A Century of Kurosawa

by Dan

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. If the fraternity of top-tier directors can be subdivided, then Kurosawa would occupy the top tier of the top tier. In a career spanning four decades and 30 films, he made at least three unqualified masterpieces (Ikiru, Seven Samurai, and Ran), as well as a string of 10 to 12 movies that would be career-defining if made by a lesser talent. His 1950 film, Rashomon, not only won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, it almost single-handedly introduced Japanese film to the rest of the world, and inspired the sociological term “The Rashomon effect,” which describes subjectivity’s effect on perception and memory.

Kurosawa was part of a unique generation of Japanese artists who became adults before the outset of World War II, but didn’t reach their artistic prime until after the war was over. Having lived through major political and socio-economic upheaval, this generation lost its identity and had to forge a new one out of two diametrically opposed forces: the shattered remnants of Imperial Japan, and the cultural and economic values of the American GIs who occupied Japan after its surrender. Kurosawa settled on a brand of humanism that lived in the tension between individual autonomy and collectivist unity. His characters — be they 16th century samurai or 20th century bureaucrats — struggle to define themselves both as unique individuals and as members of larger groups (whether family, clan, corporation, government agency, or nation).

The beauty of Kurosawa’s films is that they explore universal human experience through the lens of mid-20th century Japanese psychology. Though culturally specific, they offer easy appeal to non-Japanese. In fact, Kurosawa is arguably the most thoroughly entertaining of the major auteurs. He had no qualms about making genre pieces that fulfilled the dictates of their genres’ conventions. Though period pieces, his samurai movies have insightful things to say about the postwar Japanese experience, but they also offer the sort of well-staged action, breezy comedy, and intense drama that make the genre so entertaining. Movies like Yojimbo and Sanjuro are every bit as fun and energizing as Steven Spielberg’s genre work throughout the 1980s.

Kurosawa’s directorial career unfolded in three phases. The first began in 1943 with his promotion by Toho Studios from the position of assistant director, where he had carefully studied every technical and artistic aspect of filmmaking from writing screenplays, to editing film and sound, to building sets. His early films are mostly contemporary, often have a literary bent (his favorite writers were Shakespeare and Dostoevsky), and give little hint of the action-packed period pieces to come. His output was hit-or-miss during this period, but its highlights include Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray Dog (1949), two movies set in the Japanese demimonde of the American occupation.

Kurosawa’s most productive and artistically vibrant period began with the domestic and international success of Rashomon in 1950, and ended with the 1965 release of Red Beard, a 19th century medical drama that is one of his most beloved films in Japan — it is perhaps even more popular than Seven Samurai. It is during this middle, mature phase of his career that Kurosawa delivered one great film after another, alternating between contemporary dramas like Ikiru and period pieces like Seven Samurai. He produced loose but powerful adaptations of William Shakespeare (Throne of Blood and The Bad Sleep Well) and Maxim Gorky (The Lower Depths). He improved upon Ed McBain’s pulp crime novel King’s Ransom with a structurally inventive and philosophically probing policier called High and Low. He reinvented the Japanese action movie with The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, and Sanjuro. He changed the face of cinema both in Japan and around the world.

Toshiro Mifune

Part of his success during this period can be attributed to his creatively intense partnership with Toshiro Mifune (1920-1997). Still Japan’s most iconic actor, Mifune was like a cross between John Wayne and Marlon Brando — a dynamic screen presence with great range and an efficient, idiosyncratic style. He brought energy, personality, and life to Kurosawa’s screenplays. He was a dominating force in nearly every scene he occupied. The late phase of Kurosawa’s career was initiated by his falling out with Mifune. No one knows exactly what transpired to split the duo apart (neither would talk about it), but their final film together, 1965’s Red Beard, sent them both into career doldrums. Mifune, on the far side of middle age, began taking any role, good or bad, that would pay for his mortgages and alimony, while Kurosawa struggled to get the cash-strapped Japanese studios to give him the budgets he needed for the projects he wanted to pursue. The financial pressures and his either quitting or being fired from (depending on whose story you believe) the director’s chair of the Japanese half of the Pearl Harbor epic Tora! Tora! Tora! led to a suicide attempt in the early ’70s.

When Kurosawa emerged from this existential funk, his movies were more somber and pessimistic, yet also frequently mawkish and sentimental. Dodesukaden (1970), Dersu Uzala (1975), Dreams (1990), and Madadayo (1993) are all lesser films in the director’s oeuvre. But in the 1980s, he also made two samurai epics that are startlingly good, staging his bleak outlook on life on vast battlefields. Kagemusha (1980) is a mixed success, a comedy trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to escape Kurosawa’s pessimism. Still, it probes at fascinating questions about identity and cultural entropy. His late period masterpiece is Ran (1985). A loose and violent adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, its tale of an old, fallen warlord is one that only an old man could tell. Yet very few men of Kurosawa’s age (he was 75 at the time) would be physically capable of managing such a massive production. Like Seven Samurai before it, Ran is both epic and deeply personal. It’s nearly perfect.

The Hidden Fortress (the dopes on the right inspired R2D2 and C3P0; the guy in the center is a prototype for Obi-Wan Kenobi)

From an American point of view, Kurosawa stands out among great international filmmakers because of how often we retell his tales — The Magnificent Seven, A Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing and even A Bug’s Life are remakes of his work. But it is his influence over filmmakers of the New Hollywood movement — directors like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg — that has had a lasting affect on American movies. George Lucas was so gobsmacked by Kurosawa’s work that he borrowed liberally from the director’s light actioner The Hidden Fortress when outling Star Wars. Coppola is fond of calling Kurosawa the “father of screen violence.” That may sound like a dubious title, but Coppola means it in the best possible sense. Kurosawa was one of the first directors who presented violence bluntly but with no hint of sensationalism. In his stories, combat has real emotional weight and consequences. Death is no small matter in Kurosawa’s oeuvre — even the death of an antagonist. It always has a cost — often paid by the psyche of the character doing the killing. The influence of Kurosawa’s humanism and technically precise use of violence on movies like Coppola’s The Godfather and Scorsese’s Goodfellas is incalculable.

The Climax of Sanjuro: Bloody Powerful

Modern American cinema wouldn’t be modern America cinema without Kurosawa — at least when it comes to the good stuff. For that, we owe him. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth, let’s raise a glass to Akira Kurosawa, the best damn filmmaker the world has ever known.

If you want to know more about Kurosawa, my reviews of some of his films are available at DVD Verdict: