Tag: Toshiro Mifune

My Wonderful Yellow Car (吹けよ春風, Senkichi Taniguchi, 1953)

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A kind-hearted taxi driver becomes our guide to the post-war society in a cheerful omnibus movie co-scripted by Akira Kurosawa and directed by Senkichi Taniguchi, My Wonderful Yellow Car (吹けよ春風, Fukeyo, Haru Kaze). Inspired by a Reader’s Digest column titled “human nature as seen in the rearview mirror”, the film follows cheerful cabbie Matsumura (Toshiro Mifune) as he drives around Tokyo in 1953 picking up various fares and sometimes adding commentary or trying to help with whatever kind of problem seems to be bothering them.

Then again, he stays well out of the first fare’s business as a young couple have obviously had some kind of falling out. Bursting into tears, the girl (Mariko Okada) announces that she wants to postpone the wedding and maybe even rethink this whole thing, while the boy reiterates with slight irritation that he’s said he’s sorry with the implication that that should be the end of it though we have no idea what (if anything) he’s actually done. In any case, they eventually patch things up over some canoodling in the back seat and ask to be dropped off so they can get something to eat. In some ways, the young couple represent a more hopeful vision of post-war youth who have no apparent worries besides their tiff and are financially comfortably enough not only to be getting married but can afford to travel by taxi and pay for a meal on the same occasion. 

Their situation is later contrasted with that of an older couple who’ve moved from Osaka to Tokyo in their old age and have bought a box of live lobsters to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary but as Matsumura notes though they appear to be quite well off they also seem somehow sad. That turns out to be because they lost their only son the previous summer and have moved into his old apartment. The old lady also cries in the back seat, but for a completely different reason. As they’ve only just moved here, they don’t have friends or anything to do and are completely lost in the wake of their son’s death. Matsumura’s kindness is demonstrated when he borrows three flowers from a bouquet delivered to a girl at the petrol station and presents them as an anniversary gift. The couple are so touched they invite him to enjoy their anniversary dinner with them and by the end of it have made the decision that they should go back to Osaka and restart their lives by re-opening their old business.

Throughout all this, Matsumura is very conscious of the meter. Every second he spent in the old couple’s apartment cost him money, but as he’s fond of saying you can’t always think of things like that. Even so, he reminds himself he has a wife and child so should be mindful of the clock but still turns down a fare to go back to the station and check on a young girl he’s pretty sure is trying to run away from home. A weird guy was sniffing around her and was in fact just about to lead her off when Matsumura gets back and announces he’s come to pick her up. Matsumura spends the rest of the ride trying to convince her to go home, repeatedly reminding her that most of the “panpans”, or streetwalking sex workers catering to US servicemen, were also once runaway girls. To more modern eyes we might wonder if sending her home is what’s best without knowing the reasons she wanted to leave. He goes so far as to buy her ramen which costs him more money on top of the lost fare which doesn’t collect from her either when he, a little less responsibly, abandons her when she refuses to tell him where she lives. Thankfully, it all seems to work out. The girl made a sensible decision to go home after all and is later seen happily doing her Christmas shopping with her mother who also thanks him for looking out for her.

Perhaps these kinds of altruistic acts of kindness explain why Matsumura’s own clothes are quite ragged with a hole in his jumper and a tear to the shoulder of his jacket. He’s driving the cab in straw sandals which apart from anything else is probably quite cold in the winter. He spends another afternoon giving a free ride to some children, about 15 of them, who’ve crowdfunded 100 yen because they’ve never been in a car before and want to go as far it’ll take them having no idea that 100 yen is actually the initial charge so you can’t go anywhere on it all. Of course, Matsumura ends up taking them a bit further, and then realises he’ll have to take them back to where they were because they won’t have any other way of getting there or of knowing where they are now.

On the other hand, sometimes he ends up with nuisance fares such as two drunk guys who keep singing their university song. One of them even climbs out of the window and up onto the roof, causing Matsumura to assume he’s fallen off somewhere and he’ll have to go back and look for him to make sure he’s not hurt only to find him burbling in the footwell. He also ends up getting hijacked by a crook with a gun on his way back from Yokohama but getting a telling off from the police rather than a thank you for catching him after unwisely taking hold of the gun himself and messing up all the fingerprints. 

One might think the time he had a famous actress in the back of his cab who even sang along with the jingle he’d written for the cheerful yellow vehicle might make up for all that, but he says the story that best exemplifies why he loves driving a taxi is that of a middle-aged couple he picked up at the harbour shortly after a boat had docked repatriating people from China. Even in 1953, some had not yet returned after becoming trapped by the Chinese Civil War and eventual Communist victory. The man is dressed in military uniform and says he’s just been demobbed when Matsumura asks him, trying to lighten the mood while there’s obviously some degree of tension between the man and his wife. But as we gradually come to understand, it’s all just a ruse and he has in fact been in prison in Japan for the last seven years for an unspecified crime.

His wife asks Matsumura to drive around the city and attempts to show him how much things have recovered, suggesting that they can now put the past behind them and start over. But the man remains sullen and grumpy. He’s afraid to go home, afraid to face the neighbours worrying if they know what he did and that he’s been in prison. But most of all he’s afraid to face his children, the youngest of which he’s never met. The kids have been teaching themselves to say “Welcome home, Daddy,” in Mandarin believing he’s been in China all this time which the wife has to explain before they get there. The man tells his wife he understands if she doesn’t want him back, but she assures him that the children are excited as is she to start their new life together. Nevertheless, though they’ve been eagerly practicing, the older two children simply freeze when confronted by this anxious stranger who turns around to leave again feeling as if he doesn’t have the right to come back here after all only for the youngest one to suddenly pipe up with the phrase note perfect. It’s this kind of scene, getting people to where they need to be physically and emotionally, that seems to make Matsumura’s job worthwhile. In essence, he’s ferrying people towards the cheerful post-war future his cute yellow cab represents while driving round the rapidly changing city wondering who it is that’s going to end up in the rearview mirror today.

