DVR Diary: STRAY DOG (1949)

It doesn't surprise me that when Akira Kurosawa made a cop movie, he was influenced less by American film noirs than by Jules Dassin's shot-on-location procedural The Naked City. Kurosawa was more a naturalist than an expressionist, more elemental than chiaroscuro, so the whole shadows-and-light thing probably didn't impress him as much as it did others. As it is, there are faint parallels with an American procedural noir made the same year, Alfred Werker and Anthony Mann's He Walked By Night, though these shouldn't be overstressed. It comes down to an increasingly desperate manhunt for a seeming supercriminal, but for Kurosawa the criminal matters less than his pursuer, while in He Walked By Night the criminal is the most fully (or nearly) developed character. What Kurosawa mainly seems interested in is personal responsibility, as shown by his protagonist, a rookie police detective whose stolen gun is used in the criminal's crimes. As the rookie, Toshiro Mifune is driven by an already-awful sense of guilt that grows worse as robberies and a murder are traced back to the stolen gun. When the criminal nearly kills his new mentor (Takashi Shimura, inevitably), the rookie's guilt nearly breaks him, despite every well-meaning effort of his more seasoned colleagues to put all the blame for the crimes on the criminal. Once he starts using it it's his gun, not yours, they tell him, but you can't blame the rookie for feeling as bad as he does, especially once you understand that it's exactly that acute sense of responsibility that sets him apart from his antagonist (Isao Kimura). Both men are war veterans who were robbed on their way home. One man lashes out at society for that offense, among others, by becoming a criminal, while our hero becomes a cop. It's not that he blames himself for getting his stuff stolen, but it's his refusal to surrender to cynicism or rage, or to hold the whole world responsible, that makes him a hero.

Mifune is still young here, though Rashomon isn't far away, but it's still impressive that someone we recognize as one of cinema's mightiest badasses can so convincingly play someone so green and, in some ways, naive. Just the same, the film is nearly stolen from him by Keiko Awaji, playing the criminal's showgirl sweetheart, whose tough exterior is under siege by the rookie and her own mother. She gets one of the film's most memorable and gratuitous scenes as one of an dance team hoofing away at some seedy theater. Their routine over, the showgirls stagger back to their dressing room and collapse en masse in an almost orgiastic sprawl of exhaustion. Kurosawa lingers, half-leering, half-sympathetic, as the dancers catch their breath. As one might expect, he has a number of nice set pieces distributed throughout the picture, from Mifune's Droopy Dog-like stalking of a possible lead on the sale of his gun to the stakeout of a baseball stadium and the use of the PA system to lure the criminal into a trap. I said Kurosawa was an elemental director, and there's plenty of rain here to prove it, and an even more effective evocation of oppressive summer heat. Stray Dog is a slickly-made film and I suppose some will take it as further proof that Kurosawa spent too much time aping western genres and archetypes, but the emotional element of the film and Mifune's intensely emotive lead performance set this Japanese cop movie apart from its more world-weary or hard-boiled American models and mark it as an unmistakably personal film.

The Great Gonzo: Toshiro Mifune in RED LION (1969)

Something was in the air in the wild world of cinema at the end of the 1960s: a spirit that mingled comedy and tragedy at a time of mostly (and often violently) thwarted revolutionary enthusiasm. In Japan, one of the expressions of that conflicted spirit was this Toshiro Mifune production directed by Kihachi Okamoto, best known for the black-and-white bloodbath Sword of Doom. The great star and "John Wayne of Japan" made one of his occasional forays into buffoonery that just happened to suit the insurrectionary mood of the moment while somehow critiquing and arguably affirming it all at once.

The time is the Meiji Restoration of one hundred years earlier, when progressive forces rose against the feudalism of the Tokugawa Shogunate by demanding a return to "direct" Imperial rule. Gonzo (Mifune) is a bumpkin driven from his village by the old regime after his girlfriend Tomi was forced into prostitution to pay off tax debts. At the start of our story he's a soldier in the pro-Emperor Sekiho army, whose officers are distinguished by their flaming red "lion" headresses. To win popular support, the Sekiho forces are promising drastic tax cuts and forgiveness of past tax debts. As the army nears Gonzo's village, he begs for the opportunity to enter the town ahead of the army to win the people over. Given a red mane and other imperial regalia, he hopes to redeem his own reputation while liberating Tomi (Shima Iwashita) and avenging himself on his oppressors. Since Gonzo is a stuttering illiterate blowhard, best known at home for once falling out of a persimmon tree and landing on his head, he better hope that clothes do make the man.

