A film and its cover

[The Yahoo column for this week. With images! In full colour! Originally published here]


Two very nice things happened to me last week. First, Manjula Padmanabhan (friend, multi-talented author and illustrator who once put me in a comic strip with the peerless Suki) dropped in with a gift: a couple of posters that she had designed for Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya in 1982. Second, I got my hands on a bunch of Criterion Collection DVDs that another friend, Tipu, had picked up for me at a sale in the US. (It was my first brush with legitimately bought Criterions: Tipu had disapproved of my pirated discs from the underground market in Delhi, and decided to help make an honest man out of me.)

Both the posters and the DVD designs were reminders that high-quality promotional artwork can have a life of its own, even while it enhances one’s appreciation of the film. One of Manjula’s posters is a large close-up – a drawing done in black ink – of Om Puri's lined, weary face. You might recall that in Ardh Satya, Puri plays a sub-inspector named Velankar who is facing a crisis of conscience. To my eyes, the poster suggests the inner turmoil more effectively than a still photograph would have done. The thick black lines appear to cast shadows across the actor’s face, and looked at in a certain light, Velankar seems scruffy and unshaven - something you never see in the film, where he is neatly turned out from beginning to end. There’s an artistic rather than literal realism on view here, and it's perfect for the character.

****

I’ve been fascinated by poster art – cool and formal, loud and kitschy, and everything in between – for a long time. Many a lunch at The Big Chill café in Khan Market has been spent with my fork and knife suspended in the air, my mouth half open, while I study the wall posters of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman and The Bride of Frankenstein instead of concentrating on my food. When the annual Osian-Cinefan film festival in Delhi started displaying vintage posters, lobby cards and paintings, I routinely spent more time in the foyer than in the auditorium, to the disapproval of friends who believed that watching five movies back to back was the thing to do at such an event.

This interest has led to a few good (and I must admit, cheap) purchases over the years. On a wall in my living room is a 5ft x 3ft poster of Nargis and Raj Kapoor in the famous clinch in Barsaat. It’s a painting, not a photograph, and though the faces are very accurately drawn, the poster (unlike the film) is in bright colour, with a florid red background. On the other hand, my An Evening in Paris poster features a Goldfinger-like image of a naked green woman with prominent nipples, which I’m fairly certain wasn’t in the film. But I love it anyway.

Among the posters I sadly don’t own, some of my favourites are the ones created outside the film’s home country, so that the familiar original title is turned into something exotic (and the film itself appears transformed and foreign as a result). For example, I much prefer the Belgian Psycho poster that spells the title “Psychose” (you’ll find a version of it here) to the relatively staid American and British versions. And who can deny that “Reporter des Satans” is a more evocative title than Ace in the Hole for a film about a rotten journalist exploiting a cave-in victim?

A poster I once saw of Deewaar had the alternate English title “I’ll Die For Mama!” scrawled across Amitabh Bachchan’s face in a dramatic font size. The Danish posters for From Here to Eternity (“Herfra til Evigheden”) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (“Broen Over Floden Kwai”) make these stodgy, Oscar-honoured epics seem more interesting than they are. And speaking of stodgy Oscar-winners, there’s an awesome Polish poster of Attenborough's Gandhi with the central image a fragmented drawing of Gandhi in a sitting position, hands joined in prayer. The great man appears literally to be disintegrating even as his country is being divided. There is more delicate artistry here than in most of the film.

As you can probably tell, I'm not as interested in posters made up of publicity photographs or stills, but even these can be imaginatively designed, or combined with other media – as in the Umrao Jaan poster Manjula showed me, with a photograph of Rekha in the foreground and a Taj Mahal painting (done by Anjolie Ela Menon) in the background.

The artwork on the Criterion DVDs occupies a smaller canvas (the size of a DVD cover or, at most, the size of the Main Menu on your TV screen), but has greater scope for mixing media. For instance, the DVD cover of Onibaba, the Japanese horror classic about a woman who gets hold of a demon mask, features a bright, coloured caricature (again, the film itself is in black and white), while the Main Menu shows a short animation of the “demon” popping up from behind tall grass while two woman flee in terror.

The designers at Criterion frequently use striking, original art – I have too many favourites to mention, but consider the minimalist cover of Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, with a simple line drawing of a tall building marked with a bright red cross on one of the upper windows (the film’s plot is set in motion by a man leaping to his death). Or the whimsical, New Yorker-like drawing on the cover of Make Way for Tomorrow, with two old people walking away from each other in the middle of a big city.

