The Living Magaroku (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1943)

Toshio Hosokawa and Ken Uehara in The Living Magoroku

Sagara Kiyomatsu: Ken Uehara
Sakabe Katsusuke: Toshio Hosokawa
Yoshihiro Onagi: Yasumi Hara
Makoto Onagi: Kurumi Yamabato
Mrs. Onagi: Mitsuko Yoshikawa

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Osamu Motoki

There must have been Japanese movies of the 1940s that were as vicious about the American enemy as our war movies were about the Japanese, that had lines as callous as "Fried Jap coming down!" when a fighter pilot gets shot down in Howard Hawks's Air Force (1943), but we don't see them today. Instead we see the wartime work of directors like Keisuke Kinoshita and Akira Kurosawa, whose films seem surprisingly softcore in comparison with America's wartime movies. Sometimes in The Living Magoroku I think that Kinoshita is pulling a fast one on the military censors. This is a movie designed to support the war effort by encouraging people to forsake tradition and do things previously taboo like plant crops on sacred ground, but that's the least interesting plot thread. Instead, Kinoshita is always directing our attention elsewhere: to the psychosomatic illness of Yoshihiro, or to the young couple whose plans to marry are thwarted by convention, or even to the mystique of ancient swords. Granted, that last plot element has propaganda purposes -- Sagara wants his sword to kill 20 or 30 "American weaklings" -- but its the craftsmanship of swordmaking that gets most of the attention. The result is a war movie that's less bloodthirsty than heartwarming, as Yoshihiro finds his manhood, the couple gets the go-ahead to marry, and Sakabe not only gets a sword that will restore his honor after he carelessly sold the family heirloom but also gets the hand in marriage of Makoto. The ending, with the farmers breaking ground in the previously hallowed Onagi fields, is more like a Soviet propaganda movie about collective farming than like a war-effort flag-waver. Even Kurosawa's The Most Beautiful (1944) was about building war machinery, not about planting crops to feed people.

Himiko (Masahiro Shinoda, 1974)

Masao Kusakari and Shima Iwashita in Himiko

Himiko: Shima Iwashita
Takehiko: Masao Kusakari
Adahime: Rie Yokoyama
Mimaki: Choichiro Kawarasaki
Ikume: Kenzo Kawarasaki
Ohkimi: Yoshi Kato
Nashime: Rentaro Mikuni

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Masahiro Shinoda, Taeko Tomioka
Cinematography: Tatsuo Suzuki
Art direction: Kiyoshi Awazu
Film editing: Sachiko Jamaji
Music: Toru Takemitsu

The observation I made about Masahiro Shinoda's The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan (1970) is equally applicable to his Himiko: I was "culturally ill-equipped" for watching it. The film is based on a legendary or at least semi-historical figure, a queen and shaman who supposedly ruled part of Japan in the third century C.E. In the film, she's treated as a spokeswoman for the Sun God, whose followers sometimes clash with the followers of the Land God and the Mountain God. A young man, Takehiko, who has traveled widely among these other people, enters Himiko's realm. The two fall in love, even though he's really her half-brother. Himiko's task is to deliver the words of the Sun God, but day-to-day business of the realm is handled by a king, Ohkimi, and when Himiko, following the advice of Takehiko, proclaims that the Sun God wants peace with the Land God and the Mountain God, Ohkimi protests. After Ohkimi is assassinated by Nashime, a servant of Himiko's, there's a power struggle involving two brothers, Mimaki and Ikume; Ohkimi has designated Mimaki as his successor. Meanwhile, Takehiko is seduced by Adahime, one of Himiko's acolytes, and when the queen hears of it, she banishes him. Mimaki declares war on the peoples of the Land God and the Mountain God, leading to the deaths of almost all concerned. It's all a tangle, though in many ways a familiar one -- prophecies, power struggles, and wars are universal. What sets the film apart is Shinoda's staging, which alternates between some spectacular natural landscapes -- mountains, forests, and waterfalls -- and stylized interiors. I found the design of the latter a bit too stylized: They look a lot like the interiors of a modern convention center or office building, and the bright and unsubtle way they're lighted doesn't minimize that effect. The acting, too, is stylized, imitating traditional Japanese drama, which makes some of the exposition and declamation too stiff and mannered for my tastes. But there are compensations, such as the fascinating treatment of the followers of the Mountain God, who paint their bodies white, wear tattered garments, and never stand up straight but crouch and creep with an eerie, uncanny effect. The score by Toru Takemitsu is also effectively unearthly.

