Gate of Hell (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1953)

Machiko Kyo in Gate of Hell

Morito Endo: Kazuo Hasegawa
Kesa: Machiko Kyo
Wataru Watanabe: Isao Yamagata
Shigemori: Yataro Kurokawa
Rokuro: Kotaro Bando
Kogenta: Jun Tazaki
Kiyomori: Koreya Senda

Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa
Screenplay: Teinosuke Kinugasa, Masaichi Nagata
Based on a play by Kan Kikuchi
Cinematography: Kohei Sugiyama
Production design: Hiroshi Ozawa
Film editing: Shigeo Nishida
Music: Yasushi Akutagawa

Can a movie be too stylish for its own good? As Pauline Kael says of Gate of Hell, "It's as if the director, Teinosuke Kinugasa, had read those critics who compare every Japanese movie to a Japanese print and had decided to give them more pictorial effects than they could handle -- delicately choreographed battles, the flow and texture of garments, and everywhere the grace of movement and composition." What gets lost in Gate of Hell is the simple dignity of its story about a wife who sacrifices herself for her husband's sake. The film won an Oscar* for costume design, one of those rare Academy Awards to go to a film not made in English, and it certainly deserved it. But when the eye is continually caught by the color and texture of surfaces, the film risks being superficial. Fortunately, the wife, Kesa, is played by the superb Machiko Kyo, who makes the character into more than a mannequin for exquisite robes.

*The award was presented to Sanzo Wada, whereas the credited costume design is Shima Yoshizane. I haven't been able to discover whether Sanzo Wada is the same person as the credited "color consultant" for the film, Mitsuzo Wada, but Sanzo was a noted designer and the author of the six-volume Dictionary of Color Combinations, so it seems likely.

Women of the Night (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1948)

Kinuyo Tanaka and Sanae Takasugi in Women of the Night

Fusako Owada: Kinuyo Tanaka
Natsuko Kimijima: Sanae Takasugi
Kumiko Owada: Tomie Tsunoda
Kenzo Kuriyama: Mitsuo Nagata

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a novel by Eijiro Hisaita
Cinematography: Kohei Sugiyama
Production design: Hiroshi Mizutani
Film editing: Tatsuko Sakane
Music: Hisato Osawa

Rougher and less polished than Kenji Mizoguchi's prewar films and the masterpieces -- The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff (1954) --  that would follow, Women of the Night is still one of his harshest and most unforgiving works, with several breathtakingly raw moments. It begins in the aftermath of the war, with Fusako struggling to get by: Her husband is still missing and their small child is dangerously ill. A woman to whom she tries to sell some spare items of clothing hints that her best option is to prostitute herself, an idea that she rejects in shock. She then learns that her husband has died, and the opening sequence ends with the sick child going into convulsions. There's a remarkable jump cut at this point, and we see Fusako somewhat better dressed and learn that the child has died, but she has gone to work for her husband's former boss, Kuriyama. By accident she also meets her sister, Natsuko, whom she has not seen since the war, when Natsuko and their parents were in Korea. Natsuko is working as a "dance hostess," and when Fusako introduces her to her teenage sister-in-law, Kumiko, the girl is taken with what sounds like a glamorous job. Fusako and Natsuko move in together, but Fusako has been cultivating a profitable illicit relationship with Kuriyama, and one day she arrives home early to find that Natsuko is also sleeping with him. Furious, Fusako finds the old woman who had suggested that she become a prostitute and takes her revenge on her sister and her boss by becoming a streetwalker. Meanwhile, Kumiko runs away from home and she, too, winds up prostituting herself. Eventually, the three women find one another and struggle to get out of the destructive cycle into which they have been drawn. The story is highlighted by a couple of remarkable scenes: In the first of them, the naive Kumiko encounters a street hustler who belongs to a gang of young thugs; after raping her, he sics the girls in the gang onto Kumiko, who strip her and then make her one of them. Later, Fusako discovers that Kumiko has become a prostitute, but when she tries to get the girl to an organization that tries to rehabilitate prostitutes she is set upon and severely beaten by a gang of streetwalkers who oppose the reformists. Mizoguchi stages these violent scenes with brutal clarity. Unfortunately, Women of the Night ends with a somewhat sentimental scene in the ruins of a church whose stained-glass window of the Madonna and child seem somehow to have escaped breakage. Even Mizoguchi later felt inclined to apologize for the film, particularly for what he felt was its dominant note of anger. But as a story about the predicament of women, it's still a fascinating postwar complement to his more finished 1936 films Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion.