Title song (no subtitles)

Vendetta of a Samurai (荒木又右衛門 決闘鍵屋の辻, Kazuo Mori, 1952)

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During the American Occupation, period dramas were frowned upon, the occupation forces apparently fearing that they might encourage the latent feudalism in Japanese society. Released immediately before the Occupation’s end, Kazuo Mori’s Vendetta of a Samurai (荒木又右衛門 決闘鍵屋の辻, Araki Mataemon: Ketto Kagiya no Tsuji), not to be confused with the director’s similarly titled Samurai Vendetta from a few years later, is a suitably revisionist piece interrogating the legacy not only of the samurai but the samurai movie in demonstrating, quite poignantly for the contemporary audience, that the rigid and austere codes of a warrior class did nothing but create sadness which forced good men to sacrifice true friendship in service not even of an ideal but simply an agreement. 

To signal his intent, Mori opens with a bombastic sequence shot in the fashion of pre-war jidaigeki, all booming speeches and clashing swords before a voiceover cuts in to tell us everything we know of the events in play is wrong. The legends surrounding the battle at Kagiya Corner tell us that Jinza (Takashi Shimura) was a bad man, and that Mataemon (Toshiro Mifune) killed 36 that day, but in reality Jinza was kind and noble and in fact the two men were good friends while Mataemon in reality struck down only two enemies which is in any case much more plausible if perhaps less exciting. As the classic chanbara scene fades, we return to the modern city of Ueno in Iga which in some respects remains unchanged further emphasising the “reality” of the brief 17th century conflict. As we learn, a man called Matagoro (Minoru Chiaki) has poked a hole through the samurai order in killing the brother of a young man called Kazuma (Akihiko Katayama), and so a lot of people have to die to eradicate the corruption of his transgression.

Boasting a script by Akira Kurosawa, the action flips between Mataemon, brother-in-law of Kazuma, and his men waiting for the arrival of Jinza and Matagoro inside a small inn, and the circumstances which brought them to this point. Mataemon is duty bound to support Kazuma who is really just a boy forced to seek revenge because they are family though there does not seem to be much heat in his desire for justice against Matagoro. Jinza, by contrast, is positioned on the opposite side solely because he is affiliated with a high ranking Hatamoto who is protecting Matagoro. Yet the two men are good friends each resigned to their fates and in full knowledge of how the samurai world works. The have no quarrel with each other, but are forced into mortal combat because of a complex network of loyalties and obligations that can only be satisfied with blood. 

“What is the meaning of this violence?” an imperious official asks, receiving no answer only a mild plea for a little more time. “Being a samurai, what a funny thing,” Mataemon laments to himself reflecting on the fact he must now kill or be killed by his friend for no real reason but simply because things are the way they are. Jinza meanwhile agrees, “Being warriors, what a misfortune,” as the pair calmly discuss the inherent hypocrisies which define their lives wherein all that really matters is one’s proximity to the shogun. That’s one reason the nervous Mago (Daisuke Kato) has joined the mission for revenge, his loyalist father a former tutor to the lord and keen to show their fealty but also hoping to advance their fortunes through a successful vendetta. 

Mago isn’t the only one who’s scared. The inn keeper is visibly shaking. He didn’t really want to be ground zero for a samurai duel today and is presumably worried not just for his safety but for the repercussions of offending his guests and damage to his property. A crowd gathering around the fighting, which includes the wealthy merchant brother-in-law of Matagoro who declared himself unafraid of a few rural bumpkin samurai, remarks on the smell of blood in the air seemingly both horrified and excited by the spectacle though even that is thin on the ground. No grand duel, Mataemon merely strikes his friend down before the battle begins, thereafter coaching the young Kazuma to overcome his fear and claim his revenge despite the bloody ugliness of the task. Yet in the end all there is is fear and futility, along with still more duty and the promise of more blood to come.  

Tokyo Sweetheart (東京の恋人, Yasuki Chiba, 1952)

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It appears that even as early as 1952, some people were doing “very well, thank you” despite the suffering going on all around them. Then again, the heroes of Yasuki Chiba’s charming ensemble rom-com Tokyo Sweetheart (東京の恋人, Tokyo no Koibito) are relentlessly cheerful and likely wouldn’t use the word “suffering” to describe themselves, preferring instead to laugh at the foolishness of wealthy men and their petty squabbles while continuing to value what is honest and genuine above greed and insincerity.

At least, there’s a minor irony in the fact that Akazawa (Hisaya Morishige) makes his living selling pachinko balls, a a source of elusive hope that’s brought ruin to millions. His mistress, Konatsu (Murasaki Fujima), exclaims that when you’re doing well a ring or two is nothing, trying to manipulate Akazawa into buying a 500,000 yen diamond from the jewellers’ downstairs. Akazawa can afford to buy it, but he doesn’t really want to because he’s cheap and greedy. Later we’re introduced to a friend of portrait artist Yuki (Setsuko Hara) who does caricatures on the street corner below the office and hangs out with the three shoeshine boys opposite. Harumi (Yoko Sugi), a sex worker, has fallen ill presumably from tuberculosis. They only need 500 yen daily for her living expenses and medicine, but the only way they can hope to come up with it is by getting a large amount of people to part with a small amount of money which they are all willing to do as an act of solidarity. 

