I Will Buy You (Masaki Kobayashi, 1956)

Yunosuke Ito and Keiji Sada in I Will Buy You

Daisuke Kishimoto: Keiji Sada
Ippei Tamaki: Yunosuke Ito
Fudeko Tanaguchi: Keiko Kishi
Goro Kurita: Minoru Oki
Ryoko Taniguchi: Mitsuko Mito

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama
Based on a novel by Minoru Ono
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

We have come to accept that professional sports is a big and sometimes corrupt business, so that movies about that business, like Jerry Maguire (Cameron Crowe, 1996) and Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011), are designed more to show how things work than to serve as exposés. In fact, I think we have to go back to Japan in 1956 and Masaki Kobayashi's I Will Buy You to see a film that really purports to be shocked about the venality behind a supposedly innocent and much-loved game like baseball. In Kobayashi's view, the bidding war over a star college player becomes a nastily cynical exhibition of greed, corrupting everyone, including the player and his family. The central figure in the film is Kishimoto, played by Keiji Sada as an essentially nice guy who is dismayed by what his job, persuading a player named Kurita to sign with the Toyo Flowers, forces him to do. Sada has some of the look and manner of a Gregory Peck (without Peck's ineradicable blandness), making it possible for us to sympathize with the character and also to understand how he can persuade Kurita's wary mentor-trainer, Tamaki, that he has the player's best interests at heart -- unlike the more ostensibly greedy rivals from other teams. Tamaki is something of a shadowy figure: He may have been a spy during the war, and for most of the film we're not entirely sure that his occasional attacks of pain from gallstones aren't faked, an attempt to win sympathy. He also has a wife and child, but spends most of his time with his mistress, Ryoko, whose younger sister, Fudeko, is Kurita's girlfriend. Fudeko professes to hate baseball, and she is ashamed of her illegitimate birth. Every character in the film, it seems, has a complex backstory. That includes the members of Kurita's family, who live in the country and are mistakenly treated as naive yokels by some of the agents attempting to sign the young player. In the end, the greed of the family even produces brother-on-brother violence. The film ends in irony loaded on irony, capping a well-told and sardonic story.

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. 

Identification of a Woman (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982)

Tomas Milian and Christine Boisson in Identification of a Woman

Niccolò: Tomas Milian
Mavi: Daniela Silverio
Ida: Christine Boisson 
Woman in Swimming Pool: Lara Wendel
Carla: Veronica Lazar
Nadia: Enrica Antonioni
Mavi's Sister: Sandra Monteleoni
Mario: Marcel Bozzuffi

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay: Michelangeo Antonioni, Gérard Brach, Tonino Guerra
Cinematography: Carlo Di Palma
Production design: Andrea Crisanti
Film editing: Michelangelo Antonioni
Music: John Foxx

As I said recently about his La Notte (1961), it helps when Michelangelo Antonioni has cast movie stars like Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau in his films because they provide something of a backstory to his often enigmatic characters. Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, and Christine Boisson, attractive and capable actors though they are, don't do quite enough to illuminate what's going on with Niccolò, Mavi, and Ida in Identification of a Woman. It's a film that plays almost like a parody of the movies that Antonioni and other directors made 20 years earlier: There's a party filled with bored Eurotrash like the ones in La Notte, Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1961), and Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1962); there's a film director trying to get over creative block like Guido in 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963); there's a search for a missing woman, though not so fruitless as the one in Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960); there are some mutterings about imponderable philosophical questions, such as whether god would exist if human beings didn't; and there's a good deal of sex, still not enough to overcome the problems of the characters, though the nudity is more frontal and the copulation more explicit than it was two decades earlier. In short, we've been here before. Still, Identification of a Woman is not without its rewards, most of them provided by the wizardly color cinematography of Carlo Di Palma. His artistry and technique are on display in such scenes as the film's most memorable segment, the journey through the fog, as well as in the play with reflections (see the still above) in the Venetian hotel scene. They do more than the actors do to bring the film to what life it possesses. 

