Love Letter (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1953)

Masayuki Mori in Love Letter

Cast: Masayuki Mori, Juzo Dosan, Yoshiko Kuga, Jukichi Uno, Kyoko Kagawa, Shizue Natsukawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Chieko Seki, Ranko Hanai, Chieko Nakakita, Keisuke Kinoshita. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, based on a novel by Fumio Niwa. Cinematography: Hiroshi Suzuki. Art direction: Seigo Shindo. Film editing: Toshio Goto. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two (Akira Kurosawa, 1945)

Susumu Fujita and Osman Yusuf in Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two

Sanshiro Sugata   Susumu Fujita
Shogoro Yano :  Denjiro Okochi
Gennosuke Higaki / Tesshin Higaki : Ryunosuke Tsukigata
Genzaburo Higaki : Akitake Kono
Sayo Murai : Yukiko Todoroki
Yujiro Toda : Soji Kiyokawa 
Yoshima Dan : Masayuki Mori 
Buddhist Priest : Kokuten Kodo
American Sailor: Osman Yusuf 
William Lister: Roy James 

Director: Akira Kurosawa 
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa 
Based on a novel by Tsuneo Tomita 
Cinematography : Takeo Ito 
Production design: Kazuo Kubo 
Film editing: Akira Kurosawa 
Music : Seiichi Suzuki

Patched together from what aging film stock could be gathered during the end-of-war shortages in Japan, and interrupted during its filming by bombing raids, Akira Kurosawa's Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two, was a labor imposed on the writer-director by the studio, Toho, which wanted a sequel to the hit Sanshiro Sugata (1943), and Kurosawa's lack of enthusiasm for the project shows. The story is routine: Sanshiro has helped judo triumph over jujitsu as the primary Japanese martial art, but he has gone into retreat for several years, honing his spirituality. But one day he comes across an American sailor beating up a rickshaw driver -- a job he once took on himself -- and thrashes the bully. This brings him to the attention of a promoter who wants to stage a fight between the judo master and an American boxer named William Lister. Eventually, after another fighter is beaten to a pulp by Lister, Sanshiro gives in and thrashes Lister, giving the prize money to the fighter who had been beaten. Meanwhile, his old opponent, Gennosuke Higaki, whom he defeated at the end of the first film, warns him that his brothers, Tesshin and Genzaburo Higaki, are out to revenge themselves for Gennosuke's defeat. They are masters of karate, which originated on Okinawa and was just making its way into mainland Japan at the time when the film is set, the late 19th century. Gennosuke gives Sanshiro a scroll depicting the basics of karate to help him in the eventual fight with the brothers. Naturally, the film concludes with a fight between Sanshiro and Tesshin -- the other brother is recovering from an epileptic seizure -- that takes place in the snow, an echo of the fight in the original film with Gennosuke in a windswept field of tall grasses. This battle is the only part of the film that shows much commitment on the part of Kurosawa, who insisted that the principals fight barefoot in the snow, not without many complaints from the actors. Unfortunately, the poor film stock, unable to provide shades of gray, turns much of this fight into a battle of silhouetted figures. Much has been made of the propaganda in the film, particularly the portrayal of the hapless American sailor and boxer, but Kurosawa, no lover of the imperial regime, manages to shift the film's emphasis to the fearsomely wild Higaki brothers. 

The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (Akira Kurosawa, 1945)

Ken'ichi Enomoto and Denjiro Okochi in The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail

Benkei: Denjiro Okochi
Togashi: Susumu Fujita
Porter: Ken'ichi Enomoto
Kamei: Masayuki Mori
Kataoka: Takashi Shimura
Ise: Akitake Kono
Suruga: Yoshio Kosugi
Yoshitsune: Hanshiro Iwai
Hidachibo: Dekao Yokoo

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa
Based on plays by Nobomitsu Kanze and Gohei Namiki
Cinematography: Takeo Ito
Production design: Kazuo Kubo
Music: Tadashi Hattori