In rather farcical turn of events, the jeweller’s has commissioned a fake ring to display in the window for security purposes while they keep the real one in the safe. Konatsu suggests a complex plan to the jewellers of getting Akazawa to buy the diamond but giving him the fake which she will then return and pocket difference. Only Akazawa has the same idea, or rather he only wants to buy the fake one because Konatsu won’t know the difference and he doesn’t think she’s worth the expense of the real one. When he ends up with both rings, Akazawa’s wife, Tsuruko (Nijiko Kiyokawa), makes him give the fake one, which is actually real, to the tea girl, Tama, who wants to sell it, even if it is fake, to help Harumi not only with her illness but to escape sex work. The boys tell her she’s being selfish and naive. If Harumi had any way of escaping sex work she would have done so years ago, there’s no real hope for her now. “A shoe can be repaired,” one of the boys sighs, “but I’m not so sure about her.”

In some ways, it seems as if the genuineness of the ring is unimportant. The two are often mistaken for each other and few can tell the difference. After all, if you like it, what does its supposed authenticity matter and what does that really mean anyway? It does, however, seem to matter to Yuki who later says that she thought the film’s most genuine person, Kurokawa (Toshiro Mifune), was “gaudy and slick” when they first met because he was wearing a tacky tie pin and ring which stand out a mile to her as “fake”. Kurokawa in fact makes the replica jewellery displayed in front windows and dresses in that way as a kind lived brand though he does not necessarily approve of his own occupation. He exceeds expectations when he tracks the gang down in order to pay back some money Yuki had lent him when the conductor couldn’t give him change for his bus fare, as well as treating the shoeshine kids to ice creams and warning off the creepy yakuza type who keeps trying to bother Yuki for dates.

But the contradictions are brought to the fore when Harumi’s health declines and Yuki decides she ought to call the estranged mother to whom Harumi had written a comforting letter stating that she’d married and was living happily in Tokyo, enclosing a photo of herself and Kurokawa one of the shoeshine boys had taken on his toy camera. Yuki wants Kurokawa to pose as the husband so the mother won’t be so upset, only for him to point out that she now asks him adopt a fake persona after taking him to task for confusing people with his “fakes”. Again, this false comfort does seem to bring genuine relief to the mother even if as Kurokawa suspects she’s seen right through their ruse suggesting that authenticity of feeling is the only kind that matters.

Akazawa and his wife, meanwhile, bankrupt themselves trawling the river looking for the lost “genuine” ring sinking to all new depths of absurdity as even Tsuruko dons a diving suit and goes in to look herself. Unfortunately, all they find is a single pachinko ball. There is something quite abrupt about the sudden tonal shift from Harumi’s death bed to the gang laughing away at the foolishness of Akazawa and his wife, the boys convinced that Yuki and Kurokawa are now a couple though they never really enjoy much of a romantic resolution. Kurokawa lives a long way out of town and his home is surrounded by rubble and empty lots, signs of post-war devastation still not fully cleared away though Yuki and the boys, presumably war orphans, remain endlessly cheerful even as the extreme irony of Kurokawa’s rendition of Moon Over Ruined Castle washes over them. They do at least have each other and the strength of their community, living honest and genuine lives every day in contrast to men like Akazawa chasing pointless yet shiny trinkets and falling straight down the plughole themselves.

A Wife’s Heart (妻の心, Mikio Naruse, 1956)

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“We’re too late for everything these days,” mutters an overly cheerful geisha whose behaviour is becoming ever more erratic. A sense of fatalism, that everything has already been decided and there is no real escape from the misery of life, hangs over much of Naruse’s filmmaking even if his heroines often do their best to rail against it and on occasion succeed. Kiyoko (Hideko Takamine), the heroine of A Wife’s Heart (妻の心, Tsuma no Kokoro), finds herself faced with just this dilemma while considering which side of a generational divide she might be on and whether she has the power to escape from her disappointing life to chase emotional fulfilment. 

We can see the literal distance between herself and her husband Shinji (Keiju Kobayashi) in the opening sequence as he stands in a vacant lot at the back of their property and she firmly within the domestic space hanging washing. Yet for all that she seems excited, perhaps even a little giddy as they plot their escape together through planning to turn that vacant space into a cafe in an attempt to fend off the economic changes ravaging their town and wider society of Japan in the mid-1950s. Out and about on his bike, Shinji looks anxiously at the construction of a new pharmacy much larger than his own and with flashy modern signage. Their business is failing and they don’t know how to save it so the cafe is their way out and also a break with the depressing past represented by Shinji’s grumpy mother, Ko (Eiko Miyoshi), who is predictably dead against the cafe idea. 

The new business, in its way, is also a stand-in for the child they don’t have and a means for Kiyoko to find domestic fulfilment in a society ruled by motherhood. This one reason that the sudden arrival of her sister-in-law Kaoru (Chieko Nakakita) with her small daughter Rumiko causes so much disruption. Kaoru has fulfilled the social obligations which Kiyoko has not and quickly insinuates herself within the house, taking over the domestic space as symbolised by her otherwise trivial action of putting back a pair of nail clippers in the place she sees fit rather than their usual home. Yet she does this in part because her husband, Zenichi (Minoru Chiaki) who left the family to become a salaryman in Tokyo, is so obviously unreliable and appears to have not for the first time lost his job while employed at a company possibly involved in something untoward. On getting wind of Shinji’s plans to open a cafe, Zenichi announces he’s thinking of opening one himself and gets his mother to put pressure on the couple to give him the money they borrowed for their dream project.

