A personal favorite of mine is Japanese samurai cinema. Like most people I was introduced to it by the films of Akira Kurosawa starring Toshiro Mifune. That in turn lead to discovering Japanese cinema during its golden age, 1948 until around 1970. The first part of this series will concentrate on Akira Kurosawa, one of the greatest directors in world history, because he is so well known and readily available in the United States. Later parts will talk about Toshiro Mifune's career beyond his 16 movie association with Kurosawa, with a final segment on Japanese cinema in the early 1970s as it descended into exploitation.
There was a film industry in Japan starting in the silent era. The country has isolationist tendencies, so while European and American imports were welcome, it was more important to have home-grown movies. The subject matter was also particularly Japanese, detailing stories from the past, many of which included tales of samurai. Even when the industry was taken over during the war years, which for Japan started in 1933, samurai stories with an emphasis on loyalty such as the 47 Ronin were popular.
During the occupation, the American forces purged the propagandists in the film industry, installing strict censorship. Cinema was a big money maker. Despite various strikes and other turmoil, this resulted in the creation of a number of new studios. Toho was the biggest, designed just a Hollywood movie factory, complete with star grooming and a career track for technicians. Other studios, such as Daiei and Shochika, also pumped out a great deal of product.
Akira came up to directing during the war years, producing Japanese propaganda, although he was lucky enough to get discrete scripts. Having been a writer, he could restructure a story to meet his needs. His first few films were not terribly special, with only a few flashes of his later style. Mostly, it was a limited budget with lots of close ups. After the war, he was again pressed into duty to create propaganda, this time for the US. He did better; 'One Wonderful Sunday', for instance, is all about a broke couple finding happiness thinking about the future, very well done.
Working with Toshiro Mifune caused an immediate upswing in his movie quality. 'Drunken Angel' was Kurosawa's first masterpiece, containing a feral performance from Mifune as a sick yakuza, with a typically incredibly physical climax. When Mifune auditioned as an actor, no other director wanted to work with him. Kurosawa saw something that he could use, but Mifune wasn't a one-trick pony.
The next movie, 'The Quiet Duel', has Mifune playing a doctor who contracts syphilis but gives all the medicine to his patients. Coming home from the war, he breaks off his engagement to his fiancé like a saint, saying nothing about his sacrifice. Their next collaboration, 'Stray Dog'. is a great noir/police procedural, with Mifune a detective whose gun is stolen when he falls asleep exhausted on a bus. His determination to find it before anyone gets killed dominated the movie, as does Toshiro's stoic performance.
'Scandal' in 1950 is a minor piece, with Mifune an artist angry at the press for misunderstanding his relationship with a young woman. It is with 'Rashomon' that the Kurosawa/Mifune partnership becomes transcendent, creating one of the greatest films in world history. In fact, the word 'rashomon' has become synonymous with a story told from various viewpoints, each one different in detail. A thing of beauty and mystery, simply done yet endlessly complex, it won great acclaim overseas. Yet Japanese audiences saw it as just another motion picture.
Mifune became an in-demand actor, appearing in eight films the next year, sometimes reaching a dozen productions annually, often in highly billed cameos. Kurosawa nearly torpedoed his career with the next movie, the endless 'Idiot' that had originally been over four hours long. He rebounded with another masterpiece, 'Ikiru', this time without Mifune, instead using the perfectly cast Takashi Shimura as a nobody bureaucrat dying of cancer who decides to do something meaningful with his life before he dies.
'Seven Samurai' was another world-wide hit, beginning Kurosawa's obsession with super-productions outside the scope of traditional Japanese films. It was a small and largely isolated business; only so much profit would ever be returned, but Akira wanted to work at a scale more in line with Hollywood. The movie is a classic, perhaps the best of the Kurosawa/Mifune collaborations, but the studio wasn't happy about either the amount of money or time it took to complete. When most directors in Japan were finishing three or four films a year, Kurosawa took two years on 'Seven Samurai'.
Kurosawa never did a typical samurai film; each of his genre pictures subverted stereotypes of class and even gender in ways obvious to Japanese audiences but perhaps not to western ones. Consequently, they did respectable business but weren't huge successes. Mifune's career was made not from appearing in Akira's productions; his defining role in the 'Samurai' trilogy, three films made between 1954 and 1956, cemented his super stardom. They are archetypical films, the life story of Musashi Miyamoto, with plot, themes, and even shots used countless times since.
'The Samurai Trilogy' has the feel and texture of a glossy Hollywood production, especially 'Gone With the Wind'. What it lacks is any surprises or subversion of genre expectations. In the short term, that was exactly what Japanese audiences craved. The role made Toshiro; for the rest of his career, except in Kurosawa films, he would be playing either that part or against that part. He became the equivalent to John Wayne in the States, a dominating presence. The work load was staggering.
Between the second and third installments of 'The Samurai Trilogy', Mifune completely transformed himself into an unrecognizable 70 year old for Kurosawa's 'I Live in Fear'. This may be his most daring performance, a patriarch crazed by the threat of nuclear war, trying to get his family to move to Brazil, away from trouble. The family doesn't want to go, eventually succeeding in having the old man declared insane. The last shot of Mifune pacing in his cell, the sun glaring through the window like an atom bomb explosion as he paces like a trapped wild animal, is unforgettable.
Mifune's roles expanded to military leaders, romantic partners, and police inspectors. He resisted gangster pictures, a popular genre that morphed in yakuza films in the 1960s and 1970s, creating many excellent films as well as launching actors such as Sonny Chiba. Unlike fellow Kurosawa star Takashi Shimura, he also didn't become involved in the emerging monster genre as well. There was something dignified about Toshiro; he became the one actor so identified with the essence of Japanese character that he had to be careful with his roles outside the Kurosawa films.