The Warped Ones (Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1960)

Tamio Kawaji in The Warped Ones

Akira: Tamio Kawaji
Yuki: Yuko Chiyo
Masaru: Eiji Go
Kashiwagi: Hiroyuki Nagato
Fumiko: Noriko Matsumoto
Shinji Kumaki: Kojiro Kusanagi
Gill: Chico Roland
Yuki's Mother: Chigusa Takayama
Neighbor: Reiko Arai
Woman in Atelier: Yoko Kosono

Director: Koreyoshi Kurahara
Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada
Cinematography: Yoshio Mamiya
Production design: Kazuhiko Chiba
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

The TCM programmer who scheduled Koreyoshi Kurahara's The Warped Ones right after Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997) evidently has a dark sense of humor. Both are fine examples of movies about people doing bad things and getting away with it. Funny Games ends with its mass murderer smirking at the camera, and while the bad-boy protagonist of The Warped Ones doesn't get away with murder, since as far as we know he hasn't committed one, he does get away with rape, theft, and assault. The film ends with Akira and his prostitute friend, Fumiko, laughing it up at an abortion clinic, amused that they are there with the virtuous Kashiwagi and Yuki because the former has impregnated Fumiko and the latter is pregnant with Akira's child. The Warped Ones belongs to a genre known as taiyozoku, or "Sun Tribe" films, portrayals of the undisciplined youth of postwar Japan. Among them are movies like Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit (1956) and three released the same year as The Warped Ones, Nagisa Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun's Burial and Masahiro Shinoda's Youth in Fury. But even hard-edged directors like Oshima and Shinoda couldn't resist putting a moral spin on their portraits of wayward youth. Kurahara could, and The Warped Ones is all the more fascinating for its willingness to see the world the way Akira sees it. Tamio Kawaji gives an amazing over-the-top performance in the role, never quite standing still for a moment. He doesn't walk, he dances, prances, skips, and contorts, and Yoshio Mamiya's camera swirls and jogs along with him, ever restless, ever kinetic. Even in closeups his face is constantly in motion, often with a cigarette stuck between his lip and teeth or in the corner of his mouth. He is the embodiment of a certain kind of existential freedom, so self-centered that he refuses, unlike his friend, Masaru, to join a gang that might multiply his opportunities for mayhem. The only thing on Earth to which he pays obeisance is jazz, provided by Toshiro Mayuzumi's score. But even without punishing Akira for his considerable crimes, the film manages to make the point that he's no role model. Instead, he's an object lesson in the impossibility of achieving pure freedom.   

Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997)

Arno Frisch in Funny Games 

Anna: Susanne Lothar
George: Ulrich Mühe
Paul: Arno Frisch
Peter: Frank Giering
Schorschi: Stefan Clapczynski
Gerda: Doris Kunstmann
Fred: Christoph Bantzer
Robert: Wolfgang Glück
Gerda's Sister: Susanne Meneghel
Eva: Monika Zallinger

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Cinematography: Jürgen Jürges
Production design: Christoph Kanter
Film editing: Andreas Prochaska

