Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2010)

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Scott Pilgrim: Michael Cera
Ramona Flowers: Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Knives Chau: Ellen Wong
Kim Pine: Alison Pill
Stephen Stills: Mark Webber
Young Neil: Johnny Simmons
Wallace Wells: Kieran Culkin
Stacey Pilgrim: Anna Kendrick
Julie Powers: Aubrey Plaza
Matthew Patel: Satya Bhabha
Lucas Lee: Chris Evans
Envy Adams: Brie Larson
Roxy Richter: Mae Whitman
Todd Ingram: Brandon Routh
Gideon Graves: Jason Schwartzman

Director: Edgar Wright
Screenplay: Michael Bacall, Edgar Wright
Cinematography: Bill Pope
Production design: Marcus Rowland
Film editing: Jonathan Amos, Paul Macliss

Edgar Wright's hyperactive but witty Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was a box-office failure, despite being an entertaining farrago of everything in 21st century pop culture: comic books, video games, anime, rock, superhero movies, and so on. Critics generally praised it, but that may have been something of a kiss of death, making it too mainstream for the hip. It has since, as such commercial misfires tend to do, become something of a cult movie, finding its audience as it ages and turns into a nostalgia piece. It gets much of its strength from Michael Cera's performance as the sweet slacker Scott, who plays bass in a garage band and has to balance an inappropriate infatuation with the underage Knives Chau and a more appropriate attraction to the très hip Ramona Flowers. Unfortunately, Ramona has a slate of evil ex-boyfriends, each of whom Scott is obliged to vanquish. Chris Evans and Brandon Routh send up their own superhero roles as two of the evil exes, the former a skateboarding movie star with an entourage of stunt doubles, the latter a bassist for a rival band who gets his superpowers from veganism -- about which he is willing to go on at hilarious length. Presiding over the evil exes is record producer Gideon Graves, sneeringly played by Jason Schwartzman. It's all very silly, but it's also bright and colorful fun if you want a break from reality.

The Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990)

John Cusack and Anjelica Huston in The Grifters

Lilly Dillon: Anjelica Huston
Roy Dillon: John Cusack
Myra Langtry: Annette Bening
Bobo Justus: Pat Hingle
Mr. Simms: Henry Jones
Cole: J.T. Walsh
Joe: Gailard Sartain
Gloucester Hebbing: Charles Napier
Jeweler: Stephen Tobolowsky

Director: Stephen Frears
Screenplay: Donald E. Westlake
Based on a novel by Jim Thompson
Cinematography: Oliver Stapleton
Production design: Dennis Gassner
Film editing: Mick Audsley
Music: Elmer Bernstein

Stephen Frears's ice-cold neo-noir The Grifters works as well as it does because of the trio of top-notch leads, a tough-minded screenplay based on a tough-minded novel, unsentimental direction, and a magnificent score by Elmer Bernstein. In short, it's an easy film to admire, but a harder film to like. If it has a message to convey it's that crime may pay, but at the expense of all humanity, including love and family. The most brutal moment comes not with bloodshed, but with Lilly Dillon's attempt to seduce her own son, a moment that has been foreshadowed earlier when Myra Langtry voices her suspicion that Roy Dillon has been sleeping with his mother. Anything goes, it seems, when you're on the grift. This was the film that made Annette Bening a star -- after a well-reviewed but little-seen performance in Frears's Valmont a year earlier -- and earned her the first of her four Oscar nominations. Adopting a Marilyn Monroe-ish little girl voice as Myra, she makes the character a near-equal to Anjelica Huston's Lilly, both of them trying to manipulate Roy to succeed in their respective grifts. But as good as Bening, Huston, and John Cusack are in their roles, the film also rides smoothly on its supporting actors, especially Pat Hingle as the brutal Bobo, Henry Jones as a kind of Greek-chorus hotelier, and the always marvelous J.T. Walsh as the cunning but ultimately fragile Cole. (Walsh's early death -- he was only 54 when he succumbed to a heart attack in 1998 -- deprived us of one of our most watchable supporting actors. Like Bill Paxton, whose death at 61 earlier this year recalls the premature departure of Walsh, he was one of those actors who made any film he appeared in just a little bit better.) 

Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Yasujiro Ozu, 1947)

Hohi Aoki and Choko Iida in Record of a Tenement Gentleman

Otane: Choko Iida
The Boy: Hohi Aoki
Tashiro: Chishu Ryu
Tamekichi: Reikichi Kawamura
Kawayoshi: Takeshi Sakamoto
Kikuko: Mitsuko Yoshikawa
The Father: Eitaro Ozawa

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Ichiro Saito

There are Web pages devoted to the "funny titles" that other countries give American films. The Japanese title for Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis, 1995) allegedly translates as I'm Drunk and You're a Prostitute, and Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999) becomes The Hole of Malkovich. But presumably other countries have similar sites devoted to silly Anglicizations of their film titles, too. Certainly the Japanese have every reason to wonder how the translators came up with an off-the-mark title like Record of a Tenement Gentleman for Yasujiro Ozu's film. The setting is not what we call a tenement: a multistory apartment building in a slum. It takes place instead in a row of small houses in an impoverished suburb of Tokyo, where people eke out a living as artisans or peddlers. And the protagonist of the film is not a gentleman but a middle-aged widow named Otane, who agrees to take in for a night a small boy who has followed one of her neighbors home. The boy was separated from his father, a carpenter, when the two of them went into the city in search of work after the apartment building in which they lived burned down. He made his way back to where they used to live, which is where he began to tag along with Tashiro, a fortune-teller by trade. Tashiro shares a home with Tamekichi, a tinker, who refuses to take the boy in, so they persuade Otane to shelter the boy for a night. Things do not go well: The boy wets the bed, and Otane, already grumbling at having been pressured to take him in, becomes even more grouchy at the "stupid" child. She takes the boy to the place where he once lived, but the neighbors there say that the father hasn't yet returned. Otane even tries to abandon the boy, running away from him when they start back, but he's too quick for her. Of course, anyone who's ever seen a movie knows where this is going: After he wets the bed again, the boy runs away, afraid of Otane's anger, but she realizes how much she has come to enjoy his presence and her heart softens when he returns home. She begins to indulge the boy with new clothes and even has their photograph taken together. And then, of course, just as Otane has decided that motherhood suits her, the father arrives, having tracked the boy down. That Ozu manages never to descend into mawkishness with this familiar premise is remarkable, but also a great tribute to his actors, especially Choko Iida as Otane, who makes the transformation from grumpiness to affection entirely credible. The film is also a tribute to the stubborn endurance of the Japanese working classes in the difficult environment of the immediate post-war period. 

Story of a Prostitute (Seijun Suzuki, 1965)

Yumiko Nogawa in Story of a Prostitute

Harumi: Yumiko Nogawa
Shinkichi Mikami: Tamio Kawaji
Lt. Narita: Isao Tamagawa
Sgt. Akiyama: Shoichi Ozawa

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Screenplay: Hajime Takaiwa
Based on a story by Tajiro Tamura
Cinematography: Kazue Nagatsuka
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto

Seijun Suzuki seems to have been a kind of Japanese Samuel Fuller, a director initially dismissed by critics as a maker of B-movies, but re-evaluated by a later generation as an auteur with a distinct and innovative style. Certainly Story of a Prostitute is loaded with style, including unabashed subjective camera tricks like the moment when the prostitute of the title, Harumi, sees the brutish Lt. Narita enter her room and freezes his image until it's torn to shreds like a paper doll. Harumi is a "comfort woman" at the front in Manchuria in the 1930s, and the lieutenant is especially taken with her. But she favors his gentle, even initially virginal orderly, Pvt. Mikami. The two fall in love, but Mikami has been so brainwashed by the Japanese army's code bushido-like code of loyalty and honor that he is trapped in a suicidal spiral. When he is wounded and trapped by the enemy, Harumi, who has pursued him behind the lines, persuades him not to kill himself as honor demands. But then he is rescued by his own forces, who suspect him of treason and propose a court-martial. His superiors decide that instead of court-martialing him, which would lead to a conviction that would dishonor his family, they will execute Mikami and report that he died in battle, but in a great scene, Mikami insists on looking his would-be executioner in the eye, and the man refuses to follow through. Eventually, however, he chooses suicide and Harumi, who has procured a grenade for Mikami, who has told her he's going to use it to escape, dies with him. It's a rather florid and sometimes confusing wartime melodrama, but Suzuki transforms it into an effective statement about the absurdity of war and the foolish codes of militarism.

