Golden Eyes (Jun Fukuda, 1968)

Akira Takarada in Golden Eyes

Cast: Akira Takarada, Beverly Maeda, Tomomi Sawa, Makoto Sato, Andrew Hughes, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Nadao Kirino, Sachio Sakai, Toru Ibuku, Seishiro Kuno, Mari Sakurai. Screenplay: Jun Fukuda, Ei Ogawa, Michio Tsuzuki. Cinematography: Kazuo Yamada. Production design: Shigekazu Ikuno. Film editing: Ryohei Fujii. Music: Masaru Sato.

Golden Eyes -- not to be confused with the real James Bond pic GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, 1995) -- is a followup to Jun Fukada's 1965 Bond spoof Ironfinger. It's just as goofy but a little more slickly made than the first film. It also stars Akira Takarada as the Franco-Japanese spy Andrew Hoshino, who may or may not be an Interpol agent, and who seems to be devoted to his mother -- although this time he gets called on that when someone suggests that "Mom" is a code word or even an acronym for some mysterious agency. The action moves from Beirut to Japan and involves some jaw-droppingly improbable setups like a man impaled on a hook dangling from a helicopter, a group of assassins dressed like nannies pushing perambulators along a desert cliff, and a crate of Champagne used as an assault weapon. There are two pseudo-Bond Babes in this one, a knife-throwing hit-woman (Beverly Maeda) who turns out to be the heroine and a ditzy singer (Tomomi Sawa) who gets an extended take in which she sings a nonsense pop song. There's also a climactic shootout between Hoshino and a blind millionaire called Stonefeller (Andrew Hughes), who "sees" his target by means of a rifle fitted out with a directional microphone. No, really. Someone else made all of this up. It wasn't me.

Ironfinger (Jun Fukuda, 1965)

Mie Hama and Akira Takarada in Ironfinger

Cast: Akira Takarada, Mie Hama, Ichiro Arishima, Jun Tatara, Akihiko Hirata, Sachio Sakai, Susumo Kurobe, Toru Ibuki, Chotaro Togin, Naoya Kusakawa, Koji Iwamoto, Mike Daneen. Screenplay: Michio Tsuzuki, Kihachi Okamoto. Cinematography: Shinsaku Uno. Production design: Kazuo Ogawa. Film editing: Ryohei Fujii, Yoshitami Kuroiwa. Music: Masaru Sato.

Ironfinger is a wacky and somewhat cheesy Japanese entry into the subgenre of James Bond spoofs that swept through movies internationally in the 1960s, attracting not only American and British filmmakers but also Frenchmen like Philippe de Broca (That Man From Rio, 1964) and even Jean-Luc Godard (Alphaville, 1965). Which may be why the pseudo-Bond of Ironfinger is part French. He calls himself Andrew Hoshino -- though it's not exactly clear that that's his name -- and is played a little more broadly than is necessary by Akira Takarada, a veteran not only of films by Yasujiro Ozu (The End of Summer, 1961) and Mikio Naruse (A Woman's Life, 1963) but also of numerous Godzilla movies, starting with Ishiro Honda's original Gojira in 1954. His leading lady, Mie Hama, made her own appearance in the real James Bond series in You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert, 1967), playing Kissy Suzuki to Sean Connery's Bond. Ironfinger isn't unwatchable: There are some good gags, but also some bad ones. The climactic action sequence, in which the good guys foil the bad guys by tossing lighted matches into oil drums, which then explode into an impossible cascade of drums coming from every corner, is flat-out ridiculous. Still, if you can put up with some tacky pop songs and a needlessly complicated plot, Ironfinger is a tolerably amusing period artifact and only 93 minutes long.

Hunter in the Dark (Hideo Gosha, 1979)

Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Yoshio Harada, Shin'ichi Chiba, Ayumi Ishida, Keiko Kishi, Ai Kanzaki, Kayo Matsuo, Tetsuro Tanba. Screenplay: Hideo Gosha, based on a novel by Shotaro Ikenami. Cinematography: Tadashi Sakai. Film editing: Michio Suwa. Music: Masaru Sato.

Colorful but rather confusing film about an 18th-century Japanese crime lord, played by Tatsuya Nakadai, who hires a one-eyed bodyguard with amnesia, played by Yoshio Harada. Violent confrontations ensue.

Tracked (Hideo Gosha, 1985)

Tracked (Hideo Gosha, 1985)

Cast: Ken Ogata, Atsuko Asano, Takuzo Kawatani, Kazuyo Asari, Mariko Fuji, Junko Miyashita, Kon Omura. Screenplay: Motomu Furuta, based on a novel by Bo Nishimura. Cinematography: Fujio Morita. Art direction: Yoshinobu Nishioka. Film editing: Isamu Ichida. Music: Masaru Sato.

