Akira Kurosawa

THE FILMS OF AKIRA KUROSAWA

The iconoclastic filmmaker who put the Japanese CInema on the map is still going strong

By TOM SOTER

from DIVERSION, NOVEMBER 1991

Dubbed "Red Beard," he is a 19th-century Japanese doctor with an unusual approach.

"This girl is sick," he says gruffly to the 12-year-old patient's foster parent, a woman who runs a brothel. "I will take her."

"You will not!" screams the woman, who has been beating the girl for not doing her chores. "Help!"

Six or seven tough-looking characters turn up. "Who do you think you are?" cries one. "Sticking your nose where it's not wanted? Get out!"

Red Beard, a big man, strokes his beard slowly. "I'm a doctor. 1 come to see sick people." The toughs threaten him, but he is unfazed, warning them in turn: "You be careful, too. You'll kick off if you let the doctors at you. 1 won't kill you, but 1 might break a couple of arms and legs."

Suddenly, a fast-paced fight breaks out in which Dr. Red Beard uses karate and jujitsu to shatter limbs and crack skulls. When it's over, the medico examines the moaning victims, shaking his head. "Hmmm," he says to his assistant. "I'm afraid I went a bit too far. I should've been more careful. A doctor must not do such things."

Indeed. The scene is from Red Beard, director Akira Kurosawa's funny, fascinating, and moving film about physicians in a slum clinic who do whatever it takes to help their patients. It is typical of a filmmaker who often combines subtle humor with searing drama, and gripping social protest with hard-hitting action. His movies, ranging from dark parables of postnuclear destruction to gentle fantasies of family life, are all crafted with a style and sensibility uniquely his own. The 81-year-old Kurosawa is in the news these days because of Rhapsody in August,scheduled- for release next month, his 29th feature since 1943. It is his first film to star an American actor, Richard Gere, but what is most controversial is the subject: Rhapsody calls the atomic bombing of Nagasaki a terrorist act. "At one point or another," wrote The New York Times film critic Vincent Canby, "there is something in it to offend everybody." Kurosawa began shaking people up in 1951 when he put the Japanese film industry on the map with Rashomon. Contrary to expectations, that 88-minute examination of the subjectivity of truth took the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and established Kurosawa as a force in world,cinema.

Directors under the Influence
Since then, the director's effect on Hollywood has been as profound as Tinseltown's influence was on him: Filmmakers Howard Hawks, George Stevens, and John Ford may have . moved Kurosawa (who has adapted Shakespeare, Gorky, Dostoyevsky, and thriller writer Ed McBain), but he in tum inspired such directors as George Lucas (The Hidden Fortress became Star Wars); Sergio Leone (Yojimbo was remade as A Fistful of Dollars, the western that turned Clint Eastwood into a star); Martin Ritt (Rashomon became The Outrage, with Paul Newman); and John Sturges (The Seven Samurai was reborn as The Magnificent Seven with Steve McQueen); as well as screenwriter John Sayles (who used The Seven Samurai as the basis for the sci-fi film, Battle Beyond the Stars).

Born in 1910, the last of seven children, young Akira never dreamed of filmmaking. He loved American movies, especially such action-packed serials as Hurricane Hutch and The Iron Claw, but studied to be a painter. He found job prospects bleak, however, and later admitted, "I couldn't make a living that way .... Even a tube of red paint was usually too expensive for me." He studied calligraphy, swordsmanship, music, and theater. In 1935, desperate for work, he answered an ad for assistant directors at a local film studio. Told to write an essay on the deficiencies of, and possible cures for, the Japanese movie industry, he approached the task with the informed skepticism that would later become a hallmark of his films: "I thought to myself, if the defect is basic, how do you remedy it?"

Nonetheless, he wrote the essay and got the job, working on all facets of filmmaking, from set design anrl scripting to lighting and assistant directing. He loved it. "I was standing in the mountain pass," he recalled in his book Something Like An Autobiography, "and the view that opened up before me on the other side revealed a single, straight road." By 1943, after penning dozens of scripts, Kurosawa was ready to direct his first feature, Sanshiro Sugata, a remarkable debut that set the style and laid out the themes of much of his future work. The story depicts the spiritual and moral dilemmas of Sanshiro (Susumu Fujita) as he masters the art of judo. The visually striking climax, staged on a windswept, cloudy mountain, finds the young hero squaring off against the forces of darkness: a mustachioed character (Ryunosuke Tsukigata) who eschews traditional Japanese clothing for western-style suits.

East Meets West, Sort of
It was a jab at modernization, although Kurosawa always seemed to be ambivalent about both the East and the West. Fighting against complacency and corruption, but also respecting tradition, he quickly became a strange mixture of cultures, a man who took values, ideas, and techniques wherever he found them. During his youth, he once recalled, "everything came rushing in from abroad at an incredible rate. We all tried to absorb this as quickly as possible--western literature, painting, music, art. So it's all part of my makeup and comes to the surface very naturally."