Tokyo Twilight (Yasujiro Ozu, 1957)

Isuzu Yamada in Tokyo Twilight

Takako Numata: Setsuko Hara
Akiko Sugiyama: Ineko Arima
Shukichi Sugiyama: Chishu Ryu
Kikuko Soma: Isuzu Yamada
Shigeko Takeuchi: Haruko Sugimura
Sakae Soma: Nobuo Nakamura
Gihei Shimomura: Kamatari Fujiwara
Yasuo Namata: Kinzo Shin
Kenji Kimura: Masami Taura

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Takanobu Saito

In commenting on Mikio Naruse's Sound of the Mountain (1954), I noted that some critics saw his film as a kind of reaction against films by Yasujiro Ozu like Late Spring (1949) in which the plot climaxes with the marriage of a young woman. Naruse was exploring the fact that marriage is not always, or even seldom, the fulfillment of things that the bride and her family have wished for. But I also noted that Ozu himself is not above his own skepticism about marriage, and no film of his depicts that skepticism more keenly and tragically than Tokyo Twilight, in which a father whose own marriage has failed is trying to cope with the failed marriage of one daughter and the troubled love life of another. The father in this case is played, as it so often was in Ozu's films, by Chishu Ryu, Ozu's favorite actor. I can see why Ozu liked him so much: Is there any other actor who can say "Hmm" with such eloquence and variety of intonation than Ryu? He has many opportunities to pack that internalized sound with meaning in Tokyo Twilight, expressing everything from doubt to contentment to disapproval, or just reinforcing his character's stoic resignation to the misfortunes that life continues to bring him. Shukichi Sugiyama and his three children were abandoned by his wife during the war, when he was stationed in Seoul, and he has done what he can to raise the family. The son from the marriage has died in an accident several years earlier, and now his daughter, Takako, has left her husband, bringing their toddler daughter to live with Shukichi. The other daughter, Akiko, has a disastrous fling with the irresponsible Kenji, who leaves her pregnant and looking for the money to have an abortion. The various secrets that the family, packed into one of the boxlike homes Ozu has made into such eloquent settings (expressing both closeness and confinement), only become more pressing when the girls' mother, Kikuko, returns to their lives: She and her new husband (the man she left Shukichi for has died) run a mah jongg parlor that Akiko, searching for Kenji, finds herself in. Kikuko overhears the young woman's name and, realizing she's her daughter, strikes up a conversation, asking about the family without revealing the truth. But then Shukichi's sister accidentally encounters Kikuko while shopping and brings him the news that she's returned. When Takako overhears, she goes to Kikuko and asks her not to reveal her identity to Akiko. But secrets will out, and Akiko, racked with guilt not only for the abortion but also for having been arrested under suspicion of prostitution while waiting for Kenji in a bar, decides that she has inherited a bad streak from Kikuko, even questioning whether Shukichi is her actual father. Events are set in motion that culminate in Takako denouncing Kikuko, who decides to leave town. There is a poignant scene at the end in which Kikuko, hoping that she has made amends with Takako, looks out of the window of the train for her daughter to say goodbye. If you know Isuzu Yamada only as the sinister "Lady Macbeth" of Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957), her performance as the woman who has spent a lifetime of quiet regret will be eye-opening. As usual, Ozu transcends the potential for sentimental excess and arrives at just the right blend of pathos and quiet endurance.

