Seven Samurai

When I graduated high school, I naturally received congratulatory checks from friends and family, Baby's First Nest Egg to ease the transition into the adult world (or, to speak more accurately of college, the transition into the transition into the adult world). I saved most of it but took a small amount for a minor spree to celebrate graduating with honors. One of the things I bought was Criterion's re-issue of its Seven Samurai package. To this day, I'm unsure why I spent the money; it was expensive, and I knew not a damn thing about the film. But I wanted to watch the only film then in the top 10 of IMDB's voter poll* that I had not seen. Maybe it was just fate, some inexorable pull that lured me away from the modern, cookie-cutter blockbusters into the grandfather of the action extravaganza. More than any other movie, Seven Samurai is the reason my small but greatly humbling audience is reading this blog right now.


What stood out for me the first time I saw Seven Samurai and continues to stand out today is its subversive element. Made only a decade after the conclusion of World War II, a time when the government coerced filmmakers into making propaganda pictures, many of them jidai-geki movies, Kurosawa Akira's epic slashes the ideal image of the samurai to tatters. The samurai here, collected by poor farmers to defend their village from bandits, fight not for honor nor rank but a bowl of rice a day. That is all the farmers can afford, which is less surprising than the fact that the samurai, even if they won't say it aloud, can expect no better. For a nation told to see itself in the noble tradition of the samurai, Kurosawa offers a cynical bit of reassurance after their grand defeat in the war: "Don't feel so bad, guys," he seems to be saying. "We actually have a long tradition of being downtrodden and defeated."

Kurosawa, who embraced the West as much as Ozu feared its cultural implications, forges Seven Samurai into something of a postwar propaganda piece not on behalf of the occupying American forces but as a means to inspire change in those who felt their entire way of life had been upended. The villagers who face the wrath of marauding bandits come every harvest splinter to protect their own farms, only to be forced into subservience. If they unite, however, they can repel the force. Strange, then, that the most influential of Kurosawa's pictures upon Western filmmaking, and the one most inspired by the Hollywood epic, should be perhaps his most Japanese, both in terms of historical accuracy and its open call for the downtrodden Japanese to set aside their self-pity and stand up for themselves as one people. Patriotism does not necessarily equal nationalism, and just because Japan could not, would not ever attempt to be an imperial power again didn't mean it couldn't at least be its own state.

Of course, this is extrapolation that becomes more plausible with each viewing, and may well be interesting more to myself than others. What is universally appealing about the film is its nearly perfect sense of pacing and editing. Almost exactly one hour and 13 minutes pass from the start of the film to the moment where the belligerent wannabe samurai, Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) enters the central village just behind the real ronin and sounds the alarm, panicking the farmers who treated the arrival of the samurai with fear and disdain, only to run for their help at the false sign of danger. It is that moment that marks the true end of the first act, as it earns Kikuchiyo his place in the fold and completes the titular seven. That first act consists of nothing but character introductions, backstory and setup, yet the hour and change feels no longer than 30 minutes. The next hour, preparation for the upcoming battle, passes as swiftly. And when hell erupts in a rainstorm with gale winds, hell, you stop looking at the clock altogether.

Yet it is precisely the amount of detail that Kurosawa inserts into the frame and the narrative that moves the film so fluidly. Kurosawa neither burdens us with such plot that we lose interest, but he also inserts enough to give the audience, even the characters, an emotional stake in the proceedings. To save time, the director avoids redundancy in the dialogue where his ever-immaculate imagery tells the story, relying on Japanese knowledge of tradition to advance the whole of the first act, knowing damn well his film would play in art houses around the word. The peasants head to a local village to find samurai to recruit, but they have no luck initially. Then, they spot a crowd gathering with hushed awe around an aged ronin, Kambei (Takashi Shimura), who cuts off his topknot and shaves his head to pose as a monk in order to save an abducted child. To lose one's topknot was a grave dishonor, inferring punishment and humiliation. This samurai cuts his hair in plain view of the villagers, who stare at him as if he were possessed. Who could do such a thing? Even for Western audiences utterly unaware of the significance of Kambei's actions, the mise-en-scène and angling of the actors' faces communicates their awe until it becomes ours. To have a character speak of the moment would kill its power, halt the film, but as it is this extraneous bit of information involves the audience more deeply even as it displays several layers of Kambei's personality without him speaking a single word. We see his capacity and cunning as a strategist, as well as a dismissive sense of the honor codes that bind samurai who can no longer even feed themselves. The peasants follow him reverently after the incident to recruit him, but two other samurai tag along as well, and Kambei tries to send them away because he can not even afford to care for himself, much less take an apprentice.

Kambei cannot keep them at bay, however. Kikuchiyo hangs around like an unpopular kid circling the cool table, while young, inexperienced Katsushiro is so reverent there's no hope of getting rid of him. Kambei finds four more warriors for the villagers, silently testing their abilities by having Katsushiro lunge at them unexpectedly. All true samurai will be prepared and move to parry the blow. The way each ronin responds says something about them: the first warrior enters, successfully blocks, but leaves in a combination of personal offense and unwillingness to help farmers. Another, Gorobei, realizes the game simply by looking at the shadow the young samurai casts before he enters. Later, Kambei makes him second-in-command. (Of course, when Kikuchiyo lumbers in to join, he gets smacked square on the head with a log as the others sob with laughter.)

At last assembled, the samurai arrive at the hamlet they are to protect, only to be met with aforementioned disdain and fear. The only samurai farmers have ever dealt with have been as rapacious and thieving as the bandits who ransack them each season -- and at least the bandits work out an arrangement rather than simply tearing the place apart. For their part, the samurai are furious when they discover old battle gear and swords taken from ronin the farmers killed. And just as Kikuchiyo dissolved the farmers' tension upon the samurais' arrival, so too does he cow the pride of the ronin. "Who turned them into such monsters?" he screams. "You did. In war, you burn their village, trample their fields, steal their food, work them like slaves, rape their women and kill any who resist. What do you expect them to do, anyway?"

This interaction becomes the dominant focus of the film, and what I notice more and more with each viewing is how much more invested I become in the characters and the implications of their dynamics than I am by the masterful action. As I have become more acquainted not only with Kurosawa's canon but the works of the other two titans of Japanese cinema, Ozu Yasujiro and Mizoguchi Kenji, I must admit that the director who introduced me into the wider world of cinema does not have the same compositional genius of the peers he greatly outlived. Yet Kurosawa is a master in his own right, and his chief ability as a filmmaker is his capacity for moving through immaculate mise-en-scène faster than anyone without losing the power of the image. That does not make him superior to his more modestly (or in Ozu's case, glacially) paced peers, of course, but in an age in which the audience is denied even a coherent progression of events in action cinema, the evocative compositions of Kurosawa's mise-en-scène are an absolute delight. It is his editing of them, however, that carries the most weight.

Kurosawa understood the power of editing in implanting emotion in an audience, and Seven Samurai is, if nothing else, a masterpiece for its editing. Every cut carries a psychic weight, more so when the action explodes at the end. Each shot holds long enough to give the audience a chance to take in the mise-en-scène, to give us something to care about so when a peasant dies or a hut gets burned, we feel it. The intelligence of the cuts compound even the longer, calmer takes. We are introduced to the master swordsman Kyuzo as spectators to a duel between him and a belligerent ronin. Kurosawa communicates Kyuzo's discipline through long takes that cut only as the agitated samurai gets restless waiting for Kyuzo to make the first move. At last, he lunges and the two connect their wooden practice swords. The one ronin declares it a draw, but Kyuzo correctly notes that his blow would have been lethal while the other fighter's would simply have been an injury. Enraged, the other challenges to a real duel, and the pacing cools further. The camera pulls back and pans between them, holding until the man at last runs at Kyuzo, who moves so fluidly you know the cantankerous ronin made a mistake he won't live to regret.

These touches are brilliant, but the most remarked-upon aspect of Kurosawa's style with the film is his transition to frame-flattening long lenses, which he would use for the rest of his career. Yet he introduces them gradually here, using depth of field in the beginning to emphasize the distance between the samurai and the peasants, and even between the unlinked samurai themselves. As the characters come to trust each other and the stakes raise, the frame tightens, bringing the tragedy closer to the audience. Kambei realizes that if the peasants are to have any shot at fending off the bandits, the outlying houses must be sacrificed to maintain a strong defense of a smaller perimeter. When the bandits set fire to those huts in a rage, Kurosawa frames the blazes in a way that stresses how far away the houses are for anyone to save them yet flattens the composition enough that the arson feels closer. We get inside the peasants watching their homes burn so close, yet so far away. That sense of tragedy pervades the film, from Kikuchiyo, the orphaned farmer-cum-samurai discovering a baby left orphaned by the bandits and seeing himself in the child to a peasant being reunited with his wife, stolen and raped by the bandits, only for the women to throw herself into a fire rather than face her shame.