Two Japanese Films

A Page of Madness (Kurutta ippêji), Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926

Eiko Minami in A Page of Madness

Servant: Masao Inoue
Servant's Daughter: Ayako Iijima
Servant's Wife: Yoshie Nakagawa
Young Man: Hiroshi Nemoto
Doctor: Misao Seki
Dancer: Eiko Minami

Director: Teinosuke Kunugasa
Screenplay: Yasunari Kawabata, Teinosuke Kinugasa, Minoru Inozuka, Banko Suwada
Based on a story by Yasunari Kawabata
Cinematography: Kohei Sugiyama
Art direction: Chiyo Ozaki

Once again, my thanks to Turner Classic Movies for programming this fascinating film. But this time I have to temper the thanks with a complaint about Ben Mankiewicz as host. Not only did he mispronounce the director's name (as "Kinagusa") but he also failed to give much substantial information about the film's content beyond noting that it was thought to have been lost until Kinugasa discovered it in 1971, and that the film's style was influenced by the German Expressionism of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), which preceded it on TCM. Given that the film plays without intertitles, it would have been helpful if Mankiewicz had indicated something of the film's storyline. Apparently, Japanese silent movies relied on benshi -- live narrators who told the story and sometimes supplied dialogue for the on-screen players. Watching A Page of Madness without such an aid is challenging, especially since the first portion of the film is largely composed of a montage of images that establish the atmosphere of the film and its setting, an insane asylum. Eventually I became aware that there was a central story about a janitor (Masao Inoue) in the asylum and his involvement with a particular female inmate (Yoshie Nakagawa) and a woman (Ayako Iijima) who visits the madhouse. But I had to turn to the Internet to learn that the woman is the janitor's wife and the visitor his daughter. However, much of the plot, based on a story by Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, remains enigmatic, subordinate to the power of the images supplied by cinematographer Kohei Sugiyama and art director Chiyo Ozaki. But it's still exciting to watch, not only for the bizarrely evocative camerawork but also for Kinugasa's direction, which includes a riot in the asylum. He is best known in the West for Gate of Hell (1953).

The Idiot (Hakuchi), Akira Kurosawa, 1951

Masayuki Mori and Setsuko Hara in The Idiot (Hakuchi)

Taeko Nara: Setsuko Hara
Kinji Kameda: Masayuki Mori
Denkichi Akama: Toshiro Mifune
Ayako: Yoshiko Kuga
Ono: Takashi Shimura
Satoko: Chieko Higashiyama

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita, Akira Kurosawa
Based on a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Cinematography: Toshio Ubukata
Production design: Takashi Matsuyama

I read Dostoevsky's The Idiot a few months ago, so I was glad when Turner Classic Movies programmed Akira Kurosawa's film based on the novel. It's prime early Kurosawa, made in the year after Rashomon and the year before Ikiru, with the stars of the former, Masayuki Mori and Toshiro Mifune, in the respective roles of Kameda (the novel's Prince Myshkin) and Akama (the novel's Rogozhin). And Takashi Shimura, the star of Ikiru, has the key role of Ono, the novel's General Yepanchin. Setsuko Hara, best known for her work with Yasujiro Ozu, is the "kept woman" Taeko Nasu, the novel's Nastassya Filippovna. So it's something of an all-star affair, originally designed as a two-parter. After a flop opening, the studio forced Kurosawa to cut it from its original run time of 256 minutes to the extant 166-minute version. It became something of a brilliant ruin in the process. As a recent reader of the novel, I appreciate the faithfulness with which Kurosawa stuck to Dostoevsky, while adapting the 19th-century Russian characters and setting to postwar Japan. Mori is, I think, an almost ideal Kameda/Myshkin. The raw edges from the cutting of the film show, however -- it's hard to follow the logic of some the characters' actions, and the presence of the mob that shows up with Rogozhin at one key point in the story goes unexplained in the film. The complex relationship among Takeda, Taeko, and Ono's daughter Ayako (the novel's Aglaya Ivanovna) becomes reduced to a kind of love triangle. But there are few sequences in Kurosawa as haunting as the candlelight vigil Kameda and Akama keep over the body of Taeko at the film's end.