But at other times, images from the films are used to equally good effect. Nearly all the Criterion covers of Ingmar Bergman's movies feature the faces of his actors, often seem in tight close-up, expressions of contemplation or barely suppressed anguish on their faces – and what could represent Bergman better? In such cases, the very act of selecting a specific frame from a movie (from among the thousands available), then blowing it up or giving it a slight tint, can do wonders for packaging.

Thus the cover of Winter Light, a stark film about a tormented, self-doubting pastor, has a full-length shot of the actor Gunnar Bjornstrand – who plays the lead – lost in thought. The disc menu shows the sallow face of Max von Sydow, who plays a man seeking religious solace; in the background of the image we can see the uncommunicative pastor, his back turned to us. It's a lovely summation. As is the cover of Criterion’s A Woman Under the Influence, which shows the lead character in bed, looking fatigued and hung-over – the choice of visual, but also the fact that the colour has been deliberately toned down, perfectly captures the film's subject matter as well as its mood.

None of this is to say that a movie should be judged by its cover, but there’s no question that a well-executed design can be something worth studying on its own terms. It can deepen our understanding of a film, or it might simply be great fun to look at - or it can do both, as in some of the ones mentioned here.

[Since this is nowhere near enough space to do justice to most of the posters I'd like to talk about, I might consider doing a sequel to this post sometime]

The cowardly Samurai: audience manipulation in Harakiri

[Full version of my latest Persistence of Vision column]

I’ve been a big fan of classical Japanese cinema for a long time, and like most other viewers who develop an interest in that country’s movies, my approach route was through the three big names: Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. But in recent years I’ve been following other Japanese directors of the 1950s and 60s – Kon Ichikawa, Masuki Kobayashi, Kaneto Shindo among them – and I’ve been struck by the recurring themes of pacifism and anti-heroism in some of the best films of that time; the revulsion for the idea that there’s something glamorous or exciting about a life of violence, even when the violence is supposedly for a good cause; and the reminders of how conflict affects “little people”. These motifs probably come from introspection about the country’s very martial past – especially between the late 19th century and WWII – and you’ll discover traces of them in literature too, often in unexpected places (e.g., a bulky Haruki Murakami novel that’s set mostly in 1980s suburban Tokyo but contains unsettling inserts about the Sino-Japanese conflict). In cinema, this introspection can take the form of a “war is hell” story such as Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain, about a sad-faced soldier turned away by his own army. Or a horror film – Shindo’s Onibaba – in which a scarred face beneath a demon mask suggests the visages of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors.

Or it can take the form of a period movie that sharply debunks some of our ideas about those enigmatic warriors, the Samurai.


Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri is just such a film. There’s a lot that can be said about this plaintive, beautifully composed movie, but I’d like to dwell on an audience-manipulation technique used in its first half – a technique that implicates us in the idea that the Samurai code of “death over dishonour” is an inherently noble one, and then pulls the carpet (or tatami mat) out from under our feet.

To discuss this properly, some plot exposition is required. Harakiri begins with a title card telling us that it’s set in the early 17th century, a time of relative peace in Japan. An unemployed Samurai (or ronin) named Hanshiro arrives at the feudal estate of the Iyi clan with a request: being master-less and with nothing left to live for, he wishes to commit ritual suicide (seppuku or harakiri) on their grounds.

The estate retainers and their lord, Saito, are sceptical: there have been many recent cases of destitute Samurai visiting wealthy houses and making such assertions when what they really want is money or employment. They try to dissuade Hanshiro by telling him a story about another ronin named Chijiwa, who had come to them a few months earlier with a similar request, and this story is shown to us as a flashback.

In the images now presented to us, we see that Chijiwa is much younger than the scruffy, steely-eyed Hanshiro. He’s clean-shaven, somewhat shifty, he doesn’t look like he’s ready to stare death in the eye. From our first viewing of him we suspect that he’s a wastrel seeking easy money, and these suspicions seem confirmed when he expresses almost indecorous delight on being told that he will get to meet the head of the clan (perhaps to be employed as a retainer?) – and later, when he looks terrified on hearing that his wish for harakiri has been granted and the ritual dress is ready.


Now he loses his nerve, stutters, asks for respite: he has some important business to take care of, so could he be granted two days’ leave? His pleading comes across as pathetic and cowardly, and his hosts will have none of it. You came here to kill yourself, they say. Now do it. Or else...