The director balances this sense of horror with gallows humor. When the village elder sends the handful of peasants to find warriors to defend them, some note that all they have as payment is some rice. "Find hungry samurai," responds the old man without hesitation. The farmers face mass indifference and derision in their quest, but Kurosawa slyly inserts a Fool in the Shakespearean tradition, laughing at the farmers in their cheap living area but shaming the samurai who arrogantly turn them down, pointing out the gruel and millet the peasants eat just to be able to provide rice to the samurai. When the samurai arrive, one farmer cuts his beautiful daughter's hair to make her resemble a man, hoping to prevent a warrior from ravishing his girl. Ironically, the young samurai Katsushiro wrestles Shino to the ground and accidentally rips open her robe because he does mistake her for a man and finds her behavior suspicious. Because of the father's actions, the two young lovers meet and enter into a relationship that provides a light relief in the film's darkest moments. Even the casting suggests a humorous bent: Bokuzen Hidari, the teetotaler comedian who gained fame for his convincing drunken pantomimes, is hilarious as the constantly sobbing old man whose grief and terror is so incessant that at some point you just have to laugh, then you find you never stop laughing.

No one, however, makes as big an impression, comic or severe, as Mifune, who pours the totality of his physical expression into Kikuchiyo. I confess that, Mifune fan that I am, I find aspects of his performance in Rashomon to simply be too much, too broad and farcical for a rapist-murderer. But here, he is something else entirely. The spirit of the film imbues him, uses him as its messenger: his Freudian sword and galloping trot are pure comedy, while the moment of anguish he has over an abandoned baby who's parents just died captures the pain and despair that links these characters. Mifune's tics could make Woody Allen look centered and calm: he scratches restlessly at his beard, randomly rears back and laughs in a booming, fake tone and does not run so much as bound like a bipedal antelope. But his drunken caterwauling has an innate charm, and as much as he might be the clown of the group, it is precisely his goofiness that softens the samurai.

His clothes are always ragged, not frayed and torn but merely left open in animalistic threat. But it also links him to the farmers, who can barely afford the clothes they themselves probably made. When the bandits finally attack, they burn the outlying homes beyond the defensive perimeter. Kikuchiyo finds an abandoned baby by the site, and suddenly sees his own life in this new orphan. "This baby is me!" That barely concealed pain explains Kikuchiyo's erratic behavior and his ability to unify the samurai and the farmers, but Mifune plays that pathos less as psychological backstory than its own competing force for Kikuchiyo's behavior. Mifune excelled at playing characters with extreme confidence (whether they deserved to display it or not), but when a close-up catches his eyes, Mifune communicates a deep insecurity and a desire to please. He laughs and boasts constantly, but when the others have even a light chuckle at his expense, he looks devastated. The tough front dissolves, as does the comic inversion of that front. All we see is the man, a man who runs headlong into any situation to try to outpace his own insecurity. Small wonder, then, that he dies with his bare ass in the air.

Seven Samurai is, without a doubt, a Western, backed up by an epic score filled with pounding drums and brass that makes every shot bombastic. But it also contains some of Kurosawa's more trenchant views of society, as piercing as his more modern films. The use of the musket as a device in the film has a slight anti-Western/technological bent, but Kurosawa goes to great pains to dispel any sense of honor in classical fighting: the peasants, the overwhelming numbers of the army in feudal society (modern society, too, if you check the link between poverty and enlistment), fight savagely with spears, unstoppable monsters being directed by social superiors. But even these noble warriors do not seem so superior to send these people to their deaths: Kambei projects an aura of authority and wisdom, but the sighs in Shimura's line deliveries belie an unspoken pain and defeat. Unlike a typical Western, Kurosawa doesn't eulogize the past, instead using it to show how far we've collectively failed to come since then.

When I finished watching Seven Samurai for the first time, I felt drained. Three and a half hours had passed quickly, too quickly, for me to account for all that had happened, and the ending drained me. It still does, a comedown that's too sobering to bring tears. Some might accuse Kurosawa of having his cake and eating it too by devoting most of the last hour to all out war just to get to a dénouement that denounces meaningless fighting. Yet it's the sort of wisdom that comes from those who've been to the other side and returned. And in the aftermath of World War II, who in the world, especially in Japan, didn't have firsthand experience of what war could do?

