Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi, 1962)

As with so many other Japanese directors, Masaki Kobayashi used the jidai-geki genre and its focus upon the past to comment on the present. After his three-part WWII epic The Human Condition, Kobayashi went even further back in time to the beginning of the Edo period, after the Tokugawa shogunate had fully consolidated power and settled in to its two-century reign. The director specifically hones in on this precise moment of dawning peace, when the reduction of daimyo resulted in samurai suddenly becoming masterless ronin in a society that had no need for additional warriors. This reduced much of the nobility to conditions of extreme poverty even as it demanded their continued fealty to the feudal order and codes of honor.

One of those codes was the ritual suicide from which the film takes its title. Harakiri is structured around the build-up to an expected act of seppuku, and it shows a particularly gruesome example of one during that escalation. Even today, we consider dying for one's cause an act of extreme nobility and resolve. For Kobayashi, however, it is merely the most repellent example of how the rules of a strictly hierarchical society efface humanity and suppress the will of the individual. The end result rates with the most biting of Mizoguchi's period pictures as Japanese cultural criticism.

Kagemusha

The story of Akira Kurosawa's fall from grace is one of the more depressing in the annals of cinema. He never suffered half the indignities of Orson Welles or Erich von Stroheim, but following Red Beard he never had an easy time of securing funding again. Where once he produced a film almost annually, each of his features following his turbulent final collaboration with Toshiro Mifune was separated by a five-year gap, a trend that lasted until 1990's Dreams. By the late '70s, Kurosawa had not worked in Japan since Dodes'ka-den, his first color feature, at the turn of the decade. He won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for 1975's Dersu Uzala, set and filmed in Sibera, but the acclaim did nothing to convince Toho Studios to fund their former golden child. At last, two leading American New Hollywood directors, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, both deeply indebted to Kurosawa's technique and themes, learned of the master's troubles and used their clout to convince 20th Century Fox to back the film (though how Coppola, still embroiled and near-bankrupt in the tsunami that was Apocalypse Now and still teetering on a knife edge before being vindicated upon its release, helped I'll never know).

In one of life's little ironies, the film Lucas and Coppola helped make, a return to the samurai genre, even, is utterly different from the films that informed these two megafans. Kagemusha, a depiction of the key moment in Japanese history when the old daimyo system morphed into a unified Japan. Primarily, it follows the Takeda daimyo, leader of the doomed clan, as he attempts to besiege and defeat his enemies, the Oda and Tokugawa clans.

It sounds like your typical, epic Kurosawa jidaigeki, filled with battles and expressions of honor, and to a degree it is. Yet the structure is different: Kurosawa shows only briefs clips of rapidly edited action, instead focusing on the intimate details of a lord's double and how this kagemusha must reign after the true lord's death to preserve morale. However, the battles in his other films often represented their themes, and what little we see of the action here serves the same purpose. The warriors of Seven Samurai found honor in their sacrifice for peasant farmers, even as Kurosawa never stooped to celebrating their violence. The reluctant brutality of the ronin who calls himself Sanjuro presented extreme violence as a violation of this wise samurai's sense of honor. Kagemusha presents the emerging impersonality of military warfare brought about by guns, an incomprehensible slaughter that destroys any sense of value, much less honor.

Shingen, the Takeda daimyo, is himself slain by gunfire, shot by a sniper who wasn't, as we learn later, even aiming carefully. The generals who hear of their master's wound are naturally distressed, but Shingen's enemies do not seem particularly pleased, either. Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu learn that he has been wounded -- but not killed -- and they display a reverence for their foe and they disparage the cowardice of the attack. As the Takeda clan had nearly made peace with Tokugawa, Shingen's brother Nobukado (Tsutomu Yamazaki) decides to use a double to fool both Shingen's enemies and allies, preserving appearances and morale until the situation can be smoothed.