Forcing young Chijiwa to commit harakiri is a ploy by the Iyi clan; they figure it will teach a much-needed lesson to any other Samurai who might want to come a-begging. And at this point in the story, the viewer’s feelings are likely to be divided, especially if he doesn’t know much about the nature of feudalism and the class divide in medieval Japan. For one thing, Lord Saito and his retainers aren’t sneering villains. They speak in restrained tones to each other, talk about the need to preserve the dignity of their house; there’s something melancholy about Saito (an understated, arresting performance by Rentaro Mikuni) himself. Also, if our main acquaintance with the Samurai culture has been through action movies, we have certain pre-conceptions. We have been conditioned to think of Samurai as men who never cringe or beg, and it strikes us as shameful that this young man is using a “noble” ritual like seppuku as a cover-up for his greed.

Thus the film, in a way, makes us complicit with the actions of the Iyi clan. But then, as the flashback continues, we see the long, increasingly disturbing scene where Chijiwa is forced to disembowel himself. Further, the Iyi sadistically insist that he do it with his own sword, which is made of bamboo, not steel. Somehow, with great effort, the young man manages to pierce his belly with this wholly inadequate weapon, but it’s impossible for him to complete the ritual, which entails cutting across his chest, left and right, up and down. Meanwhile his “second” (the swordsman who is assigned to cut off the warrior’s head once the self-mutilation is complete) stands about impassively, refusing to bring down his sword and end Chijiwa’s agony. Eventually Chijiwa takes the “easy” way out – he bites off his own tongue.

As you can imagine, this is a difficult scene to watch, even though it isn’t too gruesome (this is, after all, a black-and-white film made in 1962). It amounts to a bucket of cold water in the face of the viewer who may have felt that Chijiwa was getting what he deserved. Perhaps some of us even thought Lord Saito only meant to frighten this craven Samurai before sparing his life and booting him out of the gate – that would have made for a nice comic sequence! But what actually takes place is horrific and forces us to think again. Harakiri has only been running for half an hour at this point and its central themes aren’t clear yet, but at a subconscious level it has already started demystifying the grandeur and honour associated with the Samurai code.

The misleading nature of the Chijiwa flashback will become even more apparent as the story progresses and Hanshiro relates a tale of his own. We will discover something of young Chijiwa’s background, discover the circumstances that led him to the gates of the estate. In retrospect we will realise that when he asked for two days’ respite he was being sincere and would probably have returned to fulfill his promise. (When we first view the scene, we assume that he’s making an excuse to escape.) Our subsequent knowledge gives a whole new complexion to that early sequence, and makes a second viewing even more disturbing.

I’ve written mainly about (an aspect of) Harakiri’s narrative here but what strikes me most while watching it – especially in the sharp new transfer on the Criterion Collection DVD – is the cleanness of its composition. Some of its frames are like minimalist paintings, a reminder of Kobayashi’s gorgeously shot ghost film Kwaidan, which was full of sequences that look like lovely colour dreamscapes placed end to end. In their own discreet way, Harakiri’s black-and-white images are equally striking.

****

Among the many high-quality action films with pacifist undertones is Kurosawa’s great The Seven Samurai, about ronin protecting a village from bandits. There’s a melancholy strain in this masterpiece, a genuine sense of regret for the loss of human lives, and its protagonist (the wise Samurai leader Kambei) is a reluctant hero who has already seen too much bloodshed for his liking. But precisely because Kurosawa is such a superb director of action, and because he puts us right in the middle of the battles, it’s impossible not to feel a thrill during those scenes – and this can end up being our lasting impression of the film.

On the other hand, Harakiri has a formalness, a stillness, that goes with its plangent subject matter. A lengthy swordfight towards the end is filmed mainly in long-shot and though it’s extremely well-choreographed, there’s also something detached about it. We aren’t placed right in the middle of the blood and the grunts; there are several cutaways to Lord Saito sitting alone in an inner room, almost in a meditative state, listening to the swords clanging, waiting for his men to come and tell him that the fight is over.

Even though Hanshiro is a truly heroic figure (in a deeper sense of the word “hero” than the average action film gives us), the emphasis isn’t on the glamour of his sword-fighting, merely its efficiency. It’s possible at this moment to see a Samurai warrior as an individual worker, doing a job that circumstances have equipped him for – rather than as a representative of a way of life. Kobayashi’s haunting film is about the human beings – men with families, hopes and emotions – beneath the garb of the Samurai.