I Live in Fear (Akira Kurosawa, 1955)

Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura in I Live in Fear

Kiichi Nakajima: Toshiro Mifune
Dr. Harada: Takashi Shimura
Jiro Nakajima: Minoru Chiaki
Toyo Nakajima: Eiko Miyoshi
Sue Nakajima: Kyoko Aoyama
Yoshi Nakajima: Haruko Togo
Kimie Nakajima: Noriko Sengoku
Asako Kuribayashi: Akemi Negishi
Ryoichi Sayama: Hiroshi Tachikawa
Old Man From Brazil: Eijiro Tono

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Shinobu Hashimoto, Fumio Hayasaka, Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Music: Masaru Sato, Fumio Hayasaka

In some ways, I wish Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura had swapped roles in Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear. It would have been an easy exchange: Mifune, at 35, would have fit into the role of the dentist trying to mediate between a cranky patriarch and his family, and the 50-year-old Shimura could well have played the patriarch, a man a couple of decades his senior. Instead, we get distracted away from the story -- and the message it is somewhat heavy-handedly trying to convey -- by the fact that Mifune, the vital young actor from Rashomon (1950) and Seven Samurai (1954), films that made him an international star, is playing a man twice his age -- a tour de force not only of acting but also of costuming and makeup. This is not to say that Mifune doesn't do a fine job of it, slumping his body into an elderly arthritic crouch, peering through thick glasses with his face set in a perpetual scowl. It's true that Mifune brings a necessary virility to the role of Kiichi Nakajima, who has produced a large and recalcitrant group of offspring, including not only his legal family but also children from at least three mistresses. They come together to protest Nakajima's decision to sell everything and move to Brazil, where he thinks they will be safest from the nuclear holocaust that he believes to be imminent. Shimura's Dr. Harada, who has volunteered to serve on an arbitration panel for family court, is tasked with deciding on the family's claim that Nakajima is mentally incompetent. The problem with the film is not only that Mifune's performance seems like a misstep in casting, but also that the theme of the film is too large for the domestic melodrama of the story to carry. It asks whether Nakajima is insane for being so obsessed with the Bomb, or are we insane for not being more obsessed with it? During the postwar occupation Japanese filmmakers had been prohibited from even mentioning the atomic bomb, but when they were finally freed to deal with what had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki they found, as filmmakers from other countries have also done, that the topic tends to overwhelm attempts to put it in dramatic form. I Live in Fear is an honorable attempt, and the scenes in which Nakajima fights with his family are well-written and -acted. But the dramatic resolution feels freighted with too much striving for symbolic resonance: Harada visits Nakajima at the rather grim mental institution to which he has been committed and which Nakajima thinks is another planet, and when the sun shines through his barred window, he takes it to be the Earth on fire. To date, only the satirists have been able to give a dramatic shape to our nuclear madness.

Crazed Fruit (Ko Nakahira, 1956)

Yujiro Ishihara, Mie Kitahara, and Masahiko Tsugawa in Crazed Fruit 

Natsuhisa: Yujiro Ishihara
Haruji: Masahiko Tsugawa
Eri: Mie Kitahara
Frank: Masumi Okada
Eri's Husband: Harold Conway

Director: Ko Nakahira
Screenplay: Shintaro Ishihara
Based on a novel by Shintaro Ishihara
Cinematography: Shigeyoshi Mine
Art direction: Takashi Matsuyama
Film editing: Masanori Tsuji
Music: Masaru Sato, Toru Takemitsu

The eternal triangle, this time involving two brothers, Natsuhisa and Haruji, and a young woman, Eri. Crazed Fruit is somewhat of a landmark movie in Japanese film history, part of a genre known as taiyozoku or "Sun Tribe" movies, featuring the idle, affluent postwar Japanese youth. Every culture had its rebels without a cause in the 1950s, and the Japanese older generation was as scandalized (and titillated) by them as the rest. Crazed Fruit was singled out as more scandalous than most, partly because it seems to relish the erotic energy of the young without condemning it. The focal point of the film is the younger brother, Haruji, who becomes infatuated with a pretty young woman he sees in a train station, and becomes involved with her after he meets her again while out in a motorboat -- she has swum much farther out from shore than is usual, and he gives her a ride back. Her name is Eri, and she mysteriously keeps him away from the place she lives, agreeing to meet him elsewhere. She is taken with Haruji's innocence and shyness -- for a long time they stop short of having sex -- in part because he reminds her of her own lost innocence. She is married to a wealthy middle-aged American businessman, a fact she keeps from him, but which the older brother, Natsuhisa, learns and uses to blackmail her into having an affair with him. Haruji's learning the truth leads to a cataclysmic ending, of course. The material is handled with a good deal of sophistication that somewhat mitigates its exploitative qualities. The film made its young leads into big stars: After outgrowing his rebellious youth persona, Masahiko Tsugawa became a leading man and then a familiar character actor, while Yujiro Ishihara (the screenwriter's young brother) and Mie Kitahara married and became frequent costars -- the TCM commentary on the film calls them "the Bogart and Bacall of Japan."

The Hidden Fortress (Akira Kurosawa, 1958)

Katamari Fujiwara, Minoru Chiaki, Misa Uehara, and Toshiro Mifune in The Hidden Fortress

Gen. Rokurota Makabe: Toshiro Mifune
Tahei: Minoru Chiaki
Matashichi: Katamari Fujiwara
Princess Yuki: Misa Uehara
Gen. Hyoe Tadokoro: Susumu Fujita
Gen. Izumi Nagakura: Takashi Shimura
Lady in Waiting: Eiko Miyoshi
Farmer's daughter: Toshiko Higuchi

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto
Cinematography: Kazuo Yamazaki
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Film editing: Akira Kurosawa
Music: Masaru Sato

There's a kind of boyish glee in even the title, The Hidden Fortress, promising secrets and surprises. This rousing, entertaining, and, yes, occasionally silly adventure story is remembered most today for inspiring George Lucas on the first Star Wars film, which is now clunkily known as Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope (1977). From Akira Kurosawa's film Lucas borrowed the spunky rebel princess and the fretful, quarreling sidekicks, and renamed them Leia, C3PO, and R2D2, but more importantly he borrowed the insouciance, the delight in cinematic action. For once, Toshiro Mifune's bravado doesn't steal as many scenes as it usually does, thanks largely to Kurosawa's employment of the disgruntled foot-soldiers Tahei and Mataschichi, whose cynicism, venality, and outright greed serve as foils for the heroics of Mifune's Gen. Rokurota. Like the first Star Wars, The Hidden Fortress never rises to the level of serious thought -- in fact, it's more straightforward fun than the Lucas oeuvre: There's no mysterious Force to suggest spiritual overtones and to weigh down the adventure with mythmaking.

The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan (Masahiro Shinoda, 1970)

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan

Naojiro Kataoka: Tatsuya Nakadai
Michitose: Shima Iwashita
Soshun Kochiyama: Tetsuro Tanba
Ushimatsu: Shoichi Ozawa
Moritaya Seizo: Fumio Watanabe
Okuna, Naojiro's Mother: Suisen Ichikawa
Kaneko Ichinojo: Masakane Yonekura
Kanoke-boshi: Jun Hamamura

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Shuji Terayama
Based on a play by Mokuami Kawatake
Cinematography: Kozo Okazaki
Art direction: Shigemasa Toda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Masaru Sato

I think I was culturally ill-equipped for The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan, a wittily stylized film that presupposes an acquaintance with Japanese history and culture that I don't possess. From my own culture, I bring a knowledge of 18th-century portrayals of London lowlife, such as the pictures of Hogarth and the satire in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Buraikan has echoes for me of those, as well as, in its portrayal of the puritanical reformer's zeal, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. But for much of the film I felt at sea.

Sanjuro (Akira Kurosawa, 1962)

Toshiro Mifune, Takako Irie, and Reiko Dan in Sanjuro

Sanjuro: Toshiro Mifune
Hanbei Muroto: Tatsuya Nakadai
The Spy: Keiju Kobayashi
Iori Izaka: Yuzo Kayama
Chidori: Reiko Dan
Kurofuji: Takashi Shimura
Takebayashi: Kamatari Fujiwara
Mutsuta's Wife: Takako Irie
Kikui: Masao Shimizu
Mutsuta: Yunosuke Ito

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Akira Kurosawa
Based on a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto
Cinematography: Fukuzo Koizumi, Takao Saito
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Music: Masaru Soto

Akira Kurosawa's tongue-in-cheek Sanjuro is not so much a sendup of samurai films as it is an effort to carry a genre to its logical and sometimes absurd extremes, the way the James Bond movies took spy films to a point of exciting but improbable and often comic point of no return. It reaches its peak in the final combat between Sanjuro and Hanbei, with an explosion of gore (produced by a pressurized hose that nearly knocked actor Tatsuya Nakadai off his feet) that's surprising and shocking but also very funny once you put it in the context of the usual bloodless deaths of samurai films. But Kurosawa has made us aware of the just-a-movie unreality of Sanjuro's action throughout, with his careful arrangements of the nine samurai under the spell of the sloppy ronin who calls himself "Sanjuro Tsubaki," which means something like "30-year-old camellia," a name he makes up on the spot. The not-so-magnificent nine are always grouping themselves for the camera, either in little triple triads or in chains that fill the widescreen. Their arrangements come to annoy Sanjuro so much that once, when they're trying to sneak up on someone, he tells them not to move in single file behind him: "We look like a centipede!" In addition to Mifune's irresistible scene-stealing, there's a delightful comic performance by Takako Irie as Mutsuta's wife, dithery and concerned with propriety, but also with a fund of commonsense that Sanjuro wisely heeds. Tatsuya Nakadai is wasted as the villain who's the only plausible challenger to the hero -- a kind of Basil Rathbone to Mifune's Errol Flynn -- a role that otherwise doesn't give Nakadai much to do but glare at the fools he's allied with.