They find a dead ringer in a petty thief (Tatsuya Nakadai) set to be crucified for his crimes. They recruit him to be a kagemusha, or "shadow warrior," a job that he takes to with surprising skill. With only descriptions of the lord's behavior and mannerisms from those who knew Shingen best, the kagemusha is soon so convincing that even those who knew the truth and taught him about Shingen cannot tell the difference. Yet there are still some concerns as to certain tells that might give away the ruse. One of the elite circle mentions Shingen's horse, a wild beast that only the real lord could ride. "His lordship has been ill," another instructs the men to tell those who would ask questions, "and he must refrain from riding." The matter of the lord's mistress is then put forward. "His lordship has been ill, and he must refrain from riding."

The role of the kagemusha was initially meant for Shintaro Katsu, the comic actor known for playing the blind samurai Zatoichi. But Katsu angered the director when he showed up on-set with his own camera crew seeking to document (without his permission) Kurosawa and his shooting technique. So, the director replaced him with Nakadai who, it must be said, does not excel in the role. He infuses Shingen with so little personality that when he transforms the thief into the lord it's hard to be impressed; his only achievement is looking like himself. Nakadai had proven himself in previous Kurosawa pictures, and he still had his flawless performance in Ran ahead of him, but he's one of the major flaws in this picture.

Another is the leaden pacing. Seven Samurai is perhaps the "shortest" three-and-a-half-hour movie ever made, one with far less action that many would have you believe but edited so that even its scenes of reflection and quiet worry maintain momentum. (I also suspect that he hit budget or time issues, as some shots contain uses of hand-held shots that simply jar in comparison to his formal camerawork elsewhere.) Despite Nakadai's two-dimensional performance, it is genuinely interesting that the thief is being absorbed into the late Shigen's persona, to the point that Shingen's young grandson looks upon the double as the real, albeit kinder, deal and even Shingen's embittered son turns to the man he knows is a fraud for serious tactical advice in the conflict with Tokugawa and Oda. But Kurosawa breaks the narrative in odd places, often touching upon but never fully explicating Katsuyori's anger concerning his lack of inheritance. He might as well not show Nobunaga or Ieyasu at all, apart from perhaps their initial reactions to Shingen's wound and the eventual revelation of his death, as they add little to the story and don't have enough presence between them for one character. It leaves the film a good half hour too long, and for the first time, I found a Kurosawa film to be an occasionally arduous task.

When, however, the elements click, Kagemusha can be as impressive as anything else in the master's canon. In the long interim between Dersu Uzala and this, he returned to painting, and shots here combine the deeply artistic composition he'd always displayed with a more abstract and painterly tinge. Kurosawa fills the screen with impressionistic skies, most strikingly with reds and purples during battle scenes. In one of the film's best moments, the kagemusha has a warped dream sequence as he more or less runs through a painting alternately chasing and chased by the ghost of Shingen. As the term kagemusha means "shadow warrior," Kurosawa injects numerous shots of the thief's shadow growing and growing until it fills the screen, yet he frames these shots so as to, somehow, make them flow naturally without disrupting the flow for the sake of a visual cue.

Many dismiss the film as a sort of dress rehearsal for Ran, and while that's harsh, one cannot deny that Lear was on Kurosawa's brain even here. It certainly has Shakespeare's sense of nihilism, what with the final shots of mass slaughter and of the kagemusha's bullet-ridden corpse floating down a river along with a standard now laughable in its hollow proclamation of spirit. Yet it's unfair to call it nihilism, either in Kurosawa's work or the Bard's, as it's tempered with great regret and sadness. Kagemusha's seeming wistfulness of the sword and spear warfare that preceded the cold gunfire of this new brand of killing undermines the director's clear disdain of any sort of violence, but in reality he's simply lamenting the loss of all codes of honor, even if they had no real application in battle. In fact, Kagemusha is the sole of Kurosawa's jidaigeki films to line up with his depictions of postwar Japan: the warlords used muskets and wanton destruction to unify the country, and later we dropped two bombs from 30,000 ft, leading Japan into its modern era. This film is as slow as it is because it's Kurosawa's death march for the cultural values he mourned his whole career.