The end equalizes the peasants and samurai in death, the flattened image crushing the lower placed peasant mounds just in front of the bigger tributes at the top of the hill. As the three surviving samurai stand before it, Katsushiro slinking away from Kambei and Shichiroji to be with Shino, the old friends find themselves contemplating the sight before them. "Again we are defeated," Kambei sighs, to the confusion of his old lieutenant. Looking out at the farmers merrily planting their rice crop that they will finally enjoy themselves, Kambei sadly notes, "The farmers have won, not us." Kambei is left back where he was, a respected general without a home, even if he makes one with the villagers. A lord goes to war to protect his land, or to expand it. A peasant fights to keep what meager scrap they have. But a samurai? A samurai just fights until he dies, and whether he's serving as a vassal or as the savior of farmers, he's left alone once more when the fighting is done. From that perspective, the end of every battle is a loss, regardless of who is declared the winner.



*I WAS YOUNG, OKAY?!

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.

Throne of Blood

Akira Kurosawa's Ran, an adaptation of King Lear, was one of the best Shakespeare adaptations I've ever seen (second only to Chimes at Midnight). Its personal impact got me interested in seeing his version of Macbeth, a feeling only strengthened when I look around only and saw numerous people citing it as one of the master's best. So, over the protests of my bank account I added another of Kurosawa's films to my collection, but that tiny inner voice of fiscal responsibility can stow it because it was worth every penny.

What made Ran so interesting was how willing it was to play with Shakespeare's original dialogue, freeing it from the narrow confines that befall literal translations while never not feeling like King Lear. Throne of Blood operates in much the same fashion. The general plot follows the same direction: Macbeth becomes Washizu Taketori (Toshiro Mifune) who, along with his friend Miki (the Banquo substitute), meets a witch who prophesies him to become Master of the Cobweb Castle, while Miki's children will assume the throne following Washizu's death. Eventually it all ends in tears. You know, typical Shakespeare.

But what sets Throne of Blood apart from your average adaptation is how many liberties Kurosawa takes with the material. Even Ran stayed more or less faithful and its only modifications seemed to come from necessity in its transportation across continents, but Throne of Blood makes some bold choices that certainly not make it better Macbeth, but turns it into something almost as rare: unique.

First of all, Kurosawa scales the action waaaaaaaay back. Drawing heavily from the Noh style of Japanese theater, the action of Throne of Blood manifests itself mostly internally. Macbeth certainly dealt with inner madness but the stage tends to run red with blood; Throne of Blood, on the other hand, chiefly implies its action. For example, when Washizu's wife Asaji convinces her husband to kill his master Tsuzuki, Washizu wanders off-screen while Asaji moves in a short series of stylized movements that may look strange but clearly represent nervousness. Later, a soldier brings Washizu, the new master, the head of his friend Miki, but the master refuses to allow the guard to show him.

But the biggest change is how Kurosawa re-shapes the characters to craft an entirely new subtext for the material. Macbeth is about how man's ambition can cause his downfall, but Throne of Blood, created after the fall of royalty, paints a more complete picture of the mindset of feudal and monarchical society. Without a king or queen breathing over his neck, Kurosawa reveals how Washizu's actions merely continue a cycle instead of representing a lone man undone by madness. Tsuzuki gained the throne through bloodshed, so why should anyone be surprised that Washizu does the same? For that reason Throne of Blood is less an adaptation of Macbeth and more what Shakespeare might have wanted to say if he were freed from the constraints of the times. After all, a whole bunch of monarchs die in his plays; who's to say he wouldn't have some harsher words about them if those words wouldn't get him killed?

Even Lady Macbeth gets an overhaul. Isuzu Yamada, who would go on to appear in Kurosawa's version of The Lower Depths and in Yojimbo, brings a subtlety to the role that seems almost alien, both to the original character and to the more exaggerated styles of Japanese acting. Perhaps the most brilliant decision of the entire film was Asaji's pregnancy, as it casts the character into a whole new light. The original Lady Macbeth, despite remaining one of Shakespeare's more memorable characters, fits too neatly into the archetype of the evil woman who leads good men astray. It's been around since the Bible, and I doubt it'll ever go away. But Kurosawa's Lady Macbeth, while still very much sinister, has actual layers and for once we see her ambition rather than bloodlust. These added dimensions make Asaji seem so much more human even though she's far more calculating than her English counterpart; not only does she convince her husband to kill the master, she also arranges for the death of Miki.

