Document type
Round-up
Published
22 January 2006

Midnight Eye Round-Up

Akira Kurosawa special

By Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp

Stray Dog

Original title:
Nora Inu
Director:
Akira KUROSAWA
Cast:
Toshiro MIFUNE, Takashi SHIMURA, Isao KIMURA, Keiko AWAJI, Reisaburo YAMAMOTO, Noriko SENGOKU, Eiko MIYOSHI
Running time:
117 mins.
Year:
1949
DVD:
BFI (UK, English subtitles - as part of 'Classic Kurosawa' box set)

picture: scene from 'Stray Dog'Akira Kurosawa was one of the many directors, actors and assorted technicians to leave Toho during the series of labour strikes during the late 40s, though returned to the studio with Ikiru in 1952. By this time he had already made Scandal and The Idiot for Shochiku and The Quiet Duel and Rashomon for Daiei, the latter of which awakened a new global interest in Japanese cinema when it won the Venice Film Festival in 1951, marking for overseas audiences the beginning of a legendary career.

During this time Kurosawa also made this gripping police thriller at Shintoho, the new company formed from the splinter group of those staff that left Toho. Made and set in the post-war occupation period, with many scenes shot in the still visibly recovering areas of downtown Tokyo, it captures all the turmoil, hardship and moral ambiguity of its age.

On a crowded train detective Murakami (Mifune) has his Colt pistol stolen by an unseen pickpocket. Reporting his loss, his resignation is rejected and he is put on half pay until he tracks down its whereabouts, with the assistance of a superior officer, Sato (Shimura). Meanwhile, the gun has fallen into the hands of a vicious criminal who uses the weapon in a series of violent housebreakings.

Based on an unpublished novel written by Kurosawa inspired by the policier fiction of Belgian writer Georges Simenon, parallels can easily be drawn between Stray Dog and the pessimistic, hardboiled detective works made around the same post-war period in America, a body of works that would later be grouped together under the label of film noir. With many of the scenes shot outdoors on location, Kurosawa's work does not make use of visual techniques such as low-key lighting to the same extent as works such as Double Indemnity (1944) or Out of the Past (1947). Instead, he conjures up his edgy, oppressive atmosphere by setting his film in the stifling heat of a Tokyo summer. Bodies glisten with sweat, as the characters constantly tug at their clothing, fan themselves or mop their brows.

Though Kurosawa would later talk disparagingly of his film ("all that technique and not one real thought in it") - and indeed, there are sequences such as a wordless 8-minute montage of Murakami stalking around downtown in search of his gun that are allowed to stretch on longer than would perhaps be most effective - the film does paint a particularly vivid portrait of its era. It is at its most effective in the shared moments between Sato and the younger detective, where they ponder the nature of good and evil, and law and order within a society reigned by poverty and hunger. By the second half, though, the drama has most certainly clicked into full gear, with the sequences leading up to Murakami's inevitable meeting with his murderous alter ego kept particularly taut.

Kurosawa's film was remade with Tetsuya Watari by Azuma Morisaki for Shochiku in 1973, and the basic premise was reworked to fit the post-Aum landscape of Shinji Aoyama's An Obsession in 1997. In 2003 Hong Kong director Johnny To, a self-confessed Kurosawa fan, delivered his own homage with PTU.

[JS]

Scandal

Original title:
Shubun
Director:
Akira KUROSAWA
Cast:
Toshiro MIFUNE, Yoshiko YAMAGUCHI, Takashi SHIMURA, Noriko SENGOKU, Yoko KATSURAGI, Tanie KITABAYASHI, Sakae OZAWA
Running Time:
104 mins.
Year of Release:
1950
DVD:
Eureka (UK, English subtitles)

picture: scene from 'Scandal'The first of two films Kurosawa made for Shochiku (the other was the Dostoevsky adaptation The Idiot), Scandal is a punchy social drama taking a righteous swipe at the gutter press. Mifune plays the up-and-coming artist, Ichiro Aoe, who is snapped with famous singer Miyako Saijo (Yoshiko Yamaguchi, Manchurian-born actress who has appeared under the names Ri Ko-ran, Xi Xianglan and, during her spell in Hollywood during the 50s, as Shirley Yamaguchi) whilst they are sitting on the balcony of the spa resort hotel room to which he has just given her a ride. This simple photo, taken by two paparazzi eager for a scoop, forms the basis of a fabricated story published in the gossip-mongering magazine they work for, Amour. Miyako wishes to keep a low profile and wait for the resulting scandal to blow over, but the outraged painter is not going to take things lying down, and vows to take the magazine's editor, Hori (Sakae) to court.

One night in his studio, he and his model Sumie (Sengoku) are approached by a ragged-looking old man, Hiruta (Shimura) who offers his services as a lawyer. Aoe accepts his proposal, mainly out of sympathy for the maladroit and barely-competent Hiruta, who has virtually bankrupted himself paying for the treatment of his sick daughter Masako (Katsuragi), on her deathbed with tuberculosis. While the plaintiffs set about constructing a case and attempt to track down witnesses, divided loyalties mean that Hiruta's devotion to the cause begins to waver.

Forthright and dramatic, as with all his work Kurosawa's film is indebted in its manner to Western rather than domestic models, with a story that would work just as well wherever it was set. Stylistically bold, every image is strikingly composed and every scene carefully staged, and there's not a single superfluous shot throughout. A lesser known work from the master, but a virtuoso piece of filmmaking nonetheless.

[JS]

I Live in Fear

Original title:
Ikimono no Kiroku
a.k.a.:
The Record of a Living Being
Director:
Akira KUROSAWA
Cast:
Toshiro MIFUNE, Takashi SHIMURA, Eiko MIYOSHI, Yutaka SADA, Minoru CHIAKI, Haruko TOGO, Noriko SENGOKU
Running time:
99 mins.
Year:
1955
DVD:
BFI (UK, English subtitles - as part of 'Classic Kurosawa' box set)

picture: scene from 'I Live in Fear'Mifune, very convincingly playing a man twice his age, is Kiichi Nakajima, the aging owner of an iron foundry and patriarch of an extended family of children and grandchildren, legitimate and otherwise. Living at the height of the nuclear age, fear of the bomb and radiation have made him resolve to sell his material belongings and relocate his entire offspring to a farm in Brazil, where he is convinced they will be safe from the follies of mankind. His long-suffering wife and children, however, will have none of it and try to have Nakajima declared insane by the court, so they can take the reigns of the family business.

Grave in tone, this is one of Kurosawa's most literal, direct films. Sadly, it is less involving for it. If its earnesty is never in doubt, it does play more like a sermon than a film at times. What comes across strongest is its depiction of families and human relationships, particularly the delicate balance between displays of emotions and the need to keep family matters behind closed doors. It is for this reason that the total collapse of everyone's hopes in the final reel manages to resonate so strongly.

Like Stray Dog, reviewed above, this DVD forms part of the BFI's five-film Classic Kurosawa box set. Also containing Ikiru, Throne of Blood and Red Beard, it provides liner notes for each film by Philip Kemp and video introductions by Alex Cox for the Ikiru and Red Beard discs. I Live in Fear comes with an additional booklet of essays.

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The Bad Sleep Well

Original title:
Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru
Director:
Akira KUROSAWA
Cast:
Toshiro MIFUNE, Kyoko KAGAWA, Masayuki MORI, Takashi SHIMURA, Ko NISHIMURA, Tatsuya MIHASHI
Running time:
151 mins.
Year:
1960
DVD:
Criterion Collection (USA, English subtitles)

picture: scene from 'The Bad Sleep Well'One of the many things that make Akira Kurosawa's film such standouts are the social groundings of their plots and situations. The many excellent writers and biographers that have written on his works, Stephen Prince in his The Warrior's Camera perhaps most substantially, have remarked how from his first films - his few wartime propaganda pics notwithstanding - were underpinned by social concerns.

Early post-war films like Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, even if not among his best, certainly pointed the way: they were dynamic genre films that were constructed not around types and conventions, but about what Kurosawa felt they could represent and tell his viewers about the society in which they lived - and the society they could live in if they tried hard enough to achieve it. If it is his period work that has since come to represent him in the eyes of the West, it the ones in contemporary setting in which these life goal of the director's is most tangible.

All four films reviewed on this page are fine examples of this aspect of Kurosawa's work, but among them, The Bad Sleep Well is one of the most memorable. It's generally interpreted as an adaptation of Hamlet, but as with Kurosawa's other Shakespeare adaptations Throne of Blood and the later Ran, this is in the end entirely Kurosawan. As a social document it talks about the corrupting force of power and the manner in which society allows for this corruption to go unchecked. As a thriller it is quite simply a work of great mastery; the story of a young company man who marries the boss's daughter to advance his plans for revenge on those he knows to be responsible for his father's death unrolls as a series of perfectly planned-out schemes that drag the viewer along and never let go. The weakness of the ploy, however, lies not in its execution but in the mind of the human being that has to see it through. Against the merciless, what weapon could be truly effective? A similar cruelty would topple the moral grounding of the strategy, and a humanity may be righteous but also makes one vulnerable, as hero Nishi (Mifune) is to discover. This is but one of the many dilemmas and concerns that make The Bad Sleep Well, like its close cousin High and Low (Tengoku to Jigoku, 1965), rank among the genuinely brilliant.

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