a filmmaker with much interest in women, and yet they dominate his valediction. All told, this assemblage of oddities has a mounting effect, like a top that begins with small wobbles spinning into wildly eccentric gyrations. It would be a mistake to think that this effect is an accident, because, after all, the title of the film translates literally as "Chaos."

Ran is a great movie, no doubt about it, but I'd forgotten just how much of a downer it is. Not all of that can be laid at the feet of William Shakespeare, either. Oh, the broad outlines of Lear are still there, though it changes Lear's daughters into sons and kinda sorta changes Richmond into Lady Kaeda, one of the cinema's most jaw-dropping monsters. Lear is already something of a total negation of life, in which even the villains are inconsequential in a godless void. Its dominant words are no, not, nothing, and (memorably) never never never never. And in spite of all this, Kurosawa goes it all one better. The last shot of the movie has a blind man teetering on the precipice of a ruined castle, having accidentally dropped an image of the Amida Buddha he had been given to keep him company. Rarely has a filmmaker ever matched himself so keenly to the material. Ran is Kurosawa howling in the wilderness.

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*The other is Kagemusha (1980)

Kurosawa's The Quiet Duel

The Quiet Duel, 1949. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Miki Sanjo, Kenjiro Uemura, Noriko Sengoko.

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Synopsis: In the closing days of WW II, Doctor Koji Fujisaka contracts syphillis while operating on a wounded soldier. When he returns home, he finds that he must reject the woman he was planning to marry and treat his illness in secret while working in his father's charity clinic. His outward demeanor is of a paragon of virtue, but one of the nurses discovers his illness and shames him without knowing the details. When the man who infected him surfaces with a pregnant wife, Dr. Fujisaka's quiet duel with his own conscience comes to a head.

While The Quiet Duel isn't an apprentice work--Kurosawa had already made Drunken Angel by the time he tackled this story--it has never enjoyed the attention paid to the director's other works from the same period. Rarely screened, it appeared for the first time on home video at the end of 2006, a relatively late date for one of the world's greatest directors. And even this appearance was short lived--BCI, the label that put it out, has since folded up shop. This film can't buy a break.

Many filmmakers have skeletons in their closets, and many more have films in their portfolios that simply fall through the cracks. This film is certainly not a skeleton. It is, however, an awkward sell. Watching the film on DVD, I was continually struck by the reason it has remained unseen for so long. There was no way this film was going to be screened in America during the 1950s, Kurosawa's golden decade. The profession of Takashi Shimura's elder doctor alone would prevent that (he's a gynecologist), to say nothing of the frank depiction of syphillis, and the repeated use of the word "spirochete." That was never going to fly while the production code was in effect. By the time standards had loosened, the film had been forgotten.

It's not a great movie. One can occasionally see the constraints of the budget assert themselves in ways the director is unable to overcome. But it's pretty good, in spite of that. It's not a film that can be easily dismissed. Talent will out, and it certainly bears the stamp of its creator, however embryonic his cinematic anima may have been at the time. It's an easy film to place in the context of Kurosawa's career. With Drunken Angel and Red Beard, it forms a kind of "doctor's trilogy." The persistent use of rain, the way the camera moves to confront its characters (particularly when Dr. Fujisaka confronts a drunken Nakata when he demands to see his stillborn child), the presence of Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, everything about the film is pure Kurosawa. Like Stray Dog, made the same year, it's a fascinating portrait of post-war Japan. As in The Lower Depths, it's interesting to watch the director work out the conversion of a play to film. And yet, The Quiet Duel is an anomaly in Kurosawa's work, too. Rarely, if ever, interested in his female characters, this film is arguably told from the point of view of Nurse Minegishi, played by the superb Noriko Sengoko as a fallen woman trying to make good. More than that, the film hinges on as many of the problems faced by women as it does on the plight of men. That so much of the movie is centered around birth and diseases of the reproductive organs almost forces the director to examine both sides of the gender divide. Also unusual for Kurosawa, he lets Sengoko steal the movie from Mifune, though it's possible that he didn't have any choice in the matter. Her performance is a force of nature.

Movies for the week of 1/28-2/3

25. For a guy who didn't make any kind of name for himself in horror movies, Lambert Hillyer made a couple of interesting ones. The better of the two is The Invisible Ray (1936)--the other is Dracula's Daughter--in part because it has a terrific, subdued performance by Bela Lugosi as the good guy. Karloff, for his part, is off his rocker in this movie and it's not much different than his "off his rocker mad scientist" in The Man Who Changed His Mind, save for the bad perm he wears in this movie. Lugosi is a revelation. It's the sort of change-up that Peter Cushing was later able to accomplish fairly often. Diabolical in one role, radiating kindness and warmth in the next. Frankly, I never though Lugosi was capable of it, and yet, here's the proof. And through a sinister goatee, to boot. The story is a bunch of improvisations surrounding Karloff's discovery and poisoning by the mysterious Radium X, which makes his touch lethal. Lugosi is a colleague who formulates a medicine to keep Karloff from burning himself up. It's all very routine, actually, though I'm amused at the notion that Africa is the source of Radium X; in real life, Africa has the richest uranium resources in the world. In any event, one wishes that Lugosi had been offered this kind of role more often.