Yojimbo

Akira Kurosawa always admired Westerns, and his jidaigeki samurai pieces usually reflect a clear influence from Western directors such as John Ford. With Yojombo, however, Kurosawa decided to go all-out and make a Western of his own. Oh sure, people are still sporting swords, and only one gun ever shows up, but this is a Western through and through. It's also one of the most darkly funny movies I've ever seen.

Toshiro Mifune crafts one of the most influential characters in cinema history with his unnamed ronin. Eventually someone presses him for a name, and he looks outside at a field and gives his name as Kuwabatake Sanjuro, meaning "thirty-year-old mulberry field." "But I'm almost 40," he growls sarcastically. At the start of the film he roams the countryside with no sense of direction; finally, he tosses a stick in the air and walks in the direction it points, and soon he stumbles into a town gripped by civil war. The town sheriff sizes up the ronin and tells him there's a fortune to be made for a man like him in this town, and he'll only have to pay the sheriff a small fee, of course.

The samurai stops in a restaurant where the owner tells him of the two families competing for supremacy in the town. On one side of the town is Seibei, a silk merchant, and on the other Ushitora, who makes sake. Everyone in between is already dead, and both have hired numerous mercenaries, and the only business in town making any money is the local cooper, who never stops making coffins. The samurai absorbs this information and hatches a plan: "This town is full of men who deserve to die," he intones, and he's just the man to follow through on it.

After slicing and dicing a few brash fools, both sides tremble with fear and excitement in his presence, and they race to add the ronin to their cause. He goes to Seibei to demand an exorbitant sum, but we soon learn it's his wife Orin who runs the show. Kurosawa always places Orin in front of her husband in the frame, and she makes the deals with the samurai even as she plots to kill him afterwards. Then he goes to Ushitora, who takes no offense to the samurais murder of his men. After all, that's less money he has to pay for a group of men who couldn't even nick one true warrior. In these scenes Sanjuro usually sits surrounded by others, always in the middle, as if listening to and contemplating both sides. Really, though, he's just worming his way between them so he can manipulate the two parties.

Sanjuro tricks each side into fighting one another, and spends his time at the top of the bell tower in his own personal box seat to watch the action with glee. Ushitora captures Seibei's son, Seibei responds by stealing the mistress of one of Ushitora's top men, and Sanjuro notes that the mistress has been stolen from her husband and child. Up until this point, he sat in the tower or the restaurant smirking at his machinations, but a glimmer of humanity appears in the warrior. He finds the house where Nui is being kept and, in a fantastically short sequence of event, slaughters the guards inside and reunites the family. But that humanity disappears when the family spend too much time bowing to him to run. "Stop crying...I hate pathetic people. I'll have to kill you."

Ushitora's son, the gun-toting Unosuke, eventually figures out Sanjuro's ruse, and the film takes a shift into film noir when the samurai is captured and tortured. Suddenly shadows play a major role in the frame, particularly when he makes his escape under the floorboards of the castle. Eventually he makes his back to Gonji, the tavern owner, who smuggles him out of town in a casket. Sanjuro proves he's unlike any other samurai as he nurses his wounds and feels no shame in his defeat. In the sequel, Sanjuro, a group of young samurai are flabbergasted when our protagonist practically begs for food and water, but we see his indifference to much of the code of honor of samurai because he's seen how disgusting the life of a warrior really is.

Gonji gets captured to coax the samurai out of hiding, and Sanjuro marches back into town and absolutely lays waste to the few still standing, and even outsmarts Unosuke. Unosuke, played by Tatsuya Nakadai in his first role for Kurosawa, provides a nice foil for Sanjuro: both have largely abandoned the Bushido code, but where Sanjuro did so because his basically good nature could not take the "honor" of violence Unosuke violates codes of honor because he is cowardly and sinister. That pistol he carries, apart from representing the modernization of Japan and giving the film a more obvious Western hue, allows him to keep his distance from any warrior who might best him. He tries to assign the same meaning to the gun as most samurai do to their swords, saying "Without my pistol, I feel sort of naked," but it's just a ruse to try to appeal to Sanjuro's sense of personal honor in order to get in one last shot.