P.S. Tatsuya Nakadai, who plays Hanshiro, was one of the great Japanese actors. He makes a poetic remark in an interview included on my DVD of the film. “My twenties felt like a long climb up Mount Fuji,” he says, “and the burden I was carrying on my back was everybody’s masterpieces – the films of Kurosawa, Kobayashi, Ichikawa, Naruse.” It’s hard to believe Nakadai was only 30 when he played the aging, weary Hanshiro; it’s even harder to believe he’s the same actor who, only a year earlier, played the young, chuckling, pistol-wielding psychotic in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

Detectives, drunkards and vampires: same role, different actors

[Was asked by Crest newspaper to do this piece about characters played by many different actors onscreen. Fairly assembly-line and hurried, as such write-ups tend to be, but fun to do – reminded me of the light cinema pieces I used to write for the Cafedilli website a decade ago. Only putting this up here because the blog is malnourished these days]

When Robert Downey Jr took off his shirt for an action scene in the new Sherlock Holmes, movie historians dashed to their research hubs: was this the first onscreen Holmes to get into a topless fight? We may never know the answer – the legendary detective has been portrayed so many times on film that keeping track of “firsts” is impossible. It’s best to stick with the subjective assessment that Downey Jr has the most impressive pectorals.

Fine actor though Downey Jr is, he isn’t the best Holmes; the competition is too stiff. Consider Christopher Plummer, nicely sardonic in Murder by Decree, which pitted the detective against no less a quarry than Jack the Ripper. Or Michael Caine, playing an actor hired by Dr Watson - who's the real star of the show - to impersonate Holmes in the genre-bending comedy Without a Clue. Jeremy Brett’s Holmes in the 1980s series was probably the most “authentic”, but that was television so I’ll only give it an honourable mention. My personal vote for best feature-film Holmes (and I haven't seen them all, I should add) goes to the urbane Basil Rathbone, who played the part in a very popular series of films in the 1940s. The profile, the cap, the voice... everything about Rathbone was exactly as readers of the original stories envisioned, even if the plots were sometimes updated to fit then-contemporary events.

Conan Doyle’s sleuth is one of many fictional characters that the movies never tire of; his closest competitor in the popularity stakes (pun unintended) is Count Dracula from Bram Stoker’s novel. The Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi initiated the portrayal of the bloodthirsty Count as a darkly attractive figure, Christopher Lee sank his teeth even further into the part in the British Hammer films, and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version had Gary Oldman playing a dashing combination of Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, with a bit of werewolf (!) thrown in. But the creepiest vampire portrayal ever is from the great silent film Nosferatu. With his lean physique, spidery fingers and rodent-like face, the German actor Max Schreck was perfectly suited to the part. His vampire was repulsive and otherworldly – so otherworldly, in fact, that it was possible for another film made decades later to play around with the premise that Schreck was a vampire in real life! Nosferatu gets extra points for being decidedly unsexy, unlike the vampires in popular culture today.

Dracula is famously undead, but Death has a long tradition of appearing in human form in movies, the most iconic representation being in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, about a medieval knight being shadowed by the Grim Reaper. Brad Pitt made a luscious Death in the overlong drama Meet Joe Black – the camera was clearly in love with this toy boy – but my favourite is the Grim Reaper parody in the goofy comedy Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. In Bergman’s film, the knight challenged Death to chess; in this one, Bill and Ted make him play Twister and electric football, and beat him like a drum. Cheating Death was never such fun.

It’s difficult to choose just one among the actors who played another death-cheater, James Bond, but we’ll do the purist thing and stick with Sean Connery. Timothy Dalton, George Lazenby (remember him?) and Daniel Craig were more laconic – arguably closer to the spirit of the Ian Fleming novels – but Connery’s roguish charm and litheness gave 007 a dimension that even Fleming hadn’t envisioned. Roger Moore comes a close second. Pierce Brosnan? Fine actor, but for anyone who watched Remington Steele for more than one season it’s impossible to associate him with another recurring character.

From the ultimate man of action to a tragic hero burdened by indecision: Shakespeare's Hamlet has long been a litmus test for actors, and its screen adaptations are innumerable. Laurence Olivier won the best actor Oscar for the atmospheric 1948 version, and Mel Gibson gave one of his better performances (which isn’t necessarily saying much) in Franco Zefferelli's 1990 film, but I have to go with Kenneth Branagh, whose sumptuous-looking four-hour version retained the entire text of the play, yet still managed to be gripping throughout. Branagh was a wonderfully energetic Hamlet; his recitation of some of the key soliloquies was so vivid that I can still hear the words in my head years after I last saw the film.