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

Angeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis, Michele Valley, and Christos Stergioglou in Dogtooth

Father: Christos Stergioglou
Mother: Michele Valley
Older Daughter: Angeliki Papoulia
Son: Hristos Passalis
Younger Daughter: Mary Tsoni
Christina: Anna Kalaitzidou

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenplay: Efthymis Philippou, Yorgos Lanthimos
Cinematography: Thimios Bakatakis

Dogtooth might be taken as a satire on helicopter parenting, were it not that the imagination of Yorgos Lanthimos seems too expansive to be confined that way. The film begins with Mother providing vocabulary lessons to her children, except that the definitions of the words are hilariously incorrect: The word "sea," for example, means "a large armchair." And soon we meet Father, who is bringing home Christina, a young female security guard from the place where he works. She is securely blindfolded during the trip, and when they get there she is shown to a room where she and the Son strip and have sex -- a task the Father occasionally hires her to perform. Other than that, the three children, all of them young adults, have no contact with the outside world -- they've been told that they can go outside only when they shed one of their "dogteeth." They live in an expensive house surrounded by a high wall, and are never allowed outside. They have a television set, but it is used only for home videos. When a cat wanders onto the grounds, the Son kills it with garden shears, and on learning of the intruder the Father slashes his clothes and smears himself with fake blood, then tells them that cats are the most dangerous creatures on Earth and has them get down on all fours and bark like dogs, training them on how to respond if another cat should make its way into their enclave. Eventually, however, the world intrudes, largely because of Christina, who gets bored with the perfunctory sex with the Son, who refuses to gratify her orally, so she teaches the Older Daughter the fine art of cunnilingus, setting off some experiments with licking between the two daughters, usually involving body parts like the shoulder or the inside of the thigh. Christina also gives the Older Daughter some videotapes in exchange for her sexual favors. We gather from the Older Daughter's parroting of lines from the movies that they include Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976) and Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975). When Christina's transgression is discovered, she's banished from the enclave and the parents decide that one of the daughters should take her place in gratifying the Son. But the damage has been done: Older Daughter knocks out one of her canines with a dumbbell and, bleeding profusely, hides in the trunk of the Father's Mercedes. The macabre humor of Lanthimos's film lends itself to all sorts of interpretations: Is it, for example, a lampoon of homeschooling? A fable about the repressive power of society? A knock on utopian theorizing? Dogtooth never quite goes as crazily baroque as Lanthimos's The Lobster (2015) -- or, to judge from the reviews, his latest, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) -- but its consistent exploration of a warped worldview is fascinating.

Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972)

Anna Massey and Barry Foster in Frenzy

Richard Blaney: Jon Finch
Robert Rusk: Barry Foster
Brenda Blaney: Barbara Leigh-Hunt
Babs Milligan: Anna Massey
Chief Inspector Oxford: Alec McCowen
Mrs. Oxford: Vivien Merchant
Hetty Porter: Billie Whitelaw
Johnny Porter: Clive Swift
Felix Forsythe: Bernard Cribbins
Monica Barling: Jean Marsh

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Anthony Shaffer
Based on a novel by Arthur La Bern
Cinematography: Gilbert Taylor
Film editing: John Jympson