The final battle and its aftermath play out without music; only howling wind can be heard over dialogue and the screams of the dying. It hammers home the brutality of violence and how it's not really this exciting, visceral experience but quite literally deadly. Then Kurosawa ends it with an ironic perversion of the prayer drum meant to bless fallen warriors as the mayor plays it before at last breaking free of his life of fear and subservience by killing Seibei and ending it all at last.

Kurosawa always had a touch of the cynic about him, but usually tempered it with a message of hope, if not for the main characters then for someone they changed through their actions. Not so with Yojimbo; it's one of the most nihilistic movies I've seen. No one is changed by this experience, only killed. The cooper, the mayor, and Gonji still stand at the end of it, but their town is now barren and destroyed, but the samurai just leaves in an ironic take on riding off into the sunset; he leaves not with the knowledge that he helped those in need, or that he got his revenge on some terrible enemy, but with the renewed certainty that nothing ever changes and the only way to improve this world is to kill the violent. The irony isn't lost on him, I assure you. Toshiro Mifune's character and performance would inspire generations of homages and knock-offs, the best of which of course being Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" (A Fistful of Dollars itself is a remake of this film), but for my money Sanjuro remains the ultimate anti-hero because Kurosawa does not temper the film with an upbeat ending.

High and Low

Akira Kurosawa's samurai films certainly don't lack in the plaudits department, but this contemporary thriller is a bit overlooked. I can't imagine why; alongside Ikiru, High and Low ranks as the master's most vicious commentary on postwar Japan, a nearly literal journey through the heaven and hell of the film's international title. Yet whereas Ikiru enunciated its messages through the calm subtlety of a dying man, High and Low pulses with excitement and slashes through the seedy underbelly of the capitalist Japan with all the ferocity of Mifune's ronin in Yojimbo.

In his penultimate role with Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune plays Kingo Gondo, a wealthy executive of the National Shoe Company who has put all his assets at stake in a gambit to gain control of the company and start producing high quality shoes. Even in this seemingly banal setup Kurosawa takes a swipe how the sudden postwar introduction of capitalism in Japan quickly led to corruption: the bean counters in charge couldn't care less about show quality as long as they turn a profit. Gondo, a more idealized mixture of Traditionalism and the purer aspects of new Japan, manages to borrow 50 million yen against everything he owns. But what does that matter? Soon he'll run the whole company.

Then Gondo receives a phone call. A man claims to have his son, and unless Gondo coughs up 30 million yen the boy will die. The family panics, until young Jun walks through the door, happy as can be. Turns out, the kidnapper snatched the son of Gondo's chauffeur by mistake. Crisis averted, right? Wrong. In a stunning display of effrontery, the kidnapper still demands the ransom.

Kurosawa sets up this first hour magnificently; as police set up equipment to monitor calls and advise him on how to act, Gondo must decide whether the life of a boy he has no relation to is worth giving up nearly all of his fortune. Even the chauffeur knows he cannot ask his boss to give so much, and resigns himself to his fate. Yet Gondo ultimately sides with his conscience, and agrees to the payoff.

The resulting payment sequence is one of the finest in Kurosawa's repertoire. The kidnapper, knowing full well Gondo went to the police, instructs Gondo that the swap will occur on a bullet train, yet when he boards he learns that the criminal isn't even on the train, and that Gondo must dump the money out of the window when he sees the pickup man. In a series of shots so rapidly yet skillfuly cut together that it seems almost unbroken despite its multiple angles and settings, the train passes young Shinichi being held hostage, then the camera cuts back to Gondo before jumping out of the train again to see the pickup man, cutting back for Gondo to rapidly unload his payment. It's not the explosive action of Ran or Seven Samurai, but it's so masterfully shot that it seems almost as epic.