I've mentioned that a lot of action takes place off-screen, but that pertains mainly to the psychological aspects of the play. It wouldn't be a Kurosawa samurai film without some great battle scenes, and sure enough there are two action sequences in this film that could shame almost any other director out there, then or now. The final sequence in particular, in which the "forest" comes to the castle, illustrates not only a taut, thrilling action sequence but Kurosawa's use of creative liberties. In Macbeth the lead rebelled against a pure king more or less because his wife manipulated him and sent him spiralling into madness. But there is no higher ideal in Throne of Blood; Washizu is simply another cog in an endless wheel of corruption and violence. He, and his soldiers, are motivated not by religion or greed but by fear. Washizu's soldiers do not fight for their master as Macbeth's troops; when they see the forest "move" they immediately turn on their master and kill him because they are too frightened to face the possibility of such a foe.

Throne of Blood, for me, seemed to work better almost as an afterthought. As I watched it, I couldn't help but feel that Kurosawa took the edge of the emotion with his Noh stylings, and at only 110 minutes the movie felt like it came and went to quickly. Yet the second it ended, and I mean the very second the title card came up, it hit me just how brilliant this film was. If it seems shorter and more personal, it is, but Kurosawa gives us the most claustrophobic version of Macbeth ever made. It simmers with social commentary and actually delves into what drove these people to madness instead of turning them all into little Satans for rebelling against a noble king. The more I think about it the more I'm tempted to separate Throne of Blood from Macbeth entirely; both are masterpiece in their own ways, but each offers radically different subtext. As a Kurosawa film, it's one of the master's finest, but as a Shakespearean adaptation, it surely ranks in the top three alongside his own Ran and Orson Welles be-all, end-all mash-up Chimes at Midnight.

Rashomon

Plenty of films remain in the public consciousness after their release, but how many films are so groundbreaking, so innovative, and so thoroughly singular even after 58 years of worldwide copying that the film itself is used to describe a psychological effect? Rashomon is perhaps not Akira Kurosawa's greatest work (though I could never choose between it Seven Samurai or Ikiru), but it is perhaps his most perennially interesting. Where Seven Samurai, copied virtually note for note not only in remakes but every half-decent action epic since, may not seem as fresh as it did then (I don't think it's aged at all, though), Rashomon forever looks as if it was made yesterday, even though it's been copied just as much as Kurosawa's great action epic. But why? What's its secret for remaining so relevant and singular?

The film opens in a rainstorm, as a woodcutter and a priest rest in a ruined gatehouse to stay dry. A bawdy commoner enters, and to pass the time the woodcutter tells the newcomer of the trial in which he and the priest just testified. We abruptly flash back to the woodcutter's story, in which he discovers a dead samurai whilst wondering through the woods. He runs to get help, and then we flash forward to the trial three days later.

The trial itself is divided by the testimonies of its witnesses and defendants. The woodcutter's establishing story gives way to a testimony by the priest, who says only that he saw the samurai and his wife on the day the man was murdered. Then we get into the real heart of the matter when the officials drag out Tajōmaru (Toshiro Mifune) to testify.

A notorious bandit, Tajōmaru proudly admits to killing the samurai, but another point of contention arises: we learn that the samurai's wife was raped. The bandit claims he decided to kill the samurai the moment he laid eyes on the woman, because he "thought [he] saw a goddess." He tricks the couple, only to tie the husband to a tree and chase down the wife. This leads to one of the most memorable camera tricks in Kurosawa's oeuvre: as the bandit drags the wife along to see her defeated husband, the camera whips around in a frenzy, moving so swiftly that you assume it must be one hell of a dolly shot. Then you notice the slight curve at the edge of the frame and realize that Kurosawa is panning in a circle. I'd hate to have been on that camera as it spun around so quickly.

Kurosawa instructed Mifune to play Tajōmaru like a wild animal, and the actor certainly did just that. Mifune's acting usually seems a bit overstated by Western standards, but he has a knack unlike any other for acting with his entire body, and he practically throws himself into every line. When the wife struggles against his advances you can see a mixture of all sorts of emotions-- from surprise to intrigue and excitement) not only on his face but in every limb.

Following his testimony, we see the wife offer her side of the story, and afterwards a psychic conjures the dead samurai's spirit to recount his own. The real intrigue of the story unfolds when both of those stories touch upon the same basic facts of the events as we know them (samurai killed, wife raped), but they offer up stories that completely contradict the bandit's tale and each other's. Tajōmaru claimed that, after "seducing" the wife, she begged the two men to fight to the death so only one might know her dishonor. The wife, however, claims that she begged for her own death. The samurai himself states that the wife, actually seduced by the brigand, demanded her new lover to kill him.