The Sword of Doom (Kihachi Okamoto, 1966)

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Sword of Doom

Ryunosuke Tsukue: Tatsuya Nakadai
Ohama: Michiyo Aratama
Hyoma Utsuki: Yuzo Kayama
Omatsu: Yoko Naito
Taranosuke Shimada: Toshiro Mifune
Shichibei: Ko Nishimura
Bunnojo Utsuki: Ichiro Nakaya
Kamo Serizawa: Kei Sato
Isami Kondo: Tadao Nakamura

Director: Kihachi Okamoto
Screenplay: Shinobu Hashimoto
Based on a novel by Kaizan Nakazoto
Cinematography: Hiroshi Murai
Art direction: Takashi Matsuyama
Film editing: Yoshitami Kuroiwa
Music: Masaru Sato

One of the joys of my pilgrimage through film history has been the discovery of great actors who aren't exactly household names in the United States. One of the best of them is Tatsuya Nakadai, who threw himself into roles with such commitment that it's almost a surprise to realize that he's still alive: He's 84 and still making movies. Even with the presence of the charismatic -- and, in the West, better-known -- Toshiro Mifune in the cast, Nakadai carries The Sword of Doom on his considerable shoulders, playing Ryunosuke, a psychotic samurai, with frightening conviction. In his first appearance, his face is partly hidden by the latticework of a hat, but his eyes burn brightly through the shadowing. He calmly murders an old man whose granddaughter has gone to fetch water. Granted, the old man is praying for death, but an easy one, not the blow of the titular sword. By the end of the film the madness that glitters in Ryunosuke's eyes has been responsible for countless deaths, and it flares up in a cataclysmic ending in which he slashes out at the ghosts he sees behind the bamboo shades of a brothel and eventually at the assassins who come for him. Nakadai does something extraordinary with his body in this final sequence: As Ryunosuke's mind comes unhinged, so does his body, killing in a kind of Totentanz that looks spasmodic but never loses its lethal precision. And there the film ends, on a freeze frame of Nakadai's face and its glittering eyes. The Sword of Doom was meant to have sequels, but they were never made. Yet although we never learn what happens to several other characters whose subplots have centered on Ryunosuke, or indeed whether he survived this orgy of blood, it doesn't really matter much. It's almost enough to have watched Nakadai in performance. 

Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

Chieko Naniwa in Throne of Blood

Taketoki Washizu: Toshiro Mifune
Lady Asaji Washizu: Isuzu Yamada
Noriyashi Odakura: Takashi Shimura
Yoshiteru Miki: Akira Kubo
Kunimaru Tsuzuki: Hiroshi Tachikawa
Yoshiaki Miki: Minoru Chiaki
Kuniharu Tsuzuki: Takamaru Sazaki
The Ghost Woman: Chieko Naniwa

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa
Based on a play by William Shakespeare
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Music: Masaru Sato

To call Throne of Blood the best film version of Shakespeare's Macbeth, as some have done, does a disservice to those filmmakers who have wrangled with the difficult beauty of Shakespeare's language, like Orson Welles in 1948 or even Justin Kurzel (who pretty much threw the language out of consideration) in 2015. But it also distorts Akira Kurosawa's achievement, which is not to provide us with a kind of Japanese Masterplots version of Macbeth, but to grasp the essence of Shakespeare's tormented vision of ambition and the limits of civilization. Moving the action from medieval Scotland to medieval Japan could be just as gimmicky as staging Shakespeare's play in the Old West or outer space, except that Kurosawa has the skill to make Throne of Blood stand on its own, even for those who have no knowledge of Shakespeare. It's an action film, a ghost story, and a portrait of a marriage -- the contrast of the blustering Washizu and his icy spouse is beautifully handled by Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada. And the final assault on Washizu is one of the most exciting -- and dangerous -- stunts ever pulled off by a director and a movie star, involving sharpshooting archers and careful choreography as Mifune battles his way through a forest of real arrows. We miss the language, of course -- Macbeth contains some of Shakespeare's most gorgeous speeches -- but Kurosawa gives us some compensations.