Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)

Takashi Shimura in Ikiru

Cast: Takashi Shimura, Shin'ichi Himori, Haruo Tanaka, Minoru Chiaki, Miki Odagiri, Yunosuke Ito, Bokuzen Hidari, Minosuke Yamada, Kamatari Fujiwara, Makoto Kobori, Nobuo Kaneko, Nobuo Nakamura, Kyoko Seki. Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni. Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai. Production design: Takashi Matsuyama. Film editing: Koichi Iwashita. Music: Fumio Hayasaka.

Takashi Shimura, one of the finest actors in Akira Kurosawa's films, often took a back seat to the more flamboyant and handsome Toshiro Mifune, but he gets a chance to shine on his own in Ikiru. It's a story of growing old, a topic more prominent in the films of Yoshijiro Ozu than in Kurosawa's -- at least until Kurosawa began to age. Shimura's Kanji Watanabe is a bureaucrat with a rather greedy and unloving family who learns that he has terminal stomach cancer and decides that he wants to experience life before he dies. Hedonism doesn't work out for him, so he turns to service to others, particularly the people he has seen over the years shoved around by the bureaucracy of which he is a part. It's a somewhat more satiric film than most of Kurosawa's, but also somewhat more didactic. Nevertheless, it's held together by Shimura's fine performance.

Dodes'ka-den (Akira Kurosawa, 1970)

Cast: Yoshitaka Zushi, Kin Sugai, Junzaburo Ban, Kiyoko Tange, Hisashi Igawa, Hideko Okiyama, Kunie Tanaka, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Ryo Sawagami, Yoko Kusunoki, Noboru Mitani, Hiroyuki Kawase, Hiroshi Akutagawa. Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, based on a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto. Cinematography: Yasumichi Fukuzawa, Takao Saito. Art direction: Shinobu Muraki, Yoshiro Muraki. Film editing: Reiko Kaneko. Music: Toru Takemitsu.

Akira Kurosawa's first film in color, Dodes'ka-den was a critical hit, earning an Oscar nomination for foreign language film, but a commercial failure, sending the director into a deep, near-suicidal depression. It's a curious grab-bag of stories of people living in a trash dump, their lives connecting only tangentially for the most part. It has the appearance of such post-apocalyptic films as Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), Delicatessen (Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991), Escape From New York (John Carpenter, 1981), Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2014), Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1991), and The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969), though its setting is on the fringes of the actual 20th-century Japan -- apocalypse nigh, if you will. The title comes from what is perhaps its central figure, the mentally challenged Roku-chan (Yoshitaka Zushi), who is obsessed with streetcars and chugs through the dump chanting the nonsense words of the film's title, meant to be an evocation of the sound of the tram on the tracks.

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.

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.

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 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. 

Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi, 1962)

A study in tragic irony, Harakiri was intended as a commentary on Japan's history of hierarchical societies, from the feudal era through the Tokugawa shogunate and down to the militarism that brought the country into World War II and finally the corporate capitalism in which the salaryman becomes the latest iteration of the serf, pledging fidelity to a ruling lord. Working from a screenplay by Shinobu Hashimoto from a novel by Yasuhiko Takiguchi, director Masaki Kobayashi sets his film on a steady pace that at first feels static. There are long scenes of talk, with little moving except the camera's slow pans and zooms. But as Kobayashi's protagonist, Hanshiro Tsugumo (brilliantly played by Tatsuya Nakadai), tells his harrowing tale of loss, the film opens out into beautifully crafted scenes of action, as well as one terrifying and painful scene of cruelty, in which a man is made to commit the title's ritual disembowelment with a sword made of bamboo. Although there is an extended fight sequence in which Hanshiro takes on the entire household of the Ii clan, the true climax of the film is the duel between Hanshiro and Hikokuro Omodaka (Tetsuro Tanba), the greatest swordsman in the Ii household. Especially in this scene, the cinematography of Yoshio Miyajima makes a brilliant case for black and white film, aided by the editing of Hisashi Sagara that cuts between the dueling men and the waving grasses on the windswept hillside where the fight takes place. Harakiri is one of the best samurai films ever made, but even that observation contains its own note of irony, since Kobayashi's aim with the film is to validate his protagonist's assertion that "samurai honor is ultimately nothing but a façade."