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936)

Jean Arthur and Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town 

Longfellow Deeds: Gary Cooper
Babe Bennett: Jean Arthur
MacWade: George Bancroft
Cornelius Cobb: Lionel Stander
John Cedar: Douglass Dumbrille
Walter: Raymond Walburn
Judge May: H.B. Warner
Mabel Dawson: Ruth Donnelly
Dr. Emile Von Hallor: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Morrow: Walter Catlett
Farmer: John Wray
Mrs. Meredith: Emma Dunn

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Robert Riskin
Based on a story by Clarence Budington Kelland
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Stephen Goosson
Film editing: Gene Havlick
Music: Howard Jackson

Frank Capra's perennially popular Mr. Deeds Goes to Town currently has an 8.0 score on IMDb and an 89% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. So let me cavil a little bit about its psychological dishonesty, namely the scene in which Deeds, engagingly played by Gary Cooper, is subjected to a sanity hearing because of his attempt to give away to distressed farmers the $20 million he has inherited -- a scheme that economically speaking doesn't bear much close scrutiny. Capra (and Robert Riskin, who as writer must bear his share of blame) brings on an "expert," a caricature Viennese psychiatrist, who explains that Deeds suffers from "manic depression," the now-discarded term for bipolar disorder, and exhibits a peaks-and-valleys chart of Deeds's mood swings. It's pretty clear that Capra and Riskin want us to regard this testimony as quackery. But anyone who has dealt with bipolarity, either first-hand or with family or friends, can see the element of truth in the diagnosis. We don't know enough about Deeds's daily life in Mandrake Falls, Vt., where, as the Faulkner sisters testify, everyone is "pixilated" but them, to give a confident diagnosis that Deeds is in fact bipolar, and the attempt to use the diagnosis as a smear is reprehensible. But Deeds's decision to refuse legal council at the hearing is the act of someone who really is depressed, and while we are supposed to dismiss as chicanery the attempt to classify his eccentricities -- playing the tuba, sliding down banisters, chasing firetrucks, feeding doughnuts to a horse, and above all wanting to give away his money -- as manic behavior, there's a grain of truth there. Moreover, Deeds does in fact exhibit violent tendencies: witness his punching out the poets who mock his greeting-card verses -- who beats up poets? -- and his assaulting the lawyers at the trial. Capra intends his film as a valorization of small-town virtues against city cynicism, but even that doesn't bear much close scrutiny, especially in the age of more critical looks at small town life as Sinclair Lewis's Main Street or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. It has always struck me that Capra was the most empty-headed of the great American directors, making films that annihilate thought, or at least anesthetize it. I like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town more than most Capra films: At its best it's lively and funny, but its worst is pretty annoying and even pernicious stuff.

Fighting Elegy (Seijun Suzuki, 1966)

Hideki Takahashi and Junko Asana in Fighting Elegy

Kiroku Nanbu: Hideki Takahashi
Michiko: Junko Asana
Turtle: Yusuke Kawazu
Takuan: Mitsuo Kataoka
Principal: Isao Tamagawa
Kaneda: Keisuke Noro
Ikki Kita: Hiroshi Midorigawa
Kiroku's Father: Seijiro Onda
Yoshino Nanbu: Chikaku Miyagi

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo
Based on a novel by Takashi Suzuki
Cinematography: Kenji Hagiwara
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto

Seijun Suzuki's Fighting Elegy is a coming-of-age story, ostensibly about a hormone-crazed teenager who tries to sublimate his lust for the pretty Michiko and to expiate his Catholic guilt for that lust by joining one of the warring gangs in his town. But what's really coming of age, as we find out at the film's end, is the militaristic imperialism of prewar Japan. So much of the film depends on Suzuki's mastery of tone as he shifts from the mostly comic story of young Kiroku's plight to the wholly tragic outcome. Kiroku becomes increasingly adept as a fighter, and his rebellious antics at school are not punished so much as increasingly tolerated -- even his father refuses to punish him, taking a boys-will-be-boys attitude. When he's forced to go live with his uncle and transfer to another school, he only gets more bellicose, but although the school has a motto that stresses the necessity of "seemly" behavior, at the end of his stay there the principal is so impressed by Kiroku's fighting skills that he removes his coat and challenges Kiroku to a duel. The scene ends with the two squaring off, suggesting that part of the reason for the military's takeover lies in the older Japanese generation's admiration for the violence of the young. The film ends with Michiko going into a convent, but not before she is forced off of the path she is traveling by a troop of jogging soldiers and her crucifix is trodden into the snow, and with Kiroku on the train to Tokyo, where he plans to join the fight for control of the government. It's not clear from the film which side Kiroku will fight on this time, although the novel on which it's based has him joining the army and dying in China. Suzuki scripted this part of the novel and planned to film it as a sequel before he was forced out of his job at the Nikkatsu studios. Fighting Elegy is an exhibition of Suzuki's original and innovative technique, which audiences loved but studio management thought was out of control.