It’s the loan that in part allowed Kiyoko to consider life beyond her marriage in reuniting with the still unmarried brother of her best friend Yumiko (Yoko Sugi). Kenkichi (Toshiro Mifune) is everything Shinji is not, handsome, well dressed, and with a good, middle-class job working at a bank. On a visit to her relatives, Kiyoko’s aunt remarks that everyone wanted to marry her provoking a slight twinge of pain in Kiyoko’s face. Mother-in-law Ko arranges marriages and it’s likely she arranged the one between Kiyoko and her son and that Kiyoko likely agreed out to of social obligation under the rationale that Shinji was a good catch as the proprietor of a successful business. The implication is that if, like Yumiko, she had held out a little longer she probably would have fallen in love and married Kenkichi. As the atmosphere in the family home grows ever more toxic, she grows closer to him yet at least in part as a symbol of the path not taken, what her life may have been like if only she had resisted and claimed a little more freedom for herself. 

Ko has also arranged a marriage for youngest daughter Sumiko (Akemi Negishi) who asks her if all of her matches were happy. An indignant Ko replies that only one or two have split up, but as Sumiko points out just because a couple stays together does not mean they are happy. “Women don’t have the courage, they just give up,” she remarks implying that she, as a representative of the younger generation, might be less minded to simply accept a disappointing situation in the same way as someone of Kiyoko’s age may feel she had to. For these reasons Kiyoko is torn. Yumiko remarks that she and Shinji didn’t even particularly like each other when they married and perhaps remain indifferent to each other now. The cafe may have brought them closer as a couple, but now it’s causing a rift in the wider family while also offering Kiyoko the faintest glimmer of an escape route. When she returns to the cafe where she was learning the ropes as a part-time employee, much to Ko’s chagrin at losing a domestic helper, it’s clear that she’s doing so in part to have a means of supporting herself as she leans closer to the idea of leaving Shinji. 

But for all that it seems unlikely that she has the courage, as Sumiko put it, to break with the traditional social codes of feminity by leaving a husband who was not really bad but that she did not love and made her unhappy. In rebellion, Shinji has an indiscretion with a local geisha who goes missing on the way home from a hot springs and is later found dead having taken her own life because she was trapped in a bad relationship with her husband. The implication is that this is the only way many women find to escape from their dismal circumstances and may soon present itself to Kiyoko if she cannot find a way to reconcile herself to her life with Shinji or find the confidence to leave it. The enemy is the increasingly outdated institution of arranged marriages as advocated by the austere Ko who refuses to hire maids while believing herself entitled to the free labour of her daughters-in-law, and the patriarchal social codes of a modernising nation in which Shinji can have his dalliance with a geisha and his wife is expected to put up with it, but merely being seen walking with a man not one’s husband provokes gossip and jealousy. 

When Shinji implies he suspects her of having an affair with Kenkichi, he tells her that she’s free to follow her heart and he understands if she chooses to leave him but of course by telling her this he seals her fate by making it almost impossible for her to do so. The couple repairs itself, but the resolution is far from comfortable as it becomes clear that each is essentially resigning themselves to misery because of social convention vowing that they’ll build their cafe in the next season though it seems like a dream destined to go unfulfilled while the institution of Rumiko left behind in the family superficially fills the void it was designed to fill. The fades to black between scenes seem to echo an exhalation of bleakness as the interrupted thought of Kenkichi’s dangerous “Kiyoko…” as an admission that the prospect of escape is only ever a torturous fantasy and a heart is something that must be sacrificed in the name of conventional success. 

The Lost World of Sinbad: Samurai Pirate (大盗賊, Senkichi Taniguchi, 1963)

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Seemingly drawing influence from the series of Arabian fantasy films from Hollywood, Senkichi Taniguchi’s Lost World of Sinbad: Samurai Pirate (大盗賊, Dai Tozoku), sees the director reunite with Toshiro Mifune who had made his debut in the director’s Snow Trail which could not be more different from this crowd-pleasing adventure movie. The film is loosely based on the life of 16th century merchant Luzon Sukezaemon who eventually fled to Cambodia after all his possessions were seized by Hideyoshi Toyotomi and he was condemned on some trumped up charges.

The film’s opening scenes perhaps reflect this incident as Luzon (Toshiro Mifune) is branded a pirate and set to be burned at the stake, narrowly escaping after bribing an official with drugs. Resentful, Luzon decides he might as well become a pirate after all as he’s pretty sick of Japan and fancies seeking his fortune on the open seas only his ship is quickly destroyed in a storm and all his crew killed while the treasure he was carrying is seized by the fearsome Black Pirate (Makoto Sato). Washing up in a mysterious place aesthetically a mashup between South East Asia and the Middle East, Luzon is cared for by a hermit and then becomes embroiled in intrigue on finding out that the tyrannical king has been seizing local women in exchange for unpaid taxes and imprisoning them within his harem.

Luzon’s dreams are for riches and status so his sudden discovery of a love of justice is a bit of a surprise, but then he’s also most interested in the princess Yaya (Mie Hama) because he spotted one the necklaces from his treasure chest around her neck which suggests she might have a lead on the Black Pirate. Princess Yaya is engaged to a prince from the Ming kingdom which threatens a wider kind of geopolitical destabilisation should anything go wrong with this marriage which is a distinct possibility seeing as the corrupt Chancellor (Tadao Nakamaru) has been colluding with an evil witch to kill the king and seize the kingdom.

