Kabuki Theater on Film

A lot of early Hollywood talkies look like filmed versions of stage plays, with a fairly static camera filming the action and a drawing room-like set. I recently watched a movie that made me think of a different kind of theater: Akira Kurosawa's Sanjuro.

Toshiro Mifune plays Sanjuro, a ronin in the late shogun period of Japan's history, so probably the mid-1800s. He happens on a group of samurai who are talking about one of the local officials, whom they believe is guilty of corruption. Sanjuro tells them that they're incorrect and that if they try to respond impetuously on their suspicion, they're going to pay a heavy price for it. Sure enough, there's a group of the local lord's men that have been sent to ambush these samurai. Sanjuro decides he's going to stay a while and help them.

Not that he has any reason to do so, it seems. The official, Mutsuta, whom the samurai had thought was corrupt is in danger, along with his wife and daughter. So Sanjuro devises a plan to save the wife and daughter first, before he can come up with a way to free Mutsuta and preserve everybody's honor, too. However, Mutsuta's wife and daughter don't like the idea that Sanjuro and the samurai might have to resort to violence.

Sanjuro is able to play both sides, since nobody but the samurai knows that Sanjuro is working with the samurai. The real corrupt cabal has a lacky named Hanbei who knows Sanjuro and offers Sanjuro a job working with the cabal, which Sanjuro uses to find out where Mutsuta is. Of course, he's in a heavily guarded compound, so Sanjuro is going to have to come up with a ruse to get the cabal's men to go elsewhere. Eventually we get to the climactic fight, which you can probably figure out how it's going to end.

Sanjuro is a technically well-made movie, but one that I have to admit left me cold. I think it's because of the staging of all those fight scenes. I mentioned kabuki theater in the title of the post, which I think holds because so much of the choreography seems for show. The way the characters enter and exit the frame in preparation for the fights looks implausible and obviously choreographed, if not as deliberately acrobatic as Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate. There's a good story in Sanjuro, but I can't help but think it's overshadowed by the way Kurosawa handled the many fight scenes.

Sanjuro is available on DVD from a pricey Criterion Collection release; it's the sort of movie that really ought to be on a box set of multiple Kurosawa works at a somewhat lower price per movie.