That eclecticism helped him create a cinema that was typically Japanese in its concern for appearance, class, and tradition, but typically western in its obsessions with individuality and selfexpression. No wonder: Kurosawa's formative years as a filmmaker were postWorld War II, when a broken Japan was occupied by an American force promoting its own version of democracy.

The clash of cultural ideas led to arresting work: Stray Dog, about a young policeman (Toshiro Mifune) searching through a cross section of black-market Tokyo for his stolen gun; Rashomon, the visually stunning exploration of illusion; and Ikiru, a moving saga of a dying bureaucrat's (Takashi Shimura) search for meaning in life. All feature striking images, some that are impossible to forget: Throne of Blood's climax in which a forest moves and a man becomes a pincushion full of arrows; Ran's soundless montage of destruction, scored to woeful music; Ikiru's saddest, yet most life-affirming moment, when the dying Watanabe sits on a swing, watching the snow fall and sings the dirgelike, "Life Is Too Short. "

Although each movie is different, all are united by Kurosawa's favorite idea:the lonely hero fighting impossible odds or battling with himself and/or the illusions of the world in a quest for truth. The films, wrote Stephen Prince in The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, "caution against resignation in the face of social oppression and offer heroes whose rebelliousness is meant as a role model for the audience."

These Zen-like journeys of self reliance frequently involve an older figure and a novice because "I like unformed characters," the director noted in his autobiography. "This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still unformed myself. In any case, it is in watching someone unformed enter the path to perfection _ that my fascination knows no bounds. For this reason, beginners often appear as main characters in my films."

Mifune Also Rises
Chief among them, from 1948 to 1965, was Toshiro Mifune, a volatile, versatile presence who became an international star under Kurosawa's tutelage. His considerable characters range has included the young police officer, racked by guilt in Stray Dog; the blustering, cowardly rapist in Rashomon; the proud, ambitious, and terrified killer in Throne of Blood; the heroic, Errol Flynn-style general of The Hidden Fortress; the good man, obsessed with revenge but destroyed by his own humanity in The Bad Sleep Well; and the toothpick-chewing, unshaven samuraifor-hire in Yojimbo and Sanjuro.

"Mifune can safely take credit for smashing, almost single-handedly, the passive/impassive mask of tragedy image of the Japanese that lingered in the West since the silent days of Sessue Hayakawa," claimed Carlos Clarens in the Village Voice in 1984. "Whether impossibly noble or bestial, the Japanese were misrepresented all along as barbaric people. Mifune played on the occidental viewer's untapped reserves of identification by showing his race as both humorous and highly emotional, and he accomplished this feat with a system of grunts and glowers that were language at its most communicative."

Humor is key in Kurosawa, because comedy often reveals character, which is another major ingredient in the director's work. Yojimbo is a black comedy of violence, as Mifune's mangy samurai-for-hire sets about destroying an evil town because, as he says, "Better if all these men were dead. Think about it." Dodes' ka-den, a film about the illusions that help slum dwellers stay alive, is only bearable because of its quirky touches of humor. And the epic Seven Samurai is endlessly enjoyable not for the brilliantly staged battle scenes in the rain, but for the marvelous range of its seven characters, from the sardonic samurai (Minoru Chiaki) who chops wood for a living ("It's a lot harder than killing enemies," he remarks) to the rambunctious farmer's son (Mifune) who wants to be a warrior but doesn't know how.

Mifune in The Quiet Duel.

The Seven Samurai, which examines, among other things, the futility of heroism, finds Kurosawa at his best. The plot is simple: A pathetic village of farmers hires seven unemployed samurai to defend them against forty brigands. But the depiction is wonderfully complex, a miniature that could be taken from life, as high drama quickly turns to comedy, then tragedy, then pathos, and then back into comedy again. Through it all, there is an underlying hope in man's humanity, in his ability to understand and overcome the obstacles he faces. ''The Kurosawa hero is distinguished by his perseverance, by his refusal to be defeated," noted Donald Richie in The Films of Akira Kurosawa. Indeed, there is no better example than Kurosawa himself: Beset by career obstacles in a Japan reluctant to fund his work, he survived a suicide attempt in 1971 and continued making movies, often with foreign cofinancing. And if his later films have become more bitter and less hopeful, it is perhaps because Kurosawa loves mankind too strongly and too well. "I want to question the way we are going. Are we right?" he asked in a 1980 television documentary, despairing at what we are becoming and at his inability to change us for the better.

"In times of the most intransigent apathy, his challenge seems too great, or perhaps too simple," wrote British film critic Derek Malcolm in 1986. "He asks us to better ourselves, not with material possessions but by defining what is right and then doing it, at whatever the cost."