Among the Bard's heroines, Lady Macbeth has had a long and varied screen life. In Roman Polanski’s excellent 1971 Macbeth, the fragile-looking Francesca Annis performed her hand-washing soliloquy in the nude, whimpering as she is supervised by nurses. Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool gave us a fine desi Lady Macbeth, Nimmi, all the more effective because we never thought the ethereal Tabu could be a manipulative vixen. But the best Lady Macbeth by a country mile was in Akira Kurosawa’s classic Throne of Blood. Isuzu Yamada’s chilling performance as Asaji isn’t rooted in psychological realism – the film is based on the Noh theatrical form, and Yamada’s face is made up to resemble an impassive mask – but when she’s on screen it’s impossible to take your eyes off her.

One character it’s surprisingly easy to take your eyes off is Indian cinema’s favourite tragic hero, Devdas. Here’s a role that can make a lazy performance look good: produce a distant, glaze-eyed expression, slur a little and you’ll be admired for “understated acting”. This is what most actors from K L Saigal to Abhay Deol have done over the decades, so why not judge the role by its very limited requirements and hand the trophy to that master of self-conscious “understatement”, Dilip Kumar, who played Devdas in Bimal Roy’s 1953 movie? (Yes, this IS a back-handed compliment.)

Of course, recurring characters don’t have to be fictional. Historical figures can be very popular too, and the more colourful the better: take England’s Henry VIII, famous for dispatching wives and ministers to the royal chopping block. The mercurial monarch has been played by some fine actors, including Richard Burton (Anne of the Thousand Days), Robert Shaw (A Man for All Seasons) and, most recently, Eric Bana (The Other Boleyn Girl), who took the modern, interior approach and avoided being influenced by stereotypes. These are all fleshed-out performances, but ironically the best screen Henry of them all was a deliberate caricature of the king as a gluttonous buffoon. The 1933 British film The Private Life of Henry VIII makes no pretence at being historically accurate, it just has a grand old time depicting Henry’s boudoir shenanigans, and the great Charles Laughton (who, incidentally, also gave the definitive screen performance of other popular characters such as Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame) chews up the scenery magnificently, in an Oscar-winning role.

In fact, so iconic was Laughton’s performance that it ended up defining Henry for generations of viewers. Which returns us to Downey Jr and a troubling question: will future generations think of Sherlock Holmes as that dude with the rippling muscles?

A few notes on The Seven Samurai

Last week I treated myself to a couple of mini-film festivals at home, watching (mostly re-watching) a few films of a particular director or actor. The honorees included James Stewart (whose birth centenary is next week) and Akira Kurosawa, and the festival high point, apart from re-experiencing the gorgeousness of Vertigo in its restored print, was watching The Seven Samurai after many years. It was like catching up with old friends. Jaded film buffs often tend to undermine a director’s iconic movies in favour of less-discussed works, but I can’t get over what a timelessly awesome film The Seven Samurai is, and how well it holds up to multiple viewings despite its length. So what if this is Kurosawa’s most popular movie: it’s still arguably his most organic and satisfying too. (Dare one say: "best"?)

A confession here: when I first saw The Seven Samurai (the full-length, 3 hour 20 minute version), I was slightly underwhelmed. This could partly be because I’d been expecting a full-blown action movie and didn’t realise that the first two hours would be dedicated to build-up, character development and strategy. Also, being aware that Samurai was among the many inspirations for Sholay, I probably expected a clearer delineation of the heroes and villains and wasn’t quite prepared for the ambiguity about class relations and the parallels the film draws between marauding bandits and noble samurais. (For viewers unfamiliar with class conflicts in 16th century Japan – the mutual distrust between warriors and peasants – it can take a while to appreciate these nuances anyway.) It was only on a second viewing that I was better able to see the film for what it was and everything fell in place. (Later, Donald Richie’s essay in his excellent Kurosawa book provided a deeper understanding of context.)

Among the many strengths of The Seven Samurai are its economy and directness, which the film sustains throughout its long running time. These qualities are evident right from the opening scene, where a group of horse-riding bandits look down at a hillside village and decide that they will attack it once the crop has been harvested. A terrified peasant overhears these plans and reports back to the villagers. After consulting with a wise elder, they decide to hire itinerant samurai to protect them from the bandits, in exchange for food. They travel to a nearby town in groups to look for master-less samurai (ronin), but their offers are rejected. Then they happen to witness a rescue operation performed by a composed, elderly samurai named Kambei; he agrees to help them and sets about assembling a band of warriors for the task. We are introduced to these recruits one by one, and we also meet the swaggering, clownish Kikuchiyo, a man who was born a peasant but is trying desperately to cross over to the warrior class – to become a samurai by dint of his actions. He is eventually allowed into the group and preparations begin for the battles ahead.

