The Samurai Trilogy (Hiroshi Inagaki, 1954, 1955, 1956)

Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto

Toshiro Mifune in Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto

Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple

Kaoru Yachigusa in Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple

Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island

Toshiro Mifune and Koji Tsuruta in Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island

Musashi Miyamoto: Toshiro Mifune
Otsu: Kaoru Yachigusa
Kojiro Sasaki: Koji Tsuruta
Matahachi: Rentaro Mikuni
Takuan Osho: Kuroemon Onoe
Akemi: Mariko Okada
Oko: Mitsuko Mito
Osugi: Eiko Miyoshi
Sado Nakaoka: Takashi Shimura
Sasuke: Minoru Chiaki
Nikkan: Kokuten Kodo
Koetsu Hinami: Ko Mihashi
Toji Gion: Daisuke Kato
Shishido: Eijiro Tono

Director: Hiroshi Inagaki
Screenplay: Hiroshi Inagaki, Tokuhei Wakao
Based on a play by Hideji Hojo and a novel by Eiji Yoshikawa
Cinematography: Jun Yasumoto (I,II), Kazuo Yamada (III)
Art direction: Makoto Sono (I)
Production design: Kisaku Ito (II,III)
Film editing: Eiji Ooi (I,II), Koichi Iwashita (III)
Music: Ikuma Dan

Toshiro Mifune achieves a kind of gravitas that he never displays in the movies by Akira Kurosawa in which he played a samurai. That's because Hiroshi Inagaki's trilogy is a kind of cinematic Bildungsroman: the education of Musashi Miyamoto, a historic figure who served as a kind of bridge between the swordsmanship tradition of the Japanese warrior and the meditative tradition rooted in Zen Buddhism. It's a strongly planned trilogy where it comes to Miyamoto's development, and Mifune provides a solid center. But I found myself distracted by the Hollywoodizing of the story, especially the subplot involving Otsu, the woman who loves Miyamoto so much that she devotes her life to seeking him out. The argument goes that this romantic subplot represents one of the trials that Miyamoto must undergo before he can achieve the kind of wisdom that his spiritual mentors wish for him, but Otsu's doggedness struck me as heavy-handed and sentimental. Still, it's a fascinating and often spectacular trio of films, beautifully climaxing in the battle between Miyamoto and Kojiro Sasaki as the sun sets over the sea on whose verge they are dueling.

Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955)

Hideko Takamine in Floating Clouds

Yukiko Koda: Hideko Takamine
Kengo Tomioka: Masayuki Mori
Sei Mukai: Mariko Okada
Sugio Iba: Isao Yamagata
Kuniko Tomioka: Chieko Nakakita
Seikichi Mukai: Daisuke Kato

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Yoko Mizuki
Based on a novel by Fumiko Hayashi
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Production design: Satoru Chuko
Film editing: Eiji Ooi
Music: Ichiro Saito

Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds brings to mind some of Ernest Hemingway's stories about war-damaged lovers trying to make the best of a doomed relationship. Yukiko is a young woman returning to Tokyo after working in Japanese-occupied French Indochina as a secretary. There she had an affair with the bitter, cynical Kengo, an employee of the Japanese forest service who is married to the sickly Kuniko. Trying to make it on her own in postwar Japan, Yukiko finds that her secretarial skills are in little demand because she doesn't know English, a necessity under the American occupation. Desperate, she picks up an American soldier and becomes his mistress. Meanwhile, she also seeks out Kengo, and finds him trying to make a go of it in the lumber business, still married to Kuniko but unwilling to divorce her and marry Yukiko. So over the course of the film, these two deeply wounded people meet and part repeatedly, not only lacerating themselves but also hurting others with words and deeds. At the end, they have seemingly found a way to live together, partly by retreating from the world onto a remote Japanese island, but even that rapprochement is ill-fated. Naruse's film is an absorbing downer, gaining much of its energy from our suspense about what the protagonists will do to each other next, as well as a showcase for Hideko Takamine's marvelous performance. There are those who think it a masterpiece. 

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960)

Hideko Takamine and Daisuke Kato in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

Keiko Yashiro: Hideko Takamine 
Kenichi Komatsu: Tatsuya Nakadai 
Junko Inchihashi: Reiko Dan 
Nobuhiko Fujisaki: Masayuki Mori 
Matsukichi Sekine: Daisuke Kato 
Yuri: Keiko Awaji 
Goda: Ganjiro Nakamura 
Minobe: Eitaro Ozawa 
Tomoko: Chieko Nakakita 

Director: Mikio Naruse 
Screenplay: Ryuzo Kikushima 
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Production design: Satoru Chuko 
Film editing: Eiji Ooi 
Music : Toshiro Mayuzumi 

If I ran a revival house like the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto or the Castro in San Francisco, I'd like to program a series of double features of American and Japanese "women's pictures." It would give us a chance to compare not only directors like Douglas Sirk and Mikio Naruse but also the actresses most associated with the genre: Joan Crawford, Jane Wyman, and Lana Turner on the one hand; Kyoko Kagawa, Setsuko Hara, and Hideko Takamine on the other. Takamine is the woman who ascends the stairs in Naruse's film, only to hit something like a glass ceiling. She plays Keiko (at first a little confusingly, at least to Western audiences, called "Mama"), a Ginza bar hostess whose job it is to bring in paying customers, especially rich ones,who will while away their after-office hours flirting with her and the fleet of bar girls. She doesn't sleep with the customers -- even the younger women aren't expected to, but sometimes do -- and though she drinks with them, she doesn't particularly like alcohol. But Keiko is on the brink of turning 30, and when the bar starts losing customers to a younger hostess named Yuri, who has left Keiko's establishment to start her own, she begins to see what a dead-end she faces. She doesn't own the bar where she works, and the woman who does is beginning to blame her for losing customers and for not wearing flashier kimonos. She supports her mother and somewhat feckless brother, who has a son who needs an operation to correct a defect left by polio.She begins to hate climbing the stairs to the bar every night and the stress brings on a peptic ulcer, but she can see only three options for her life: Marry, become the mistress of a wealthy patron, or buy her own bar. Each of these opportunities presents itself during the course of the film, only to end in disappointment, and at the end she is climbing the stairs again. Takamine is marvelous, so expressive that we hardly need her voiceover narration to know what she's feeling and thinking, and she's well-supported by Reiko Dan as the younger, more carefree bar girl; Tatsuya Nakadai as the bar's handsome young business manager, who's in love with Keiko; Daisuke Kato as the chubby customer who proposes a marriage to Keiko that she accepts before learning that he's already married and a constant philanderer;and Masayuki Mori as the potential wealthy patron with whom, in a moment of drunken abandonment, she sleeps, only to learn the next morning that he's moving to Osaka.When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is a beautifully made account of problems specific to a time, a place, and a gender, yet universal in its depiction of the frustrations of the working life.