All of this happens by the end of the first hour, leaving you to wonder where the film can go from here. Well, never count out Kurosawa's ability to structure his films originally. The second half plays out as a police procedural. Here we descend into the "hell" portion; as the cops try to track down the money and the criminals. Kurosawa lays a bit with a literal notion of hell; in an earlier phone call, the kidnapper mentioned how it was over a hundred degrees down where he was. Now, as the police return to the station to map out an investigation, we see them sweating profusely in the sweltering heat. In Gondo's high-rise mansion they seem to have all the answers, to be cool and thoughtful, yet in the station they try frantically to piece together the clues in confusion.



Eventually Kurosawa moves into the actual streets, and we see just how disparate the class gap really is. Detectives move through slums that seep with fetid water and rusted iron. We see Gondo's mansion in the reflection of some standing water, and it casts his home as the castle lording over the peasants. Later, a man walks through a brothel, and all the strung-out junkie whores surround him, pawing and wheezing like asthmatic zombies as he denies their wares. Then cops try to follow the suspect through, and these same zombies suddenly rally and refuse the cops entry.

When the police finally capture Shinichi's kidnapper, Takeuchi, and Gondo meets with him, the two discuss such disparities within the city. Takeuchi, a medical intern, actually lived in the shadow of Gondo's home, and committed his crime because "it's amusing to make fortunate men taste the same misery as the unfortunate." He's known only struggle in his life, to the point that he feels he can never reach Gondo's level, so he decides to tear the businessman down to his instead. It's a poignant commentary on how people become locked into poverty and the greed and envy it fosters.

Takeuchi goes mad because he cannot face the new Japan.

Kurosawa mercilessly plays with our expectations with this film, even though the film stops being a thriller at the mid-point, it remains gripping due to his fast editing and epic widescreen ratio he used for the film. One can read endless symbolism into his use of the widescreen, how it illustrates the chasm between classes or how it can capture images fully and contrast their angles with the camera's, but when you get right down to it the ratio makes everything more exciting. Consider the moment when the kidnapper tells Gondo he's looking up at the businessman's house and is suspicious that the curtains are closed. After hiding the cops, the curtain whips open (in a manner not altogether unlike Kurosawa's trademark wipe transitions, and it establishes in two seconds the vastness of Gondo's house in a way you simply hadn't noticed before. He, like Ozu, that other great Japanese director, tends to flatten his scenes with his lens, yet somehow it makes everything seem more alive, more vibrant.

He also denies us a typical Hollywood ending. Films like normally play like a retelling of the story of Job: a man who makes the right choice (or a life of righteousness in Job's case) loses everything for his goodness, is plunged into a fit of despair (yet never loses his virtue) and ultimately receives everything back as a reward, just 'cause I suppose. Indeed, the actual book Kurosawa adapted, King's Ransom by Ed McBain, ended in such a fashion. Yet Kurosawa does let us off so easily; he knows that the right choice does not always come with a reward, that it can damage or even kill you. After all, isn't that why it's so hard to do the right thing?

Gondo's fate is not entirely bleak; he becomes a hero in the eyes of the public, while people boycott the National Shoe Company when they learn how executives used the kidnapping as an excuse to shut Gondo out. Nevertheless, he loses a considerable amount of status in the process, and one wonders how what his future has in store for him.

Mifune, normally so unrestrained and vibrant, places all of that manic energy in the suit of an executive. He has outbursts, to be sure, but he's more nuanced than ever before; Mifune usually erased the line between inner turmoil and outward expression but here bottle his emotions within. Also bringing his A-game is Tatsuya Nakadai, in his second role for Kurosawa after playing the gun-toting Unosuke in Yojimbo; here he plays Chief Detective Tokura, a cool and collected cop who places all of his efforts on finding the boy yet still empathizes with Gondo for his position. Though Gondo is certainly the emotional center of the film, Tokura is no less important and shows a vision of the police that is neither romanticized nor cynical.

High and Low easily deserves a spot on the short list of Kurosawa's great films. Of course, that "short list" is about half his filmography, but even then this must surely rank near the top. It perhaps lacks the visceral power of his more epic samurai productions, but it nevertheless teems with life and paints a multi-layered portrait of poverty, class and greed without ever patting itself on the back for examining social issues. How many films can be as thrilling in the investigation office as they are in the chases?