Frenzy is so often called a "return to form" by critics commenting on Alfred Hitchcock's films that it's worth parsing that phrase a bit. What's generally meant is that after the triumph of Psycho (1960), Hitchcock's films seemed to decline in quality: To the critics of the day, The Birds (1963) felt like a gimmicky monster movie, Marnie (1964) an overdone, miscast psychological drama, Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) attempts to cash in on the James Bond-era vogue for spy movies. Later generations of critics have found intelligent things to say about some of these films (though there are few ardent defenders of Torn Curtain and Topaz), largely because of their ability to see the Hitchcock oeuvre as a whole and to work in the revelations of the Hitchcock biographers about the director's obsessions and predilections. But Frenzy was for many mainstream critics what Roger Ebert called it: "the kind of thriller Hitchcock was making in the 1940s, filled with macabre details, incongruous humor, and the desperation of a man convicted of a crime he didn't commit." I would qualify that observation with the remark that Frenzy is the kind of film Hitchcock couldn't have made in the 1940s because of the Production Code's restrictions on nudity, sex outside of marriage, and excessive violence. Liberated from the Code, Frenzy is rated R. And I think Hitchcock's delighted rush into the new era of frankness in film may have had a destructive effect on his ability to maintain consistency of tone. A scene like the rape-murder of Brenda Blaney belongs to a different kind of film than the domestic comedy of Inspector Oxford and his gourmet-cook wife, and there's something a little too sick about the snap of Mrs. Oxford's bread stick as her husband is recounting how Rusk had to break Babs Milligan's fingers to retrieve his stickpin. There is no heart in the film, the way there was in films of the 1940s like Shadow of a Doubt (1943) or Notorious (1946), in which we could feel anxiety over the plight of the characters. Hitchcock does seem to want us to feel some real-world horror at Brenda's reciting Psalm 91 and trying to cover her bared breast as she's being raped, but even that invocation of sympathy feels out of place later, especially when Babs's corpse is treated for comedy when her feet keep finding their way into Rusk's face. And a "joke" like that of the man in the pub who quips "every cloud has a silver lining" on learning that the killer rapes his victims before strangling them should never have found its way onto film. There is much to admire in Frenzy: Hitchcock never did a more skillful scene than the one in which the camera follows Babs and Rusk up to the flat where we know she's going to die, and then silently retreats back down the stairs and across the busy street. Alec McCowen and Vivien Merchant skillfully play the comedy of the husband and wife dinner table scenes -- the soupe aux poissons is particularly unappetizing. I especially like the bit in which Mrs. Oxford offers a drink to the sergeant who brings news of the case to the inspector: It's a new cocktail called a "margarita," she explains, made with what she pronounces "tekwila." The sergeant has to leave, however, so she swigs the drink he has abandoned and then, with a rather odd look on her face, hastily makes her exit. But too often in Frenzy what Hitchcock thinks is naughty is just nasty.

Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene, 1966)

Mbissine Thérèse Diop in Black Girl

Diouana: Mbissine Thérèse Diop
Madame: Anne-Marie Jelinek
Monsieur: Robert Fontaine
Diouana's Boyfriend: Momar Nar Sene
Boy With Mask: Ibrahima Boy

Director: Ousmane Sembene
Screenplay: Ousmane Sembene
Based on a story by Ousmane Sembene
Cinematography: Christian Lacoste

With a run time of just about an hour, Black Girl is a marvel of condensed storytelling, even though it uses a sophisticated technique like flashbacks to create its powerful portrait of the wounds of colonialism. It begins in medias res, with Diouana's arrival in France to serve as the maid -- although she expects to work as a nanny, as she had in Dakar -- to a French couple. We learn a bit of her life in Senegal at the same time that we see her disillusionment and eventual slump into depression with what she becomes in the small apartment in Antibes of the couple. The children are away -- presumably at boarding school or with relatives -- and Diouana is forced into a round of cooking and cleaning that she had never expected. She sees nothing of the city outside of the apartment, and is subjected to insults from the couple's guests: An older man, for example, insists on grabbing her and kissing her because, he says, "I've never kissed a negress." The Frenchwoman's friends chatter about Diouana as if she is invisible, asking if she understands French. Told that she does, one of them says she must do so "instinctually" and adds, "like an animal." The result of the exploitation and abuse is tragic, and although what happens might seem melodramatic to some, I think it feels consistent with the way Sembene tells the story, almost as a moral fable. The central symbol of the fable is a mask that Diouana gave to her employers when she first went to work for them in Dakar. She finds it hanging on a wall of the stark modern apartment in Antibes, a touch of decor without significance, and when she decides she's had enough with her life there, she takes it down and puts it with her luggage. She never goes back to Dakar, however, but the man for whom she worked does, and he returns the mask with her belongings to Diouana's mother. A small boy, whom we first saw playing with the mask before Diouana gave it away, finds it and follows the Frenchman, who takes fright and runs away from him -- the European colonizer fleeing the new Africa. 

Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966)

Julie Andrews and Paul Newman in Torn Curtain

Michael Armstrong: Paul Newman
Sarah Sherman: Julie Andrews
Countess Kuchinska: Lila Kedrova
Heinrich Gerhard: Hansjörg Felmy
Ballerina: Tamara Toumanova
Gustav Lindt: Ludwig Donath
Hermann Gromek: Wolfgang Kieling
Jacobi: David Opatoshu
Dr. Koska: Gisela Fisher
Farmer: Mort Mills
Farmer's Wife: Carolyn Conwell

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Brian Moore
Cinematography: John F. Warren
Production design: Hein Heckroth

I saw Torn Curtain in the year of its initial release and was never tempted to watch it again until last night. I had forgotten almost everything about it except its general dullness and the one great scene when Armstrong and the farmer's wife take an extraordinary time (for a movie at least) to kill Gromek. It's an exceptionally well-directed scene, harrowing in its unexpected realism in the midst of a film that's anything but realistic. I particularly like the way the struggle leaves Armstrong exhausted when it's over, a refreshing change from the usual movie action in which the protagonist picks himself up and dusts himself off after a fight as if it was no big deal. There is one other thing that struck me when I first saw Torn Curtain: the way Michael and Sarah supposedly blend in with the crowds in East Germany. I had lived in Germany for almost a year several years earlier, and I know how easy it is to spot American haircuts and clothes, like the kind Paul Newman and Julie Andrews have in the movie, so their going unnoticed on a bus full of Germans struck me as silly movie fakery. But almost everything about Torn Curtain feels fake. Andrews and Newman are miscast, apparently having been foisted on Hitchcock by the studio, Universal. Granted, Andrews's role is a particularly thankless one, the stand-by-your-man helpmeet, but it's particularly unfortunate in the context of a film by a director who had traditionally given women strong leading roles. And despite an opening scene that puts the two of them in bed, there is no sexual chemistry between Andrews and Newman. (Was there ever sexual chemistry between Andrews and a leading man? Is that a consequence of having been introduced to movie audiences as a nanny and a novice in a convent?) The one interesting performance in the movie is Lila Kedrova's Polish countess, trying to get Michael and Sarah to sponsor her immigration to the United States, but it goes on much too long, as if Hitchcock knew what a drag the rest of the film was and wanted to showcase this florid eccentric. This was the first film Hitchcock made without the team of cinematographer Robert Burks, composer Bernard Herrmann, and film editor George Tomasini, who had seen him through most of the glories of his 1950s and early '60s classics.

Utamaro and His Five Women (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1946)

Toshiko Iizuka and Minosuke Bando in Utamaro and His Five Women

Utamaro: Minosuke Bando
Okita: Kinuyo Tanaka
Seinosuke: Kotaro Bando
Oran: Hiroko Kawasaki
Takasode: Toshiko Iizuka
Oman: Kyoko Kusajima
Yukie: Eiko Ohara
Shozaburo: Shotaro Nakamura
Oshin: Kiniko Shiratao
Takemara: Minpei Tomamoto

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a novel by Kanji Kunieda
Cinematography: Minoru Miki
Production design: Isamu Motoki

Utamaro and His Five Women is a film about the male gaze, but is it a celebration or a criticism of it? Kenji Mizoguchi is well-known for films like The Life of Oharu (1952) that explore the lives of women with deep sympathy and understanding, so it's easy to read the Utamaro biopic as a criticism, a portrait of the sometimes desperate existence of the women who inhabited "the floating world" of the 18th-century Japanese demimonde that was the subject of much of the artist's work. But the film also teeters over into exploitation even as it's revealing the seamy side of the male-dominated society. There's a satiric edge to the scene in which Utamaro and his assistants clandestinely observe a powerful lord's gathering of young women who strip to their underclothes and run into the water to catch fish. In a long pan down a row of the women, they disrobe in sequence like a chorus line in a musical. Meanwhile, the assistants are obviously taking more than an aesthetic interest in what's happening. Utamaro and His Five Women was Mizoguchi's first film after the war, and was made under the close observation of the occupying forces who were generally opposed to historical films for fear that they would celebrate the values of pre-war militaristic Japan. Fortunately, the film passed muster, probably because Mizoguchi's subject, a famous artist, represented the positive in Japanese culture. Even so, it's a subtle film with a sly double edge.