Rather than a pure pirate movie the film contains fantasy elements such as the presence of a Western-style castle which is clearly modelled on the one from Disney’s Snow White along with a weird hermit whose powers are weakened every time he sees an attractive woman. It is not, however, the kind of tokusatsu the English title bestowed by the US release implies as it contains no real monsters instead focussing its special effects on the magic used by the witch, who can turn people to stone with her eyes, and the hermit who can turn himself into a fly or disappear in a puff of blue smoke. Despite the prominent inclusion of SFX master Eiji Tsuburaya these effects are repeated several times are really the only ones featured in the film. 

In any case, what’s in play is famous merchant Luzon’s redemption arc in which he recovers the treasure but gives it back to the people, symbolically abandoning his dreams of wealth and status for something a little more community minded in vowing to sail the seven seas pursuing justice throughout the world. Having been a victim of authoritarianism in Japan, he rises up against tyranny abroad while teaming up with a group of local bandits and several times proudly proclaiming himself as Japanese though in a movie conceit everyone speaks his language including the Black Pirate who is later exposed as a snivelling fool tricked by the Chancellor on the promise of a chance to marry the Princess Yaya. Most of the derring do is reserved for the final sequence in which Luzon and the bandits storm the castle to defeat the evil chancellor but the screenplay also packs in genre elements such as trap doors and secret dungeons which keep Luzon busy as he does his best to overthrow an oppressive regime if only to put the rightful king back on the throne in the hope that might be better. Taniguchi certainly makes the most of his elaborate sets and costumes, creating a sense of tempered opulence along Middle-Eastern themes while adding a touch of the mythic in the attempt to weave a legend around the real life figure of Luzon Sukezaemon as a bandit revolutionary selling dreams of freedom on the sea as a pirate more interested in justice than money in otherwise corrupt society.

The Sands of Kurobe (黒部の太陽, Kei Kumai, 1968)

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Kei Kumai’s three-hour epic of human engineering The Sands of Kurobe (黒部の太陽, Kurobe no Taiyo) opens with a titlecard to the effect that the film testifies to the courage of the Japanese people who brought the nation back to life after the war. Partly produced by Kansai Electric Power along with the production agencies of stars Toshiro Mifune and Yujiro Ishihara, the film is therefore somewhat conflicted, part bombastic celebration of Japanese engineering skill and ambivalent critique of the wilful decision to place success above all else including the welfare and safety of ordinary workers.

This critique is most evident to the flashbacks to the construction of Kuro 3 in 1938 which as many point out was conducted by the military under brutal and primitive conditions. The construction of the new Kurobe hydroelectric dam, by contrast, is a much more modern, enlightened affair in which workers have proper equipment and are not simply hacking at rocks with pickaxes wearing only a vest. But then as the conflicted Takeshi (Yujiro Ishihara) points out, it’s all effectively the same. Just because no one is pointing a gun at their heads, it doesn’t mean the men actually building the dam aren’t being exploited rather simply pressured by a vague notion of national good that they should be ready to lay down their lives. Could it be that “prosperity” is worse thing to die for than “patriotism”, especially when it appears as if your employer cares little for your physical wealth and economic wellbeing simply pledging that they will support the families of men killed during the dam’s construction. 

That there will be deaths seems inevitable. The man placed in charge of building a tunnel through the mountain, Kitagawa (Toshiro Mifune), is haunted by the vision of a man falling from a cliff that he witnessed when they first hiked to the dam site. He originally described the project as “crazy” and wanted to resign but was convinced to stay on. Kitagawa is himself fond of insisting on safety first where others are minded to cut corners, but also troubled by domestic issues in the film’s sometimes insensitive use of his daughter’s terminal leukaemia as a mirror for the dam project in considering what is and isn’t possible through human endeavour. The suggestion is that Kitagawa wants to believe the miracle of the dam is possible because needs to keep believing in a scientific miracle that can save his daughter, though obviously even if it is ultimately possible to build this dam that’s designed to fuel the post-war rocket to economic prosperity there are limits and unfortunately decades later we have still not found a cure for cancer though treatment may be more effective. 

Takeshi meanwhile has a similar battle with his hard-nosed father whose devotion to the dam project he describes almost like an addiction, suggesting that he values nothing outside of tunnelling and is willing to sacrifice everything in its name including the lives of himself and others. A flashback to to 1938 reveals that he asked his own teenage son to place dynamite and inadvertently caused his death though lax safety procedures which is the understandable reason why his wife eventually left him taking Takeshi with her. But the strange thing is for all his original opposition, Takeshi too is later captivated by the immensity of the challenge if also wary that the workers are falling victim to the same sickness as his father and are still being exploited by those like him who expect them to offer up their lives while paying them a pittance and complaining when the project does not proceed along their schedule. 

The almost nationalistic, bombastic quality of the film seems at odds with some of Kumai’s previous work save the discussion of the building of the 1938 tunnel though this largely serves as a contrast to imply that this time is different because they’re doing it for love of country rather the forced patriotism of the militarist past. Kitagawa justifies himself that if they don’t build the dam, economic prosperity will stall, companies will go bust, and people will lose their jobs but it seems somewhat hollow in the knowledge many men are certain to die while building this dam. Kumai undercuts the bombast with a series of scenes shot like a disaster movie in which supports collapse and the tunnel floods, or men are hit by falling rocks, eventually closing on an ironic Soviet-style statue dedicated to the labour of the workers that seems to question the immense loss of life along with the destruction of the natural beauty of Mount Kurobe but cannot in the end fully reconcile himself, torn between a celebration of human endeavour and its equally human costs. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Throne of Blood (蜘蛛巣城, Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

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In many ways, the underlying theme in Akira Kurosawa’s films of the 1950s is that we are incapable of knowing ourselves and are, as a forest spirit remarks in Throne of Blood (蜘蛛巣城, Kumonosu-jo), afraid to look into our own hearts and admit our darkest desires. In adapting Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Kurosawa is less interested in the pull of ambition than the insecurity that drives it along with the inability to transcend himself that precipitates the hero’s decline. 