Funny Games is Michael Haneke's cold and nasty take on the horror-thriller genre, particularly the home-invasion subgenre in which a psychopath traps a family in their home and torments them. The locus classicus of the genre is probably Cape Fear, in both the original film by J. Lee Thompson in 1962 and the 1991 remake by Martin Scorsese, although there have been plenty of other movies designed to needle our complacent sense that we're safe at home. Haneke's version is effective in that regard, although he takes the suspense a step further by making us complicit in the torture: Paul, the more dominant of the two young psychopaths in the film, breaks the fourth wall to wink and smirk and even talk at us as we watch his plans unfold. At one point, he says to us, referring to the family he's tormenting, "You're on their side, aren't you?" And at the point where, as in a conventional horror-thriller, the family seems to have turned the tables on their captors, he comments, "We're not up to feature film length yet," meaning that the plot must have a few twists to go. And finally, he shows us that we are among his captives: When Anna suddenly grabs the rifle and blows away Peter, the other tormenter, Paul grabs a video remote and rewinds the scene, then gains the upper hand again, leaving the family (and us) at his mercy. In sum, this is a nihilistic film, which Haneke designed to rub our noses in our prurience where violence is concerned. He wanted to film it in the United States, as a kind of statement about American violence, but was forced to make it in Austria. But after the film succeeded and Haneke had built his international career, he was able to remake Funny Games with an English-speaking cast in 2007. More on that version later.

La Main du Diable (Maurice Tourneur, 1943)

Pierre Fresnay in La Main du Diable

Roland Brissot: Pierre Fresnay
Irène: Josseline Gaël
Mélisse: Noël Roquevert
Gibelin: Guillaume de Sax
The Little Man: Palau
Angel: Pierre Larquey
The Diner: André Gabriello
Denis: Antoine Balpêtré
Mme. Denis: Marcelle Rexiane
The Colonel: André Varennes
Duval: Georges Chamarat
The Musketeer: Jean Davy
The Boxer: Jean Despreaux
Maximus Léo: André Bacqué
The Fortune Teller: Gabrielle Fontan

Director: Maurice Tourneur
Screenplay: Jean-Paul Le Chanois
Based on a novel by Gérard de Nerval
Cinematography: Armand Thirard
Production design: Andrej Andrejew
Film editing: Christian Gaudin
Music: Roger Dumas

Maurice Tourneur's son, Jacques Tourneur, is better-known in the United States today because of his work for producer Val Lewton on arty horror films like Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943), as well as the quintessential film noir Out of the Past (1947). Maurice had been a mainstay Hollywood director in the silent era -- director Clarence Brown named him as one of his mentors -- but grew impatient with studio interference and returned to France just as sound was coming in. As a result, La Main du Diable (released in the States as Carnival of Sinners) is probably his best-known film on this side of the Atlantic. It shares with his son's films a stylish approach to horror filmmaking, in which creating a mood takes precedence over shocking the audience. Based on a story by Gérard de Nerval, La Main du Diable is about a struggling artist, Roland Brissot, who buys a talisman, a severed hand in a casket, from a chef, paying only a penny for it. The chef claims that it has made him a success, but that it must be sold again, at less than the price Brissot paid him for it, before the artist dies. Otherwise his soul will be lost forever. Brissot's career takes off, making him rich, and he marries his model, Irène, who had hitherto spurned him. But he soon finds that he's being stalked by a little man in black, the devil himself, who makes it clear that the talisman is the real thing and offers to buy it back from Brissot, who is unable to sell it because there's no coin smaller than the penny he had paid. The artist, enjoying his celebrity and wealth, turns him down, but is then informed that since the buyback offer has been made, the price will double each day. Soon the price has mounted into the millions and Brissot begins to panic, looking for a way to get rid of the hand. He then learns the lineage of the hand, which began several centuries ago with a deal made by a monk named Maximus Léo -- which is also the name Brissot, under the spell of the hand, has been signing to his paintings. If Brissot can reunite the hand with the monk's body, then the deal can be broken. All of this is told in flashback to a crowd at the inn in the French Alps to which Brissot has traveled, the little man in black pursuing him, trying to find the tomb of Maximus Léo. There's not really much horror on display in La Main du Diable, but the film is full of striking visuals, the work of production designer Andrej Andrejew and cinematographer Armand Thirard, and Tourneur directs a capable and colorful cast headed by Pierre Fresnay as Brissot. Since the film was made in occupied France, there are those who think it's a subversive allegory about the price exacted from the French in capitulating to the Nazis.