Akira Kurosawa's fourth film and first venture into the samurai movie genre is only an hour long, but it displays both the attention to character delineation and the infusion of humor into a sometimes earnest genre that would be present when Kurosawa began working on an epic scale almost a decade later in Seven Samurai (1954). But he ran into trouble with the censors both before and after the war ended, first with the militarists of the Japanese government who wanted propaganda, not subtlety, and then with the American occupying forces, which banned all films that seemed to glorify the warlike past. It was held from release until 1952. As a film, it's little more than an anecdote about how the samurai serving Lord Yoshitsune managed to elude a roadblock and escape into hiding. Kurosawa added a comic figure to the retinue, a porter played by the big-mouth comedian Ken'ichi Enomoto, a kind of Japanese Joe E. Brown. Enomoto's mugging gets a bit annoying at times, but he also keeps the film from turning into a historical pageant as the leader of the samurai, Benkei, tricks the garrison commander at the roadblock, Togashi, into thinking that they're actually a group of monks raising funds for the restoration of a temple. When his bluff is called and he's asked to read the paper that sets for the appeal for funds, Benkei unfurls a blank scroll and improvises -- to the astonishment of the porter, who is looking over his shoulder. Yoshitsune is disguised as a second porter, and in order to deter Togashi's suspicion, Benkei is forced to beat the disguised lord for laziness -- an unthinkable act of lèse-majesté under normal circumstances. Slight as it is, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail gives off a sense of the greatness to come in Kurosawa's career, including the presence of several actors, such as Takashi Shimura, who would become prominent in the director's later films. 

The Good Fairy (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Chikage Awashima and Rentaro Mikuni in The Good Fairy

Yoshio Nakanuma: Masayuki Mori
Itsuko Kitaura: Chikage Awashima
Rentaro Mikuni: Rentaro Mikuni
Mikako Toba: Yoko Katsuragi
Ryoen Toba: Chishu Ryu
Tsuyoki Kitaura: Koreya Senda
Suzue: Toshiko Kobayashi

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Kogo Noda
Based on a novel by Kunio Kishida
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The Good Fairy is a shamelessly tearjerking snarl of plot threads, any one of which might have made a coherent movie, but together make for a complete mess. Nor would any of them justify the oddness of the title. (The original is Zen-ma, but Google Translate failed me.) It begins when Yoshio Nakanuma, a newspaper assigning editor, sends a young reporter, Rentaro Mikuni,* to track down Itsuko Kitaura, the runaway wife of a wealthy businessman. Naturally, there are complications: Nakanuma was once in love with Itsuko, who has a younger sister, Mikako, with whom Rentaro falls in love. She's dying, however, and by the film's end Rentaro is so devoted to her that he persuades her father, a former Buddhist priest, to let him marry Mikako on her deathbed. But Rentaro wants Nakanuma to witness the marriage, and by the time he gets there, Mikako is dead. Meanwhile, Rentaro has witnessed Nakanuma's cruelty to his longtime mistress, Suzue, whom he dismisses coldly now that he has reunited with his old love, Itsuko. Angered by his boss's treatment of Suzue, Rentaro sends Nakanuma away, then marries the dead Mikako. No, really. The thing is, this incredible nonsense seems to have been plausible to director and cast, all of whom do their best to make it work. At least the glimpses inside a Japanese newspaper office are interesting, but there are no fairies to be seen in the film, good or otherwise, unless it's Chishu Ryu's gentle, infinitely understanding ex-priest.

*Rentaro Mikuni is both the character and the screen name of the actor, born Masao Sato, who, like the American actors Gig Young and Anne Shirley, took his screen name from a role, in his case the first of a long career.

Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

Toshiro Mifune in Rashomon

Tajomaru: Toshiro Mifune
Masako Kanazawa: Machiko Kyo
Takehiro Kanazawa: Masayuki Mori
Woodcutter: Takashi Shimura
Priest: Minoru Chiaki
Commoner: Kichijiro Ueda
Medium: Noriko Homma
Policeman: Daisuke Kato

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto
Based on stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Production design: Takashi Matsuyama
Film editing: Akira Kurosawa
Music: Fumio Hayasaka

Rashomon is one of those films like Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) that you had to have seen just to be considered culturally literate. So I was a bit surprised when, watching one of the Criterion Channel supplements to Rashomon that featured Robert Altman commenting on the film, Altman praised the acting of Toshiro Mifune by name but funked it on Machiko Kyo, referring to her as "the actress." For if there's any key to the success of Rashomon as drama it's Kyo's performance. It's not like she was an unknown, either: She's the star of another 1950s imported hit, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell (1953), and gave memorable performances for Kenji Mizoguchi in Street of Shame (1956) and especially Ugetsu (1953) as well as for Yasujiro Ozu in Floating Weeds (1959). She even crossed the Pacific to play opposite Glenn Ford and Marlon Brando (in yellowface) in the film version of The Teahouse of the August Moon (Daniel Mann, 1956) -- though that's one that Altman might well have forgotten seeing. I don't want to labor the point too much, but it's the nuances of Kyo's performance that make Rashomon work, that keep us guessing whether she was the dutiful wife or the savage wanton. As I steep myself more and more in Japanese film of the late 1940s, '50s, and '60s, it becomes ever clearer that this was a great period for female actors like Kyo, Setsuko Hara, Kyoko Kagawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Isuzu Yamada, Hideko Takamine, and many others -- most of whose names are unknown to Americans today. As for the film itself, it was a career breakthrough for Akira Kurosawa and Mifune, and while it remains essential viewing for the cinematically literate, I don't hold it in as high esteem as I do such Kurosawa/Mifune collaborations as  Drunken Angel (1948), Stray Dog (1949), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), The Lower Depths (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo (1961), Sanjuro (1962), or High and Low (1963). Rashomon feels arty and remote in ways that those don't.

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.    

Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)

When does beauty become a flaw? To put it another way, if beauty is only skin deep, how does an artist present it so that we don't linger on the surface of a work and fail to comprehend its depths? I raise this in connection with a viewing of Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu, a film universally praised for its beauty. It's easy to be mesmerized by Mizoguchi's visual compositions and by the sinuous fluidity of Kazuo Miyagawa's cinematography, as well as the poetry of Yoshikata Yoda's screenplay, all at the expense of feeling the coherence of the film's story and characters and ideas with our own lives. I find myself preferring Mizoguchi's less exquisite films to Ugetsu: Sansho the Bailiff (1954), surely, but also The Life of Oharu (1952) and even an earlier film like Osaka Elegy (1936). A case in point: The scene in which Genjuro (Masayuki Mori) returns home after his dalliance with the ghostly Lady Wasaka (Machiko Kyo) is a crucial and mythic one, evoking among other things Odysseus's return to Ithaca. And Mizoguchi stages it memorably: Genjuro enters the near-ruin of his house and finds it empty and littered, the fire pit cold. The camera follows him through the house in a long unbroken take, watches as he goes out the back door and sees him through the windows as he circles the house and re-enters. Only this time when he enters, the room is clean and the fire is burning brightly; his wife, Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka), embraces him. Overwhelmed and exhausted, he lies down and falls into a deep sleep beside his son, only to wake in the morning to find the cold empty room he first entered and to learn that Miyagi is dead. It's a magnificent sequence, a tour de force of acting, directing, camerawork and editing (by Mitsuzo Miyata). It makes a larger, deeper point: that Genjuro will never escape from ghosts. A less gifted director than Mizoguchi would have used conventional techniques like dissolves or double exposures to make the point. But there's also something distracting about instead employing a long, circular tracking shot with an invisible cut: We marvel at the technique at the expense of sharing Genjuro's experience. There is an art that conceals art, and I don't think Mizoguchi attains it here.

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.