It certainly was brave of Mifune to go through the picture wearing what sometimes looks like a Princess Merida Halloween wig.

For a while, they do. Playing on a superstitious wave of belief in a "world reform" that will come with the return of imperial power, Gonzo succeeds (despite having the damndest time sheathing his sword) in taking over the town, freeing Tomi and other debt slaves, and cancelling debts in a revolutionary jubilee. Reactionary forces bide their time, recruiting the inevitable badass loner ronin (Etsushi Takahashi) while the mysterious "Mobile Force One" schemes to retake the village. History seems to be on Gonzo's side, however, but the triumph of imperial forces is one thing, the triumph of the peasants another -- and despite the proclamations of the Sekiho army, their interests don't exactly coincide.

As Gonzo depends on the Sekiho army to back him up, his allies from the town, sent to contact Gonzo's superiors, learn the terrible truth. Internal conflicts in the imperial forces have resulted in the destruction of the Sekiho army, the decapitation of its leaders, and the rescinding of all promises of debt forgiveness. A new, white-maned army marches on Gonzo's village to eliminate the last vestige of the Sekiho enemy. In a moment of dark irony, Mobile Force One emerges to engage the white-manes -- any imperial force is still their enemy -- and ends up only buying Gonzo time. Not that he does much with it.

Sword of Doom proved that Okamoto knows how to give a film a big finish. He proves it again with the epic finale of Red Lion. Gonzo's friends (and his mother) urge him to escape the village while he can, pointing out how he'd given the peasants hope and could do so again. He's more concerned with finding Tomi in the mounting confusion, not realizing that she's gone to one of the restored officials to beg for Gonzo's life. Spurned, she kills the man and goes down in a hail of white-mane gunfire. Learning her fate, Gonzo basically throws his life away demanding to confront the white-mane leader. His fall provokes what looks like an outburst of collective madness. From the start of the picture, the peasant uprising parallel to the imperial restoration has had as its slogan the dancing chant, "Everything's O.K., never mind." While appealing to Gonzo to save himself, villagers had pointed to children performing the dance and chant even as the white-manes occupy the village. Once Gonzo dies, everyone takes it up, becoming a human wave that at least briefly shoves the white-manes out of town. In translation, the chant sounds oddly complacent, but in context, the effect is more like "We won't get fooled again!" or "We don't give a damn anymore!" or maybe just "Fuck it!" However you interpret it, it's a stunning moment, especially because this time Okamoto doesn't opt for all-out bloodshed. A massacre may happen eventually, maybe even moments after the movie ends, but he and producer Mifune leave that to our imaginations, closing instead on an image of pure revolt.

Red Lion has something to say on several levels. First, there's the historical fact that peasants' lot was not much improved by the imperial restoration. Second, there seems to be a warning to the contemporary audience of 1969 about revolutions devouring their own, or proving less than revolutionary for ordinary people. Third, this is a Toshiro Mifune star vehicle, and the actor-producer has given himself a juicy role that lets him run the gamut from slapstick comedy to epic tragedy while indulging in the expected bladed mayhem. Gonzo is a lord of misrule who gets his comeuppance (which isn't inconsistent with comedy) after living the audience's collective fantasy of power  but also an undisputed hero with his heart (if not his head) in the right place. Red Lion is, arguably, ultimately a comedy the way The Wild Bunch is in the same year in its ultimate suggestion that you have to laugh and keep going. It's a comedy the way Little Big Man was the following year, the comedy in each case leavened with the slaughter of innocents. Like I said, there was something in the air around the world in those days, and Red Lion represents that spirit nearly as well as any film. It has knockout (if not blinding) color cinematography by Takao Saito and masterful spaghetti-esque widescreen direction, contrasting massive close-ups, crowd shots and epic vistas. Okamoto's pictorial virtues require no historical context to be appreciated by movie fans, and Mifune fans will be satisfied simply by the sight of their idol having a blast of a role. It's a picture with some sucker punches for the unwary, but most people may enjoy the ride anyway.