Sanshiro Sugata (Akira Kurosawa, 1943)

Ryunosuke Tsukigata and Susumu Fujita in Sanshiro Sugata

Sanshiro Sugata: Susumu Fujita
Shogoro Yano: Denjiro Okochi
Sayo Murai: Yukiko Todoroki
Gennosuke Higaki: Ryunosuke Tsukigata
Hansuke Murai: Takashi Shimura
Osumi Kodana: Ranko Hanai
Tsunetami Iinuma: Sugisaki Aoyama
Police Chief Mishima: Ichiro Sugai
Saburo Monma: Yoshio Kusugi
Buddhist Priest: Kokuten Kodo

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa
Based on a novel by Tsuneo Tomita
Cinematography: Akira Mimura
Art direction: Masao Tozuka
Film editing: Toshio Goto, Akira Kurosawa
Music: Seiichi Suzuki

You know the plot: A talented, cocky young newcomer takes on the old pros and gets his ass kicked, but he learns self-discipline and becomes a winner. You've seen it played out with young doctors, lawyers, musicians -- it's even the plot of Wagner's Die Meistersinger -- and others challenging the established traditions. But mostly it's the plot for what seems to be about half of the sports movies ever made, including Akira Kurosawa's first feature, Sanshiro Sugata. It's also a film about the conflict between rival martial arts disciplines, jujitsu and judo, but fortunately you don't need to know much about the nature of the conflict to follow the film. From what I gather from reading the Wikipedia entry on judo, the founder of that discipline, Jigoro Kano, wanted to give jujitsu a philosophical underpinning that would put an emphasis on self-improvement for the betterment of society, and he called it judo because "do," like the Chinese "tao," means road or path. Kano's renaming was meant to shift the emphasis from physical skill to spiritual purpose. In Kurosawa's film, young Sanshiro comes to town wanting to find someone to teach him jujitsu, and signs up with a teacher who accepts a challenge from the judo master Shogoro Yano. (The name is an obvious twist on "Jigoro Kano.") Sanshiro watches as not only the teacher but all of the other members of his dojo are defeated -- in fact, tossed into the river -- by Yano. Whereupon Sanshiro becomes a follower of Yano's, but has to undergo some defeats and a cold night spent in a muddy pond before he gets the idea of what judo is all about. The film was not a big hit with the wartime Japanese censors, who wanted more aggression and less philosophy in their movies, so 17 minutes were cut from it, never to be seen again. In the currently available print, the missing material is summarized on title cards, but what's left is more than enough to show that Kurosawa arrived on the scene as a full-blown master director. His camera direction is superb, and he knows how to tell a story visually. For example, when Sanshiro joins up with Yano, he kicks off his geta, his wooden clogs, so he can pull Yano's rickshaw more efficiently. Kurosawa cuts to a passage-of-time montage in which we see one of the abandoned geta lying in the road, then in a mud puddle, covered with snow, then tossed aside as spring comes. The film's crucial scene is a showdown between Sanshiro and his jujitsu rival, Higaki, in a field of tall grasses, swept by wind with rushing clouds overhead; it's a spectacular effect, even if the battle turns out to be a bit anticlimactic. However much the censors may have disliked it, audiences were enthusiastic enough that Kurosawa made a sequel, Sanshiro Sugata Part II in 1942.

Tokyo Drifter (Seijun Suzuki, 1966)

Tomoko Hamakawa and Tamio Kawaji in Tokyo Drifter

Tetsuya (Tetsu the Phoenix) Hondo: Tetsuya Watari
Chiharu: Chieko Matsubara
Tatsuzo the Viper: Tamio Kawaji
Kurata: Ryuji Kita
Kenji Aizawa: Hideaki Nitani
Tanaka: Eiji Go
Mutsuko: Tomoko Hamakawa
Keiichi: Tsuyoshi Yoshida
Umetani: Isao Tamagawa
Otsuka: Eimei Esumi

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Screenplay: Yasunori Kawauchi
Cinematography: Shigeyoshi Mine
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Film editing: Shinya Inoue
Music: Hajime Kaburagi

Imagine if The Godfather had been made in the mid-1960s with someone like Frankie Avalon as Michael Corleone, interpolated pop songs ("An Offer He Can't Refuse," perhaps?), and sets in comic book colors that look like they were designed for a Freed Unit musical at MGM in the 1950s. Then you have something like Tokyo Drifter, a jaw-dropping Japanese gangster movie directed by the irrepressible Seijun Suzuki. There's no summarizing a plot that has so many wild excursions, but it basically follows the attempts of a young hitman who has his yakuza boss's approval to go straight -- or so he thinks, until the boss changes his mind. None of this suggests where the movie's going to go, including the shootout between Tetsuya and his almost Doppelgänger nemesis Tatsuzo on the railroad tracks with an approaching train in a snowstorm. Or the free-for-all fistfight in a bar designed to look like a saloon set for an American Western, during which the bar is almost completely demolished. For most of the film, including the train track shootout, Tetsuya wears a robin's egg blue suit with white shoes, though he later changes into other pastels. Those who find Tokyo Drifter a bit much (as the studio that employed Suzuki did) dismiss it as style over substance, but it's undeniably fascinating.