Indeed, after Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) and his best friend Miki (Minoru Chiaki) ride into the misty forest domain of the witch-like seer who ominously turns her spinning while offering a moral lesson that neither of them heed, they sit on the ground and laugh about what they’ve heard. Yet as Washizu partly admits the old woman revealed something of himself to him in that she echoed a dream of which he was unwilling to speak. Miki asks what warrior would not want to be placed in charge of a castle, but for Washizu it’s almost a primal need to prove himself in surpassing other men. Miki, by contrast, is not so nakedly ambitious but he doesn’t really need to be because he has a son. Washizu has no heir, his line will end with him and so he has only this life to make something of his name. 

Having no heir also undermines his sense of masculinity, just as it undermines the femininity of his wife, Lady Asaji (Isuzu Yamada), who as a woman now likely too old to bear a child may fear for her position. Kurosawa styles Yamada’s face as a perfect noh mask while she delivers her lines with the intonation of noh theatre all of which lends her a fairly eerie presence which only deepens as she descends into the darkness and back out again hovering like a ghost. She is in a sense perhaps already dead if not otherwise possessed by some malignant spirit as she urges her husband on in their dark deeds like a demon on his shoulder even going so far as to present him with the spear he will use to murder his lord, the ultimate act of samurai transgression. 

Yet as Lady Asaji points out, the present lord killed the lord before him for the right to sit on the dais. When the lord comes to stay with them on a pretext of hunting while preparing to launch an attack on a potential rival, the couple are moved into a room previously inhabited by a retainer who’d tried to mount a rebellion but was defeated. He took his own life and the room is still stained with his blood which covers both walls and floor. Washizu ought to realise that this is his fate too, but deep down he wants the prophecy to be true, which it is if more in the letter than the spirit. Would he have done it if he had not met the forest spirit, or would he only idly have thought of it but never followed through? It’s not something that can be known, but his eventual failure is born more of his inability to accept this side of himself than it is the price of ambition in itself. “If you’re going to choose ambition choose it honestly with cruelty” the forest spirit later advises, and Washizu might have been more successful if had he done so earlier. 

Then again, the world he lives in is as Lady Asaji describes it a wicked one in which betrayal is an all but inevitable certainty. Washizu insists that Miki is his friend, and that making Miki’s son his heir satisfies the prophecy while binding him to him so that he cannot rebel even if he were minded to. But Lady Asaji assumes that Miki is ambitious too, suggesting that he may strike first or report his treachery in the hope of personal advancement. For the prophecy to come true, someone has to betray the lord though it need not have been either of them but there can be no trust or friendship in this world of fierce hierarchy and internecine violence. 

Both men should perhaps have realised that when they were trapped riding around the eerie lair of the forest spirit with its mists and cobwebs not to mention heaps of piled skeletons still in their armour all victims of ambition and the spirit’s false promises if also echoing the legacy of wartime folly. “Look upon the ruins of the castle of delusion” the noh chant that opens and closes the film intones, warning of illusionary riches and the price of deluding oneself along with the destruction wrought by those unable to break free of the spider’s web of human desire. 

Throne of Blood screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 21st February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Sanjuro (椿三十郎, Akira Kurosawa, 1962)

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Adapted from a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo had taken place in a world of collapse in which the foundations of the feudal order had begun to crack while the disruptive allure of hard currency had left ordinary people at the mercy of gang intimidation in place of exploitative lords. A quasi-sequel or perhaps more accurately termed a companion piece, Sanjuro (椿三十郎, Tsubaki Sanjuro) by contrast, takes place in a world that should be peaceful and orderly but suggests that the corruption was there all along and tolerated to the extent of being coded into the system. 

The accused man, Mutsuta (Yunosuke Ito), says as much at the film’s conclusion explaining that he meant to deal with the matter “more discreetly” after amassing incontrovertible evidence he could he could offer to his superiors in the capital if only his hot-headed nephew and the idealistic young samurai with him hadn’t jumped the gun by naively thinking they could expose conspiracy by force of will. This time around, the wandering ronin who gives his name as Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune) finds himself adopting a fatherly position trying to convince the youngsters to think before they act. Overhearing their conversation, he explains to them that they have mostly likely been misled, Mutsuta is innocent and his attempt to warn them off well-meaning while the superintendent Kikui (Masao Shimizu) is the real villain and almost certainly intends to have the lot of them bumped off before they figure out what’s really going on. 

Unlike Yojimbo, Sanjuro takes place entirely within samurai society which ought to be an orderly place where everyone follows the same code and does their best to act honourably. This sense of stability is reflected in Kurosawa’s composition which leans closer to the classicism of the historical drama than the windswept vistas of the lonely ghost town in Yojimbo, and by the contrast so often drawn between the wandering ronin and the young samurai who are shocked by his rough way of speaking and wilful rejection of the politeness with which they have been raised. As a captured prisoner points out, Sanjuro has a sarcastic manner and a tendency to insult where he means to praise which further fuels the doubt some have in him, unsure whether they can really trust this “outspoken and eccentric” drifter fearing he will simply sell himself to the highest bidder and betray them. Mutsuta sympathises with this to some degree, forgiving the boys for having thought him a villain but lamenting that his long face has often got him into trouble. They thought he was the bad guy because he looked like one and trusted Kikui because he looked honest, laying bare the childish superficiality soon corrected by the well honed instincts of the veteran Sanjuro. 

