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.

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.

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 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. 

Drunken Angel (Akira Kurosawa, 1948)

Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura in Drunken Angel

Sanada: Takashi Shimura
Matsunaga: Toshiro Mifune
Okada: Reizaburo Yamamoto
Nanae: Michiyo Kogure
Miyo: Chieko Nakakita
Gin: Noriko Sengoko
Singer: Shizuko Kasagi
Takahama: Eitaro Shindo
Oyabun: Masao Shimizu

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Keinosuke Uekasa, Akira Kurosawa
Cinematography: Takeo Ito
Production design: Takashi Matsuyama
Film editing: Akikazu Kono
Music: Fumio Hayasaka 

Drunken Angel has been called Akira Kurosawa's Stagecoach, because just as John Ford established a fruitful director-actor team with John Wayne in his 1939 Western, in this movie Kurosawa launched a brilliant collaboration with Toshiro Mifune that lasted for 16 films. But to my mind, just as important, Drunken Angel marked the first teaming of Mifune with the great character actor Takashi Shimura. Kurosawa immediately saw the potential of the team, in which Shimura's low-key steadfastness serves as a foil for Mifune's volatility. He reteamed them in 1949 for two films, The Quiet Duel and Stray Dog, but their most memorable work together would come in Seven Samurai (1954), in which Shimura's wise and wily Kambei Shimada plays off beautifully against Mifune's madly unpredictable Kikuchiyo. In Drunken Angel, Shimura has the title role: an alcoholic doctor laboring in the slums of a postwar Japanese city. His clinic fronts a festering lake of sewage and his clientele comes largely from the neighboring nightclubs and brothels. Mifune plays Matsunaga, a swaggering young gangster with tuberculosis, who comes to Dr. Sanada hoping for a cure that won't put a crimp in his lifestyle. The screenplay by Kurosawa and Keinosuke Uekusa makes both characters into complex figures: Sanada's bitterness about his poverty and lack of status feeds his alcoholism, but he persists in trying to help his patients, even when, like Matsunaga, they resist his efforts, sometimes violently. Still, there's a bond between the two men in a recognition that they are both caught in traps they didn't make. What makes Drunken Angel more than just a clever reworking of film noir tropes -- another instance of Kurosawa's fascination with American movies -- is that it's a veiled commentary on the wounded Japan, in which the militaristic violence has been turned inward. Yesterday's soldier has become today's yakuza, still carrying on about honor and saving face. Kurosawa's film delivers an incisive criticism of some of the root problems facing his country. Made during the American occupation, when censorship was at its strictest, especially in depicting violence, Kurosawa nevertheless stages some vivid and intense fight scenes, using Mifune's physicality to great effect. That much of it occurs against a background of Western-style pop music only heightens its boldness.