Knight Without Armor (Jacques Feyder, 1937)

Robert Donat and Marlene Dietrich in Knight Without Armor

Countess Alexandra: Marlene Dietrich
A.J. Fothergill: Robert Donat
Duchess: Irene Vanbrugh
Vladinoff: Herbert Lomas
Col. Adraxine: Austin Trevor
Axelstine: Basil Gill
Maronin: David Tree
Poushkoff: John Clements
Station Master: Hay Petrie
Drunken Commissar: Miles Malleson

Director: Jacques Feyder
Screenplay: Frances Marion, Lajos Biró, Arthur Wimperis
Based on a novel by James Hilton
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Production design: Lazare Meerson
Film editing: Francis D. Lyon
Music: Miklós Rózsa

After the success of his film Carnival in Flanders (1935) Belgian director Jacques Feyder was lured to England by Alexander Korda to make Knight Without Armor, a rather preposterous thriller in which a British spy helps a Russian countess escape from the turmoil of the Russian revolution in 1917. He had two top-rank stars to work with: Robert Donat had just made a name for himself in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935), in which he showed his skill at making outlandish thriller situations plausible, and Marlene Dietrich was looking for roles that would remove the "box-office poison" label that distributors had pasted on her after the failure of her last films for Josef von Sternberg, in which she had become an over-stylized figure. Knight Without Armor allows Dietrich to loosen up quite a bit, to get her hair mussed and her face dirtied as she goes on the run from the warring Red and White factions of the revolution. She does, however, get a chance to glam up, first as the pre-Revolution countess and then, when she's rescued by the Whites, to take a bubble bath and put on a gold lamé gown that has somehow been found for her. But Dietrich in disguise as an ordinary Russian woman is ridiculous: One look at those plucked and penciled-in eyebrows would give her away in a second. It's a silly film, a concoction of cliff-hanging moments, in which the denouement depends on a Russian commissar becoming so sentimental about the imperiled couple that he commits suicide to help them escape. But both Dietrich and Donat are game for whatever the script throws at them, and there are some bright moments. While waiting at a station for a train, they discover that the station master has gone mad: He announces trains that don't appear, and when Donat's character says he doesn't see them, the station master shushes him, explaining, "Trains that are seen get blown up." If Feyder had been able to sustain this sense of the lunacy prevalent in the revolution, Knight Without Armor might actually have been a good film.

Miller's Crossing (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 1990)

Watched 10/8/2018

Gabriel Byrne and John Turturro in Miller's Crossing

Tom Reagan: Gabriel Byrne
Verna: Marcia Gay Harden
Leo O'Bannon: Albert Finney
Bernie Bernbaum: John Turturro
Johnny Caspar: Jon Polito
Eddie Dane: J.E. Freeman
Frankie: Mike Starr
Tic-Tac: Al Mancini
Mink Larouie: Steve Buscemi
Mayor Dale Levander: Richard Woods
Mayor's Secretary: Frances McDormand

Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Cinematography: Barry Sonnenfeld
Production design: Dennis Gassner
Film editing: Michael R. Miller
Music: Carter Burwell

Miller's Crossing is the wit and cruelty of hard-boiled fiction like Dashiell Hammett's filtered through Warner Bros. gangster films of the 1930s, further filtered through film noir of the 1940s and served up by the postmodern sensibilities of Joel and Ethan Coen. It was a box office flop, but it has a cadre of admirers, many of whom, like David Thomson, ordinarily look askance at the smart-aleckiness of the Coens. There is much to admire, starting with pitch-perfect performances by the underused Gabriel Byrne, the always brilliant Albert Finney, and the shrewdly enticing Marcia Gay Harden, along with a gallery of character actors that rival those of the peak years of the Hollywood studios. Carter Burwell's score is, as always, essential. And there are some delicious moments, such as the discovery of the body of "Rug" Daniels by a small boy and his dog, who cocks his head quizzically as the boy filches the corpse's toupee, thereby providing something of a red herring for those who want to figure out who killed Rug. But on the whole, the film leaves me a little cold. It feels like a period piece for the sake of being a period piece and not because it has anything of substance to say about the chosen period.

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.