I was wrong to think of “action” in The Seven Samurai purely in terms of the actual battle scenes; Kurosawa’s mastery of shot composition and sweeping camera movements bring a kinetic energy to even the quieter scenes. The film is full of superb setpieces, such as the shot of Kikuchiyo sitting on a rooftop with the samurai banner in his hand, suddenly looking up at the hills and seeing dozens of bandits riding down towards the village. But remarkably, each of these scenes also has a built-in intimacy. Never do you get the sense that the action in this film exists in isolation – it is informed by, and enriched by, what we gradually learn about the characters.

Take the master swordsman Kyozu, the most Zen-like of the samurai, a man devoted to the perfection of his art for its own sake, rather than to material rewards or the pleasure of battle. There’s a quietly beautiful scene where Kyozu and the excitable Kikuchiyo are on a stake-out together, waiting to ambush three bandit spies. While Kikuchiyo keeps a lookout from atop a tree, grimacing and making dramatic gestures, Kyozu sits in an almost meditative state underneath, picking a flower and gazing at it. When the bandits arrive, he calmly rises, draws his sword and dispatches two of them with unhurried professionalism while Kikuchiyo elects to play the fool, jumping on the third man clumsily and beating him with his hands. (Note: in a video essay about the film on my DVD, the narrator observes that Seiji Miyaguchi’s’s deadpan performance as Kyozu recalls the “impassive gravity and grace” of Buster Keaton! The comparison makes me giggle, for various reasons.)

Shimura and Mifune

Like Sholay, The Seven Samurai is much greater than the sum of its parts. Still, the personalities of its two most prominent characters, as well as the performances of the actors playing those roles, make for a fascinating contrast: Takashi Shimura as the charismatic, soft-spoken but authoritative Kambei, who inspires and leads the samurai; and Toshiro Mifune as his polar opposite, the loud-mouthed but endearing Kikuchiyo, who constantly betrays his insecurities by trying too hard to impress. If Kambei is the cerebral force of the film, Kikuchiyo is its emotional centre, its beating heart, and Shimura and Mifune (whose roles in the earlier Kurosawa films Stray Dog and Drunken Angel are worlds removed from their roles here) are both exemplary.

As played by Shimura, Kambei exudes integrity and discipline, but he never comes across as humourless or dictatorial. The warm, self-effacing smile on his face is the smile of a man who has learnt, through hard experience, to be stoical about many things, and it’s easy to see why the others hold him in reverence. Mifune, on the other hand, makes the most of the flashiest role in the film – this is one of the greatest comic performances I’ve seen (and one that Dharmendra’s Veeru in Sholay owes a big debt to, as Anangbhai points out in a comment on this old post). Scenes like the one where Kikuchiyo sounds the alarm in jest and then makes fun of the villagers’ panicked response, or when he steals a gun from one of the bandits, or tries to master a recalcitrant horse, all make for superb physical comedy. Time and again, we get evidence of what Kurosawa meant when he observed once that Mifune “could convey in a single movement what it took most actors three separate movements to express”.

A favourite scene

My favourite 30 seconds in the film begin with a shot of Kikichiyo sulking by himself on a rock shortly after he has delivered an impassioned monologue to the other samurai, expressing his ambivalent feelings about both the farmer and warrior class. Now he’s sitting alone, heavily (and somewhat ridiculously) clad in the armour that the villagers have stolen from other samurai in the past, and even as a still image this is a lovely, poetic composition: a bear of a man hunched up in a defensive position, arms drawn tightly around himself, eyebrows furrowed in wrath. (The expression on Mifune’s face is so uncomplicatedly angry here that I can easily picture the shot as a panel in a maanga comic, with a little wisp of smoke drawn over his head to indicate blackness of mood!)

At this point, the young ronin Katsushiro – unaware of what has transpired between Kikuchiyo and the other samurai – approaches, starts to say something in a friendly tone and draws back as Kikuchiyo snarls and waves a spear at him. Kikuchiyo then jumps up and stalks away. The village children come running after him (he is, after all, the most accessible of the samurai and the villagers have become charmed by his constant buffoonery) and in a very judicious use of sound editing, we hear the children’s combined cries of delight before we see them enter the screen from the left. (It's a bit like bird sounds.) Kikuchiyo turns, stomps his feet at them and continues walking away; even though he should by rights seem like a threatening figure here, his movements are childishly petulant, and the scene is a reminder that this is a boy in a man’s body.