It’s this superficiality that also leads them to dismiss the advice of Lady Mutsuta (Takako Irie) as “hopelessly naive” while only Sanjuro can see that she has a full grasp of the situation at hand and accepts her admonishment that he has the “bad habit” of killing too easily when another solution may be available. When the boys catch one of Kikui’s henchmen they suggest killing him because he’s seen their faces, but Lady Mutsuta decides to invite him into their home, assuring him he won’t be harmed and even giving him one of their fancy kimonos to wear. The man seems to have been won over by their hospitality, sometimes emerging from the cupboard where he is (voluntarily) imprisoned to offer a word of advice along with a defence of Sanjuro having observed him and figured out that he is a good man with an admittedly gruff manner that makes him a bad fit for conventional samurai society. “He would find it too confining here,” Mutsuta agrees, “he wouldn’t wear these fine garments or be a docile servant of the clan.”

In any case, the film doesn’t particularly reject samurai society only suggest that if you’re going to live within it you should follow the rules and if you can’t you should follow your own path as Sanjuro has been doing in a sense “freed” by his ronin status serving no master but himself. Lady Mutsuta had a point when she said that he glistened like a drawn sword, something he too concedes after facing off against his final foe, Heibei (Tatsuya Nakadai), whom he describes as much like himself another drawn sword in a society in which direct violence is inappropriate as the explosive spray of blood on Heibei’s all too matter of fact defeat makes plain. “The sword is best kept in its sheath” she reminds him, she and her husband both suggesting that this world is ruled by intrigue which is why Mutsuta hoped to handle the corruption “discreetly” though he won’t condemn the young men for their desire to enforce the rules of their society and stand up against corruption and injustice. Their rebellion has accidentally led to unnecessary deaths because of their youthful hot-headedness and tendency towards the simplistic solution of violence, but all things considered it has worked out well enough for all concerned. And so, his work done, Sanjuro is left to wander telling the boys not to follow him because he too is a disruptive and dangerous a presence in this codified world of peace and order in which a sword loses its value the moment it is drawn.

Sanjuro screened at the BFI Southbank, London as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Yojimbo (用心棒, Akira Kurosawa, 1961)

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“You’re not a bad guy after all” a previously hostile inn owner later concedes, finally seeing the method in the madness of a cynical wanderer who appears to take no side but his own but may in his own way be quietly fighting for justice in a lawless place. A samurai western set in an eerie ghost town beset by feuding gangsters whose presence has destroyed the local economy and lives of the frightened townspeople, Yojimbo (用心棒) subversively suggests that the world’s absurdity is best met with nihilistic amusement and healthy dose of irony. 

When the confused hero who later gives his name as Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune) wanders into town, he is surprised to see a stray dog running past him with a human hand in its mouth. This is indeed a dog-eat-dog society in which a petty dispute between gang members has forced the townspeople to hide behind closed doors. The streets are empty and silent until the town’s only policeman darts out and requests a “commission” for recommending Sanjuro offer his services as a bodyguard to either of the two factions suggesting that brothel owner Seibei (Seizaburo Kawazu) is on the way out and upstart Ushitora (Kyu Sazanka) is the best bet. But Sanjuro does not particularly like the look of Ushitora’s gang which as is later revealed is largely staffed by desperate disreputables, convicts, and murderers. 

Sanjuro’s response is to laugh. He makes his money by killing and there are lots of people in this town the world would be better off without. He plays each side off against the other, knowing that they each need a man of his skill to break the stalemate but is rightfully mistrustful of both. First approaching Seibei, he overhears his cynical wife Orin (Isuzu Yamada) suggesting that they agree to his high fee but kill him afterwards so his services will effectively be free. Sanjuro’s plan is to antagonise both sides so they wipe each other out, freeing the town of their destructive influence. With violence so present on the streets, the townspeople are afraid to leave their homes and the only guy making any money is the undertaker. 

The trouble also means they can’t host the local silk fair which usually stimulates the town’s economy demonstrating the counter-productivity of the gangsters’ dispute in that no silk fair means no delegates and empty gambling rooms meaning the gangsters aren’t making any money either. Yet it’s also clear that it’s gambling that has corrupted the town and is disrupting the social order. A symptom of an economical shift, gambling offers a new path to social mobility amid the fiercely hierarchal feudal society in which the possibility of distinguishing oneself in warfare has also disappeared. Thus the young man Sanjuro encounters on the way into town argues with his father, rejecting the “long life of eating gruel” of a peasant farmer claiming he wants nice clothes and good food and has chosen to burn out brightly. Kohei (Yoshio Tsuchiya), a young father has also succumbed to the false hope offered by the gambling halls and lost everything, including his wife, to a greedy sake brewer turned silk merchant and local mayor thanks to his enthusiastic backing of Ushitora. 

“I hate guys like that” Sanjuro snarls, but it seems he also hates petty gangsters and everything they represent. “This town will be quiet now” he remarks before leaving, as if stating that his work here is done and the real purpose of it was clearing out the source of the corruption rather than taking advantage of the town’s plight for his own material gain. Yojimbo quite literally means bodyguard and is the service Sanjuro offers to each side interchangeably, but Sanjuro isn’t above betraying his clients or playing one off against the other. His final foe, Ushitora’s brooding brother Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai), wanders around with a pistol in his kimono as if to say the age of wandering swordsmen has come to an end but in the end is exposed as complacent in his superior technology, easily neutered by Sanjuro who even gives the gun back to him as if no longer caring whether he lives or dies merely amused to find out the answer much as he had been standing on a bell tower watching the factions pointlessly tussling below. Masaru Sato’s surprisingly cheerful score seems to echo his state of mind, seeing only humour in the absurdities of the feudal order and the futility of violence while Kurosawa’s camera roves around this windswept wasteland as Sajuro kicks the gates of hell shut and prepares to move on to the next crisis in a seemingly lawless society.

Yojimbo screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 18th & 23rd February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

I Live in Fear (生きものの記録, Akira Kurosawa, 1955)

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Which of us is “crazy”, the man who lives in fear or the rest of us who live in its denial? By 1955, a decade had passed since the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but even if the world seemed “peaceful” it was only superficial. The Korean War had “ended” in an uneasy truce only two years earlier and the world was already mired in a cold war which daily threatened to turn hot with both sides in possession of a nuclear deterrent. Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear (生きものの記録, Ikimono no Kiroku) asks us if we can really say a man is “insane” if his life is ruled by a rational anxiety and if it is our refusal to accept the threat he sees which eventually drives him out of his mind. 

Our guide is gentle dentist Harada (Takashi Shimura) who has a sideline as a mediator at the family court. The case he has been called in on one particular afternoon is that of the Nakajima family which is attempting to have the ageing patriarch, Kiichi (a near unrecognisable Toshiro Mifune), declared legally incompetent on account of his increasing paranoia about nuclear attack and latent radioactivity. A wealthy self-made man and foundry owner, Kiichi has frittered away vast sums on harebrained schemes to keep himself and his family safe but after a plan to build a bunker in a remote area had to be abandoned, he’s set his heart on moving everyone to Brazil where he believes they will be safer. 

The problem is partly one of changing times as Kiichi, “despotic and selfish” as his son describes him, attempts to railroad his family into a safety they do not want or need. His two legitimate sons now operate the foundry and their lives are dependent on it, which is not to say that they are dependent on Kiichi, but if he goes through with selling the the foundry to finance his new life it will leave them all high and dry. It would be, to a certain way of thinking, the ultimate paternal betrayal but in Kiichi’s mind all he’s trying to do is “save” his family from an invisible threat. 

That family, meanwhile, is one he’s already undermined through patriarchal selfishness in fathering a series of illegitimate children he is also supporting financially but has never legally acknowledged. The parents of the illegitimate kids are worried that if the family succeeds in having Kiichi declared legally incompetent, his wife will get her hands on the purse strings and they’ll be left out in the cold. Kiichi, meanwhile, has an old-fashioned view of filial relations and never considers that the other kids might not want to come with him either even if it’s unexpectedly nice of him to include them, or that inviting your two mistresses to live in the same house as your legal wife might be awkward for all concerned. 

On the face of it, the case is open and shut. If a man causes his family to suffer through frittering money away on drink or pachinko, they would approve the motion to give another family member legal control over his finances. So why is it taking them so long to decide if Kiichi is a liability to his family or not? The problem is, his fear is entirely rational. It’s only its extent which is the problem. It’s perfectly understandable to be afraid of the ebola virus or brain-eating amoeba, but we can’t afford to spend every minute of every day consumed by fear and so they retreat into the background anxiety of our lives while we try to go on living. Yet, could it be that Kiichi has it right and we’re merely living in denial, sleepwalking into a preventable disaster while he alone has a plan for survival? 

“No place is safe” Kiichi’s son-in-law exasperatedly explains to him after he has taken drastic and somewhat ironic action, a kind of scorched earth policy designed to force his sons to follow him into a new world of safety. Pushed over the edge, Kiichi gets a rude awakening, realising that it was perhaps selfish of him only to think of salvation for his immediate family when his actions will essentially throw his workforce under the bus. Belatedly, he promises to find a way to take them to Brazil too, never realising that people have their own lives that aren’t so easily uprooted. He thinks Brazil is safer because the currents of the world seem to blow ill winds over Japan, but there are already more than enough nuclear bombs lying in warehouses to destroy the planet several times over. 

In any case, Kiichi has already destroyed his family through his various transgressions. They don’t want to go in part because they don’t particularly like him, are sick of his gruff authoritarianism, and resent his tendency to make unilateral decisions on their behalf. Strapped for cash he tries asking the illegitimate kids to return some of the money he gave them, but they too are insecure in their positions and cannot trust that they will continue to be provided for if Kiichi is deposed. Meanwhile, when Kiichi falls ill the legitimate children are only too quick to start discussing the inheritance in the absence of a will. Perhaps Kiichi isn’t much more to them than a walking wallet, all of which lends a rather poignant quality to his continual attempts to protect his family from the nuclear apocalypse in fulfilment of his fatherly duty even as he wagers their economic security to do so. 

If Kiichi is a Cassandra prophesying the end of the world, we won’t be here to be sorry we didn’t listen, but Harada and other more rational minds are shaken by the intensity of his vision. They cannot say that he is “mad” even if his anxiety has consumed his life, but nor can they allow him free rein to pursue his plans because they do not concern only himself but greatly affect the lives of others. They are forced to wonder if it isn’t we who are “insane”, quietly living our lives while all these preventable threats hover in the background, ignored. Kiichi’s mistake was perhaps that he wanted only to be “safe” in an unsafe world, not to cure it of its dangers. Few us are actively trying to eliminate ebola or brain-eating amoebas, just as few actively opposed an increasingly nuclear society, powerless as we are and were in the face of a greater threat. Perhaps Kiichi was the sanest one of all, retreating into a world of madness and infinite safety in a delusional bubble of survival in an otherwise crazy world.

I Live in Fear screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 6th & 13th February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.