DVR Diary: LIFE OF OHARU (1952)

By coincidence, Turner Classic Movies is showing William Wellman's Heroes For Sale as I write this review. It's a coincidence because Heroes For Sale is the movie Kenji Mizoguchi's 1952 film most reminds me of. Just as Heroes chronicles the ups and downs of one of society's victims, with an emphasis on the downs, Life of Oharu treats the fortunes and misfortunes of a promising young woman (Kinuyo Tanaka) whose life is cursed by one understandable mistake. She seems all the more accursed because the mistake is only in the eyes of her repressive society and culture in 17th century Japan. The mistake, to be specific, is that she fell for a humble retainer, a man beneath her class station. That the man is Toshiro Mifune, albeit almost unrecognizably clean-cut and romantic, matters not. Such a romance across class lines is a crime in the Tokugawa era. Oharu, along with her parents (for failing to raise her right, I guess) are exiled from court, while the Mifune character is decapitated, though not before dictating a last request that Oharu manage to find happiness with someone else someday.

For Oharu, the punishment must be like being sent back to live with your parents, only to have them evicted because of you. Her father certainly resents it and looks for every opportunity to exploit her in order to regain some of his former position or prestige. He hires her out to the local daimyo as a concubine who'll bear a child before being discarded. Dad expects at least 300 ryo for this, but only gets five. Too bad that he'd already bought some textiles on credit, expecting the bigger payoff. To help pay off dad's debts, Oharu is put to work as a courtesan. It looks like she'll find a sugar daddy in the form of a rich bumpkin who's been saving his coins for twenty years waiting to blow it all in town. Oharu intrigues him because she haughtily refuses to scramble like the other courtesans for the coins he scatters about the place. He offers to buy her off her employers while boasting to her that he'll find her price. Before he can leave with her, however, his money is revealed as counterfeit. A better man finally shows up: an expert fan maker who opens his own shop with Oharu as his salesperson, but this relative idyll ends abruptly when this rare good guy is mugged and murdered. From there the descent is swift, and before long Oharu is an aging street prostitute, as we found her at the start of the picture, all of the above being her flashback.

One more humiliation awaits. Rescued from her plight by her elderly mother, she's told that her son by the daimyo, now the daimyo himself, has invited Oharu to live with him in the palace. It turns out to be a set-up: Oharu is too much an embarrassment to everyone to be allowed to wander the world free. But before the authorities lock her up for life they allow her a Stella Dallas like look at her boy, whom she's never really known, as he takes his daily walk without acknowledging her existence. Somehow she manages to escape the grim fate planned for her, but the future she escapes to is hardly less grim. Just as Heroes For Sale ends with the hero's future still uncertain as he's driven out of town with a band of unemployed men, Oharu wraps with the heroine a Buddhist beggar going door to door as the soundtrack sings of vows to overcome the snares of earthly life. Mizoguchi toes the line between pessimism and philosophy. While Heroes still pays lip service to the American Dream, Oharu's close suggests that all dreams, like all desires, are hopeless, the only real hope being transcendence of desire. That's harsh for a movie that started with Oharu as a martyr for romantic love, but the song itself strikes an almost hopeful note with its beauty, even if the argument seems paradoxical: our only hope is to abandon hope, or at least one kind of hope in favor of another.

If anything, Mizoguchi's film may make you more indignant than the often furious Heroes, since at least some of the hero's misfortunes in the Wellman film can be written off to bad breaks, while Oharu is more consistently the victim of a vicious social system. In both cases, directorial craftsmanship softens the blow while making a point. Mizoguchi directs elegantly, relying often on fluid camera movements; his films that I've seen have always been enjoyable to watch regardless of the content. Oharu is a vehicle for Kinuyo Tanaka, regarded by many as Japan's greatest film actress, and while it may be stretching things for the 43 year old to play the young woman in the early scenes -- Mifune, more than a decade her junior, throws himself quite eagerly at a cougar's feet -- she hardly makes a false move thereafter. Oharu may seem like a thankless role, with one damn thing after another befalling her -- but Tanaka's poise and presence master the material and make Life of Oharu as much a tribute to female resilience as it is a protest against female victimization.

Now Playing: OCT. 15, 1962

Our one and only stop for today is New York City for a major American premiere.

Itself allegedly derived from Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, Yojimbo would become a template in its own right, most famously for Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars (Kurosawa sued) and subsequently for any picture in which a tough guy intervenes in a feud with the intention of destroying both parties.  If not Kurosawa's definitive film -- there are too many choices -- it's probably Toshiro Mifune's definitive performance, at least for audiences outside Japan. He would play the role again for Kurosawa in a sequel and a very similar "yojimbo" in a comics team-up with Shintaro Katsu's Zatoichi a decade later. Fifty years ago today he reached American shores, and he has never really left.

So here's an English-subtitled version of the Japanese trailer from the Criterion Collection.

JAPAN'S LONGEST DAY (1967)

Sometimes a movie wants to be one thing and ends up another. The English-language title of Kihachi Okamoto's docudrama seems to faithfully represent the director and writer Shinobu Hashimoto's intention to emulate The Longest Day, the sprawling all-star international D-Day epic from 1962. For Japan, however, the longest day doesn't see a big battle or even an American bombing raid. After about 20 minutes of barely-dramatized exposition (narrated by Tatsuya Nakadai in a grave waste of a great actor), the film focuses on the 24 hours leading up to the August 15, 1945 radio broadcast by Hirohito, the Showa Emperor, announcing Japan's surrender to the Allies. With The Longest Day's international scope impossible for him, Okamoto juggles a number of plot threads to make room for a huge cast, this being a Toho showcase celebrating the studio's 35th anniversary. The points of interest are the characters' varying reactions to Japan's unprecedented admission of defeat in war, with the most attention going to those desperate and despairing dead-enders who want to stop the broadcast and topple the civilian government in order to keep the war going. As officers of the Imperial Guard kill their commanding officer and attempt to seize control of the Imperial Palace, and while a rogue military unit attacks the prime minister's house, the warmongering madness and the race-against-time format become less reminiscent of any other World War II film and more reminiscent of those doomsday twins of 1964, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe. But while those movies milked futile attempts to avert Armageddon for maximum suspense -- the Kubrick almost in spite of itself -- Japan's Longest Day gets its paradoxical suspense -- it works as a thriller despite our knowing that the conspirators must fail -- out of desperate efforts, in the wake of Armageddon, to keep it going.

If you can get past those first turgid reels, Okamoto comes up with an effective historical thriller. Despite the initial evidence, he proves quite capable of manipulating time as the government dithers over the text of the Imperial Rescript the Emperor must read and the propriety of the Emperor speaking into a microphone while the madmen plot their mayhem. Anchoring the picture, predictably enough, is Toshiro Mifune as War Minister Anami. This character serves more or less as the film's moral compass. A superpatriot, he's initially reluctant to surrender. He believes, almost insanely, that Japan shouldn't consider itself beaten until the Allies invade and a major land battle decides the issue. He stuns fellow Cabinet members with the assertion that Japan has been handicapped by having to fight on small islands where its full military might couldn't be brought to bear. His personal belief is that the millions who've already died will have done so in vain if Japan doesn't fight to the bitter end. In short, he thinks much like the maniacs who try to prevent the surrender, except for one thing. His values are grounded in obedience, like any good soldier's, and when the Emperor speaks and says the war is over, it's over as far as Anami is concerned -- end of discussion, that's an order. If he feels he still has a debt to the dead, or to the Emperor he feels he failed, his proper recourse is seppuku. Those who throw tantrums and otherwise act out, assuming that the Emperor has been tricked and the country stabbed in the back, are forgetting something important. They're putting their own personal feelings and prejudices before the word of the ruler and the good of the country. Anami is no hero -- he does nothing to suppress the uprisings, leaving that to others -- but his personal example is damning to the conspirators. Mifune's performance is of a quality out of proportion to the commercial ambitions of this all-star studio project.

But the ensemble acting is really good all around here, and the crosscut action has a thematic coherence that makes the finished product much better than the first twenty minutes would leave you fearing. When a historical picture can make you feel suspense the way this one does -- it does probably help if the audience doesn't know Japanese history that well -- it's a praiseworthy accomplishment. But even if you know the general history you may not know what happened to particular people, and the cast here is good enough to keep you interested in their several fates, while our sense of the stakes makes the plight of even minor characters like a radio announcer suddenly important. When the announcer faces down a gun-toting soldier who demands to read a speech condemning the Rescript in advance, you feel that it's not only the climax of the film but a fateful moment in history.

With the suspense comes some cathartically violent moments. The death of the Imperial Guard commander is preceded by a close-up decapitation, and Anami's suicide, seconded by himself with a slice to the jugular, is hardly less gruesome in black and white than it would have been in color. These scenes may be tough to watch, but they bring the war home to the last privileged quarters of Japan and remind us more effectively than any stock footage that this is still a war movie. This is a stern film with a strong message. If it resembles a nuclear nightmare more than a classical battle, it at least gives a hopeful account of people with the courage to step back from Armageddon at the last possible moment.