There is immense energy in this nearly wordless sequence, made even more forceful by the dust sweeping across the background, a reminder of the strong wind constantly blowing through the village, dramatically heralding the action that lies ahead. (Heavy rain plays an equally vital role in the final battles.) And it defines Kikuchiyo’s character (his internal confusion, his uncertainty about his place in the world) more effectively than pages of dialogue could. But like I said, it's only 30 seconds in a great three-and-a-half-hour film.

P.S. for more about the film’s subtexts – including the story’s relevance to early 20th century Japan – see this lengthy review on the DVD Verdict site. And Donald Richie’s book is a must-have for any Kurosawa fan.

P.P.S. Anyone interested in doing me a good turn many kindly gift me the three-disc edition of the film released by Criterion, which has a treasure trove of supplementary material. The DVD I own only has a shortish video essay.

[A post on Kurosawa's Yojimbo here, and one on Donald Richie here.]

Yojimbo, and the Mifune walk

Have been down with viral the last 2-3 days. My nose runneth over. (Zen wisdom: if you have a bad cold, it is inadvisable to sleep on your stomach.) When a nose dies, all that remains is its name. Stat nosa pristine nominee, nomina nuda tenemus. Am writing this through an antibiotic haze. (And hey, what’s all this ‘feed a fever, starve a cold’ nonsense? I usually have both at the same time.)

Wasn’t planning to blog for a few days but then read something JAP wrote about Amitabh’s famous walk in films like Deewaar being inspired by Clint Eastwood’s in Dirty Harry. Well okay, but I prefer the copy to the original. Anyway, this got me thinking about the great walkers (no, Adam Gilchrist doesn’t feature here) and I reached, even in my enfeebled state, for my DVD of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

If Yojimbo had never be made, the word “swagger” could comfortably have been pulled out of all dictionaries by now. The incomparable swaggerer here is, of course, Toshiro Mifune, whose performance as the nameless samurai in this film (and its sequel Sanjuro) created the palimpsest for Eastwood’s Man With No Name in Leone’s spaghetti westerns. The opening scene is an exercise in style. The samurai comes into the frame from the right (we don’t see his face), scratches the back of his neck in a coarse, throwaway manner, and begins walking forward magisterially, as the camera follows behind him at a respectful distance. And all this while the titles are still rolling (atypical for Kurosawa, who usually preferred to get the opening credits out of the way before the film began). This great tracking shot ends with the samurai reaching a break in the road, where two lanes lead in different directions. He throws a branch into the air and unhesitatingly walks down the path it indicates. Thus, with utmost economy, Kurosawa establishes that the protagonist is a wanderer with no ties, while also making a nod to the arbitrariness that governs so many human decisions.

The town that the path leads to is caught between two feuding groups, each of which wants absolute control, and the focus of the story is how the amoral samurai sets about playing one side against the other until both groups have self-destructed. “The idea was about rivalry on both sides, and both sides are equally bad,” said Kurosawa, “Here we are, weakly caught in the middle, and it is impossible to choose between evils.” This can easily be related to the larger subtext surrounding the film – that it was made by a Japanese director at a time (1961) when the Cold War was at its peak, two superpowers holding a reluctant world hostage. Nowhere does this come across more strongly than in the superbly composed scene where the samurai, having professed his allegiance to one gang, brings the two groups face to face for a battle and then abdicates. He takes up a vantage point between the gangs and amusedly watches the cowardice hidden beneath all their bravado – they mostly stay where they are, shaking their weapons at each other pathetically, making ape sounds, advancing and retreating for quite some time before they actually get anywhere near each other.

Yojimbo is one of my favourite Kurosawas, an enormously stylish, irreverent black comedy and – this isn’t noted often enough – a great musical too in its own way (in his book on the director, Donald Richie notes how ballet-like the film is and how the characters’ movements all seem to be choreographed). One memorable scenes follows another and even the briefest shots impress themselves into your mind: the cheerful-looking doggie trotting along, a human hand in its mouth, and the expression on Mifune’s face as he watches this; the coffin-maker who wants there to be more bloodshed so that his business improves – but then says ruefully at the end “When a battle gets too big, no one needs coffins anymore”.

Dominating it all though is the Mifune walk, which is where this post began. Hungry tigers would flee, caterwauling, at his approach. Think it’s time to start a series on some of the great screen walks. Calling Henry Fonda next.