Jubilation Street (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1944)

Mitsuko Mito, Chiyo Nobu, and Eijiro Tono in Jubilation Street 

Shingo Furukawa: Ken Uehara
Takako: Mitsuko Mito
Kiyo Furukawa: Chiyo Nobu
Shingo's Father: Eijiro Tono
Bathhouse Owner: Makoto Kobori
Bathhouse Owner's Wife: Choko Iida

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Kaoru Morimoto
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda

There's a kind of quiet desperation in the patriotism on display in Keisuke Kinoshita's Jubilation Street. Kinoshita could not have ignored the censors' demands for the flag-waving ending and the vows to revenge the death of one of the central characters, but maybe it's only postwar hindsight that makes me feel that his heart wasn't in it. Or maybe he was more interested in his characters than in manipulating them to serve the war effort. The titular street is condemned to be torn up by the military for unspecified wartime purposes, but the longtime residents are at first not thrilled by being dislocated to serve their country. The film depicts their struggle to hold on as long as they can, some out of stubbornness, like the bathhouse owner who doesn't want to leave a place where he has run his business for so long -- though he has to admit, when someone reminds him, that he won't have any customers after all the other neighbors leave. And some, like Kiyo Furukawa, want to remain for more deeply personal reasons: She's afraid that if the husband who left her and their son, Shingo, so many years ago suddenly decides to return he won't be able to find them. Shingo is already doing his part in the war as a test pilot, but he has also fallen in love with the pretty Takako, whose family wants her to enter into an arranged marriage. They are afraid that separation will prove fatal to their love. The plot then takes a predictable turn: Shingo's father returns, though Kiyo has misgivings about resuming their marriage when she learns how many varied jobs he has held over the years, an indicator that the instability that caused him to leave is still a problem. But then an event -- one that most filmgoers will have predicted on their own -- alters everything. Good performances aren't enough to lift this early Kinoshita film above routine, but the director's characteristic humanity (and equally characteristic sentimentality) gives it a warmth that even the ham-fisted propaganda can't quite obliterate.

Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003)

Nicole Kidman and Zeljko Ivanek in Dogville

Narrator: John Hurt
Grace Margaret Mulligan: Nicole Kidman
Tom Edison: Paul Bettany
Gloria: Harriet Andersson
Ma Ginger: Lauren Bacall
Mrs. Henson: Blair Brown
The Big Man: James Caan
Vera: Patricia Clarkson
Bill Henson: Jeremy Davies
James McKay: Ben Gazzara
Tom Edison Sr.: Philip Baker Hall
Ben: Zeljko Ivanek
Olivia: Cleo King
Liz Henson: Chloë Sevigny
Chuck: Stellan Skarsgård

Director: Lars von Trier
Screenplay: Lars von Trier
Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle
Production design: Peter Grant
Film editing: Molly Malene Stensgaard

Lars von Trier's Dogville has weathered an initial critical reaction that dismissed it as "Our Town on downers" to become among his most admired films. But that may be in part because von Trier's life and works have been the focus of so much intense controversy since the film was made, so that Dogville looks like a relatively stable and focused work, especially in comparison with Antichrist (2009), which provoked walkouts at Cannes, and Nymphomaniac (2013), his sexually explicit epic-length film. Von Trier has also been plunged into controversy after joking in an interview that he was a Nazi -- he later apologized and said he was drunk when he made the comment -- and by charges of sexual harassment during the making of his films. He has become something of a latter-day poète maudit, whose defenders are as passionate as his detractors. But Dogville, though overlong and perhaps too show-offily "experimental" in its minimalism, tells a strong story with the help of some gifted performers, particularly Nicole Kidman, who gives one of the best performances of a remarkable career in the role of Grace, the gangster's daughter who winds up being abused by and then destroying the titular town. Some of the criticism initially directed at Dogville centered on its supposed "anti-Americanism," which seems to me wrong-headed. Is the barely masked greed and hypocrisy of Dogville's inhabitants indigenous to America? Is its portrayal of the dark side of frontier village life any more an indictment of America than that of the town of Presbyterian Church in Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), a film that I've never heard called anti-American? And anyway, there's nothing more American than the freedom and willingness to criticize America. Why not extend that freedom to Danish filmmakers, too?