SAMURAI BANNERS (Fuurin kazan, 1969)

Promoted as "the biggest movie production in Japanese history," Hiroshi Inagaki's historical epic was produced by its star, Toshiro Mifune, who may have seen in the real-life protagonist a kind of antithesis of the Japanese Macbeth he'd performed for Akira Kurosawa in Throne of Blood. Mifune plays Kansuke Yamamoto, an important general of Japan's sengoku period (roughly the 16th century CE) whose ambition has shady origins but is ultimately more vicarious than personal. He's introduced in a black-and-white opening sequence in which he eliminates a creditor by convincing him to attack but spare an important daimyo as a demonstration of his skills. The film immediately shifts to full color as the incident plays out exactly as the creditor feared, with Kansuke following up to rescue the daimyo from the attacker by killing him. The shifty scarfaced ronin thus ingratiates himself with the rising Takeda (Kinnosuke Nakamura), who is quickly impressed by Kansuke's strategic acumen and his ambitious vision of Takeda's future. Kansuke persuades him to conquer a neighboring province with minimum fuss, with Kansuke himself conspiring under diplomatic cover to assassinate the rival lord. He discovers a kind of kindred spirit in the lord's daughter, Princess Yufu (Yoshiko Sakuma), who refuses to do the proper thing and kill herself. Her desire to live, even if that means becoming Takeda's concubine, strikes a chord in Kansuke, who has a similar desire to live at all costs. "I can't die, even if they kill me," he says at one point. That's because he's a visionary with an overwhelming drive to see his vision become a reality. That vision involves Takeda expanding his domain from coast to coast, at the very least.

 

Kurosawa's Shakespeare influence may have rubbed off on Toshiro Mifune, who delivers an ultimatum reminiscent of Henry V's Harfleur speech -- with serious props to back him up.

Strangely, Kansuke has no apparent ambition to usurp Takeda's domain; it'll suffice for him if someone achieves these great triumphs. But he'll manipulate Takeda as best he can to make him realize Kansuke's vision. Likewise, he manipulates the princess, for whom he feels strong yet repressed emotions, to make sure she bears Takeda a son -- whom Kansuke treats as his stake in Takeda's future. In an intense and disturbing scene, he takes the newborn from Yufu's arms and tells it that he, Kansuke, and not Takeda or Yufu, is the boy's true parent. For her part, Yufu has love-hate relations with both the men in her life, and probably with herself, and the film creates the impression that Kansuke has kept her alive by his own force of will, because she's part of his vision. But this samurai control freak can't master everything. In the literal fog of battle, when it looks as if all his plans will collapse, he throws himself into reckless action, charting his own course for fate separate from the outcome of war....

"I am your father!" The dark side of Kansuke's ambition doesn't exactly score points with Princess Yu(Yoshiko Sakuma, below)

Fuurin Kazan (the Japanese title is a sort of anagram of the four slogans on Kansuke's banners) is a big historical spectacle in the classical manner, and it has the air of a history lesson about it. Inagaki, who directed Mifune in the Miyamoto Mushashi trilogy of the 1950s, can handle the pageantry with ease, though his battle scenes lack the abstract clarity of Kurosawa's. He also throws in some impressionistic bits, including solarized scenes, to illustrate Kansuke's subjective consciousness and ambition. The psychology of Kansuke's vicarious ambition holds the film together, and Mifune makes the most of the acting opportunity. It's an intense lead performance from a period when he was starting to recede into distinguished guest-star roles and may be one of the last full-power performances he gave, down to what had become a stereotypical human-pincushion finish. At the same time, producer Mifune gives Yoshiko Sakuma every opportunity to make a strong impression as the princess, a woman who seems like Kansuke's soulmate, but is probably doomed for just that reason. By comparison, Nakamura is underutilized as a malleable authority figure, but his star power keeps Takeda from being blown off the screen and keeps Kansuke's singleminded yet self-serving subservience to the lord plausible.

Mifune biographer Stuart Galbraith IV reports that Fuurin Kazan was "mildly successful" at the box office but already regarded as old-fashioned even within Japan. It seems analogous to the period spectacles that were losing loads of money in the U.S. at the same time, but Samurai Banners doesn't seem like a failure to me. You might be able to imagine the greater film Kurosawa may have made of the Kansuke story (had he been willing to work with Mifune again), but Mifune had enough of a sense as a producer of his strengths as an actor and star to make the film an impressive personal vehicle and a compelling, personality-driven historical drama.