Shakespeare on film

Latest prize acquisition: Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. One of the best things about the DVD is that it has two subtitle options, one by Linda Hoaglund and the other by Donald Richie. Both are Japanese film experts – I have Richie’s comprehensive book on the director, The Films of Akira Kurosawa - and so either set of subtitles should be better than the terrible ones on the print I first saw around 10 years ago. Even better, there’s a very informative commentary track by another expert, Michael Jeck.

Throne of Blood is an undeniably great film but I’ve always been slightly perplexed by the irony-laden chorus about how a non-English movie is perhaps the best Shakespeare film ever. I wonder about that sometimes; it’s easy to see that Kurosawa’s epic captures the spirit of the Bard’s great tragedy but is it strictly speaking a Shakespeare film? Are the original words, the poetry of the original language, completely irrelevant? One of the reasons I’m ambivalent about this is because I grew up with the strict sense that you can’t claim to have read a classic if you’ve only read an abridged version of it. (I remember snootishly informing a schoolfriend who’d laboured his way through a Lamb version of a Shakespeare play that he mustn’t imagine he had read Shakespeare – "it isn’t enough to just know the story, the work is defined by the words the author originally used".)

Another reason is that I have a very special relationship with my favourite "conventional" Shakespeare movies: soliloquies that I couldn’t remember after merely reading the play somehow miraculously stuck in my mind after I heard Olivier, or Gielgud, or Branagh, or even Brando, declaim them. Pleasant way to learn. (Though the casting agent who put poor Brando in the position of repeatedly having to mumble the word "honourable" in Mark Antony’s funeral speech must have been one of Satan’s little helpers.)

I’m probably nitpicking about Throne of Blood; I’d have no problem at all if it was designated "best film based on a Shakespeare play". So I’ll just be tactful and say that it’s more Kurosawa’s triumph than it is Shakespeare’s. Meanwhile, here are some of my favourite films that do employ the Bard’s language:

Macbeth (Roman Polanski, 1971)
Great director puts his own distinct stamp on this tale of guilt and overvaulting ambition. One of Polanski’s most effective devices is to introduce an element of stream-of-consciousness by presenting soliloquies as half-spoken, half-in-voiceover (often alternating from one line to the next). Loved his final, typically macabre touch of showing Macbeth’s successor, the young prince, entering the witches’ coven for consultation. But far more morbid is the way art holds up a mirror to life in the scene where Macbeth is told that Macduff was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped”; Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, had been stabbed to death by Charles Manson and his gang a few years earlier.

Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh, 1996)
Branagh took on the task of making a four-hour version of Hamlet with the full text of the play, and somehow managed to make it cinematic. Great principle cast, Derek Jacobi superb as Claudius. Some of the many cameos – Jack Lemmon as Marcellus, Robin Williams as Osric – are distracting, but some – Charlton Heston as the Player King, Billy Crystal as the Gravedigger – work brilliantly.

Titus (Julie Taymor, 1999)
Shakespeare’s strangest, queasiest, most unwatchable play (assuming it was his at all) gets the post-modernist treatment in this visually fascinating movie that doesn’t shy away from any of the text’s horrors, and in fact even punks them up. Sir Anthony Hopkins, on a break from playing Hannibal Lecter, feeds Jessica Lange her sons’ cooked remains.

Julius Caesar (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1953)
With apologies. This is a star-spangled, slightly Hollywoodised production but it has a lot going for it. John Gielgud’s mellifluous, classical reading of Cassius makes for a fascinating contrast with Marlon Brando’s rough-hewn performance as Mark Antony; two completely different acting theories, separated by hundreds of years, but occupying the same frame here. And Edmond O’Brien in his brief role as Casca shows how Shakespeare’s lines can be spoken in a completely natural, non-theatrical way (and with a gruff American accent to boot) – and still be utterly convincing.

Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1944)
Brilliant use of Shakespeare as a rallying call for an England that was in the thick of WWII. In his directorial debut, Olivier – until then always more of a stage performer/director - showed an unanticipated understanding of film technique.

Much Ado About Nothing (Branagh, 1993)
No consistently good but great fun throughout. Branagh at his most democratic, with roles for actors like Denzel Washington and even Keanu Reeves.

Othello (Orson Welles, 1952)
Brooding, impressionistic movie that Welles somehow managed to get made despite the inevitable financial problems. The cinematography is dazzling.

Richard III (Olivier, 1955)
No, it isn’t anywhere near as cinematic as Olivier’s other Shakespearean forays but his performance as the conniving hunchback king is enough to place this high on the list.