26. Black Friday (1940, directed by Arthur Lubin), on the other hand, consigns Lugosi to a thankless supporting role, badly miscast as a gangster. Karloff is a scientist again (natch), this time with a radical brain transplantation technique which he uses to save the life of his best friend. To this end, he uses a gangster's brain, a gangster with the key to a half-million dollar stash of loot. Writer Curt Siodmak had a thing for brain stories. For the most part, both Karloff AND Lugosi are supporting players here, behind Stanley Ridges as the poor subject of Karloff's treatment. And that should tell you that the filmmakers were misapplying their resources wholesale.

27. Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (1948) was described by the director himself as the film where he found his style. On the surface, that style seems to be a combination of American film noir and Italian neo-realism, which seems to me to be unsynthesized by the director at the time of making this film. It is, however, the first of Kurosawa's collaborations with Toshiro Mifune, and in this, it's important. Mifune was a force of nature in this film: raging, forlorn, and impossibly handsome as a yakuza underboss who discovers that he has tuberculosis. The doctor who diagnosis him is Kurosawa's other favorite, Takashi Shimura, and this is really his film. His alcoholic doctor, laboring in a slum next to an open sewer, is miles and miles away from his wise samurai in Seven Samurai or his wise scientist in Godzilla. He's his own worst enemy, a flawed doctor who manages to find some redemption for himself, even though he can't save Mifune's character. It's a pretty good movie. I would hesitate to call it a masterpiece, even if one is inclined toward the medieval definition of that word. Kurosawa would later re-frame elements of this film--particularly the climactic knife fight in which both antagonists become covered in paint--in Stray Dog, a film that probably IS a masterpiece.

28. Luis Bunuel is most associated with Salvador Dali when it comes to artists, mainly on the strength of their collaborations in the 1930s, but the more I watch his films, the more convinced I become that his more natural antecedant is actually Heironymous Bosch. Bosch was simultaneously an irreligious mocker and devoted interpeter of Catholicism, often in grotesque terms. Bunuel is much the same. Bunuel's The Milky Way (1968) is perhaps a shade less caustic than Viridiana, but by exposing the various catechisms and heresies of Catholicism to a blank-faced examination, he finds a level of absurdity that his earlier film never approached. And in spite of this, Bunuel's version of Jesus Christ remains the most humane depiction in film. We see Christ laugh. We see him shave. We see him out of breath. And we see, at the end of the film, that he's clearly deluded. The movie follows two pilgrims on the way to Santiago de Compestella, following the route of the so-called Milky Way. On the way, they encounter a series of unrelated scenes that enact various heresies against Catholicism, which causes them to examine their own understanding of Catholic dogma. They also seem to be travelling through time, encountering Biblical and medieval tableaux along with modern European ones. This is probably Bunuel's most overtly surreal film since his early career. The film's last image is the drollest joke in his filmography.

29. I was pleasantly surprised by Jason Reitman's Juno (2007). Behind its hipster dialogue, there's a closely observed humanity in this film that one rarely sees in comedies anymore. It's great fun seeing the film navigate its way away from expected stereotypes. While Ellen Page is terrific in the lead role, I'm pretty sure that I could watch J. K. Simmons read the phone book with some amount of pleasure and I seriously need to re-evaluate the talent of Jennifer Garner. Garner is NOT saddled with hip dialogue, it should be noted, and is set up as an object of ridicule in her early scenes. But damned if the movie doesn't detonate that expectation. I loved the end of this movie. Loved it.

30. As an example of meta-cinema, The Girl Hunters (1963, directed by Roy Rowland) is pretty weird. Adapted from one of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novels, the film casts the author himself as Hammer. But that's not all. One of the gripes that Spillane had with the film version of Kiss Me Deadly was that Hammer came off as kind of a douchebag. With the author himself in the role, Hammer comes off, again, as kind of a douchebag. Crazy. The politics Hammer and Spillane spew is hillariously over the top, with the author's right-wing paranoia given full reign. The story follows Hammer after a seven year bender, jumping on the wagon when word reaches him that his secretary, Velda, is alive. It's weird how this movie plays like a middle film in a series, but that's the way it goes. Spillane isn't completely awful as an actor, actually, though he is very, very limited. In Spillane's hatchet profile, one can see where Frank Miller got the design elements of his character, Marv, in Sin City. Even so, Shirley Eaton has no problem stealing the movie from him. But it's not much of a movie in any event. I like the score by Philip Green, and some of the photography is nice, but the story itself is one narrative blunder after another.