The brilliance of these segments is to point out man's fundamental inability to tell the truth about himself. Kurosawa gives each person's testimony its own distinctive look and style in order to emphasize our own self-flattery. The bandit's story unfolds with quick, exciting cuts and fast camera movements, backed by a bombastic score that almost makes him out to be some lovable scoundrel, on the level of Robin Hood perhaps. Yet we clearly see him, even in his own story, kill a man in order to rape his wife. The wife's flashback unfolds in close-ups of her frightened face and Mifune's wild abandon; it feels more personal and moving, especially when her husband damns her for being "dishonored." Meanwhile, the samurai presents his story in a refined, proper way that coldly looks upon his wife as a whore, and finally the woodcutter's second testimony plays without music, in matter-of-fact imagery that seems, of all the stories, the most plausible. Of course, we learn that he too lied by the film's end.

Perhaps the most inventive aspect of Kurosawa's direction is his use of light. All of it filters through the trees, breaking up the people and casting everything into doubt. Yet the real trick is his ironic inversion of the symbolism of sunlight. Normally a sign of good and hope, Kurosawa uses sunlight as a sense of foreboding and evil; at times he tilts his camera directly up into the sun, and it's one of the most inexplicably unsettling shots I've ever seen. The director even incorporates this notion into each of the characters' semi-fantasies.

The bandit, proudly self-aware, casts himself in the most sunlight but also bathes the husband, his perverse rival for the affections of the wife, in light to highlight his distaste for the man. All the while he keeps the object of his lust mostly in shadows. The wife herself casts both her and her husband in shadows, choosing to focus all the sunlight onto her rapist, and only lets a small amount of sunlight illuminate her husband when he refuses even to kill her in his rage. Finally, the husband washes both the bandit and his wife in light, his wife more so, actually. It's their way of focusing attention elsewhere (or, in the case of the bandit, firmly on himself), playing with the medium of film, since the officials themselves certainly can't see these flashbacks.

Ultimately we never learn the truth; instead, we get about 60 pieces of a 100-piece puzzle and we have to see what we can make of it. The woodcutter's story, the most pathetic and least self-serving, strikes us as the most plausible, but even his story is cast into doubt. We can guess that perhaps the bandit cannot truly face the real horror of his actions, that the woman may have been more conniving than she lets on (though, at the end of the day, rape is still rape, and some of the condemnations I've seen of her character online make me uneasy), and that the samurai is so rigidly locked in his system of codes that he worries only of his own honor. None of this explains what really happened, but I don't think that's the point; Kurosawa uses the crime itself to teach us a lesson about humanity.

Yet Kurosawa does not leave us in a state of existential despair. The final scene, in which the woodcutter offers to raise an abandoned baby, which casts his own lies and theft in a kinder light. Some complain that this scene is tacked on and undermines the message. What a load of nonsense. It's a film about viewing things from multiple angles; why shouldn't one of them be upbeat?

Rashomon is one of those displays of the director's talent that does not seem obvious at first. While we can see his ability to control monumental action in epics like Seven Samurai and Ran, or in the street hustle of High and Low, films like this and Ikiru showcase his ability to make the mundane seem just as epic as his samurai wars. The film runs only 88 minutes, yet offers hours worth of character depth, story, and thematic exposition. It takes place in three simple locations (the gatehouse, the courtyard where the trial is held, and the scene of the crime), yet feels infinitely larger in scope.

Well, we know the film holds up, but what about the film? Criterion knows how to restore a movie, but their DVD contains a constant hissing and some blemishes in a number of frames. I wouldn't say that it hurts the film, but I am thrilled to know that Criterion is currently working on a new restoration with whatever tools have become available since the 2002 release of the current disc. I believe a Blu-Ray release is planned sometime this year, and it will immediately join that list of films I wish to buy an actual player in order to view.

Rashomon remains a landmark in film history; not only did it expose Kurosawa (and indeed Japanese cinema as a whole) to the international market, it jump-started the burgeoning art-house movement that would come to prominence in the 50s and 60s on the shoulders of Kurosawa and European auteurs like Ingmar Bergman. But even without its historical context, Rashomon can still captivate, even thrill, audiences today with a psychological drama with the pace of an action extravaganza.

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?