The next collaboration was another super-production, an adaptation of Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' called 'Throne of Blood'. Another stone cold masterpiece, it has perhaps the most physical acting in Mifune's career, a contrast from the frozen expressions on his face, based on traditional Noh theater. Considering competition from Orson Welles and Roman Polanski while not being able to use the dialogue, it remains the best screen version. The ending, arrows flying dangerously close to Mifune as he looks more and more like a hedge hog, is classic.
'The Lower Depths', the next Kurosawa film, is not one of my favorites. Too much like a filmed stage play, too depressing, it is another European adaptation. The Japanese press and public had a problem with Kurosawa's perceived 'Western-ness'. Between the John Ford and Sergie Eisenstein visual references and frequent use of non-traditional story lines, Kurosawa was seen as pandering to foreigners. There were many other directors at the time who had greater reputations or more successful careers.
Add to that Akira's increasingly dictatorial attitude - he was called the 'Emperor', not an altogether affectionate nickname - and the studios were perpetually unhappy with Kurosawa's work. Not so Mifune, who kept pumping out ten movies to every collaboration with Akira. His most popular film, 'The Rickshaw Man' in 1958, has never been released in America. With 187 credits on IMDB, the vast percentage of his work is unknown outside of Japan. He remains to this day the single most popular Japanese actor in history.
'The Hidden Fortress' was the one film by Kurosawa that almost fits the mold of a traditional samurai picture. Really about the moral awakening of a spoiled princess, in mortal danger, protected by a stoic warrior played by Toshiro Mifune, it still manages a few gentle subversions, such as telling the tale through two lower class peasants. This was famously adapted into the first 'Star Wars' film. In truth, George Lucas did enough rewrites of the script to erase the obvious borrowing, coming up with something original in his space opera.
'The Bad Sleep Well' was the first time Kurosawa used an undisguised Mifune in a contemporary film in over a decade. It was worth the wait. The film is about corporate crime and guilt, with the buttoned-down Toshiro biding his time getting vengeance in the most personal way. There are many unflattering comments about the successful post-war Japan in this film, a grim masterpiece. I can't imagine that it was too successful at the box office with that kind of attitude.
In 1961, Mifune appeared in 'Animas Trujano', a Mexican film that garnered a Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. 'The Seven Samurai' was remade into a blockbuster American western, 'The Magnificent Seven.' It seemed that the rest of the world was taking notice of the fine work done by these two. The best was yet to come; 'Yojimbo', a movie that changed world cinema forever.
For once, Kurosawa delivered a popcorn movie, one that anyone can sit through, enjoyable, seemingly simple. That he created the anti-hero, Mifune playing the part to perfection, was the grand subversion that most people missed at the time. Yojimbo is as bad as the bad guys. It takes half of the film to realize that there is any good trait in the main character. He's smarter than anyone else, that much is obvious. It is his motivation for profit that makes him a new kind of hero.
It's well known how 'Yojimbo' was remade as a spaghetti Western by Sergio Leone, using a second string television actor, Clint Eastwood, becoming an unexpected world-wide phenomenon. Nearly every male lead since 'Yojimbo' has some of that anti-hero in his DNA. Every one of Mifune's grunts, scratches, and shrugs creates one of the screen's most copied characters. Every samurai film in Japan after had to have at least one character exactly like Yojimbo, often played by Toshiro himself.
Toho pressed Kurosawa to make a sequel, and he did, except that 'Sanjoro' manages to be the anti-Yojimbo. Akira wasn't going to make more of the same. Instead, all the simple violence of the first one was subverted by both comedy and a philosophy of less-violence-is-better. Watch Mifune being schooled by the elder woman in that film, taking her criticism to heart, trying to steer the nine pupils who dog his every step away from rash action, is sheer poetry. On first viewing, I didn't like this one. Now, I see it as the better movie of the two.
Mifune was more popular than ever, even appearing in a delightful Sinbad movie, 'Samurai Pirate.' A ten minute cameo in the three and a half hour 'Chushingura', one of the many retellings of the 47 Loyal Ronin, earned him the biggest spot on the poster. He was getting older now, playing the teacher instead of the student. "High and Low', a tense tale of blackmail and intrigue, was the next Kurosawa collaboration. It was another great film, exploring an Americanized Japan, the rift between rich and poor, and notions of honor.
The collaboration ruptured some time during the long production of 'Red Beard'. It was an intimate film about a novice doctor being mentored by an older and wiser Toshiro, but Kurosawa wanted to film it like a super production. A complete town was built that is barely seen in the finished movie. Mifune had to grow a beard, not shaving for a year, making it difficult to appear in other films. To the Japanese, Akira seemed selfish, too ambitious. For the financial model of cinema everywhere but in Hollywood, he was spending entirely too much time and money on any single film. They might be masterpieces, made for future generations to enjoy. In the short term, always the prime consideration of any corporation, they weren't a good return on investment.
Both Toho and Mifune had enough of 'the Emperor' after 1965. Kurosawa would wander fifteen years in the wilderness before making a return to the Japanese film industry. Even then, the financing still wasn't there. Instead, it came from Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, European investors. Mifune was starting his own film production company, trying in his own way to both compete with Kurosawa while providing product for the market. In Japan, television was starting to erode the cinema audience. The golden age of Japanese film was ending. Exploitation was entering the picture.
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