Not yet

I've mentioned on several occasions how I wound up with a substantial number of foreign films on my DVR that I don't always get around to watching before they expire. One that I did in fact watch is Akira Kurosawa's final film, Madadayo.

Tatsuo Matsumara plays Hyakken Uchida, a teacher of German at an all-boys school during the height of World War II. He's getting on in years a bit, but not yet so old that when he announces he's retiring to focus on his writing and the fact that he can live modestly off the proceeds of his writing, it's a shock to everybody. But retire he does, and he and his wife downsize.

Uchida is apparently one of those teachers who had an impact on his students, because all of those past students seem to admire him, to the point of coming to his house at the height of the war just to celebrate his birthday with a less-than-suitable feast because, well, you know there's a war on and the Japanese are inexorably losing. Part of that losing the the Americans' ability to carry out air raids on the Home Islands of Japan, and in one of those raids, the Uchidas' house is destroyed.

They're forced to move into a shack that's open to the elements, at least until the end of the war, when his still-admiring students look into finding a plot of land where they can move their professor and get him a better house. Also after the war, the students organize a better birthday party, which they call the "Not Yet" party (the film's title "Madadayo" means "not yet") because when they ask Uchida whether he's ready to die, he responds "Not yet!". The students are able to get a nice house built, as well as impressing on a neighboring landowner not to sell out to somebody who wants to build a house tall enough to block the sun from Uchida's house.

Madadayo is more a series of vignettes than a movie with a full plot, so the next portion of the film focuses on a stray cat that shows up at the Uchida place and basically adopts the professor and his wife. Uchida loves the cat, and is devastated when the cat goes missing in a rain storm, never to return. But everybody in the neighborhood drops everything to look for the cat in the hopes of finding it and bringing Uchida out of his depression.

Finally, we fast forward to when Uchida is about to celebrate his 77th birthday, in the early 1960s. He has one more "Not yet" party, although this one doesn't have quite the ending as the earlier parties. But then director Akira Kurosawa was in his early 80s when he made this movie, and obviously thinking himself about themes of growing old and looking back at life.

Madadayo has a fair bit to recommend it, but it's also not a perfect movie. The relative lack of a plot may not be suitable for everyone. More importantly, and I'm not the only person to have mentioned this in the reviews I read, but the segment with the missing cat goes on far too long. Indeed, the movie as a whole is 134 minutes, which is a bit too long. There's a resonance to a film like Goodbye Mr. Chips which is also about a teacher, but I also found myself thinking about Harry and Tonto which deals with the idea that the elderly still have something to offer us and a sense of dignity that needs to be preserved.

Maksim Gorky is turning Japanese

Another of the many foreign films I had sitting on my DVR was another Akira Kurosawa movie: The Lower Depths.

The opening credits mention it being based on a play by Russian playwright Maksim Gorky, although the action has been moved from early 20th century Russia to 19th century Japan. The action is mostly in a rooming house that looks a lot like it could substitute for the tenement neighborhood of Dodes'ka-den a dozen years later in Kurosawa's career. Osugi is a middle-aged woman who rents out alcoves around a large common area, the alcoves curtained off which is the only privacy the renters get.

Among the renters is an older tinker whose wife is terminally ill and everybody knows it; an alcoholic actor who's drunkien himself into a lack of ability to memorize lines; several men who gamble; and a thief Sutekichi (Toshiro Mifune) who fences the things he steals with Osugi's husband. Osugi likes Sutekichi more than her own husband, but she's also got a sister Okayo who develops feelings for him.

Into all this comes a much older man, Kahei, claiming to be a pilgrim traveling through the region. He has a bit of ability to put people at ease, and also to get in the middle of people's disputes and defuse things, but everybody also wonders where he's really what he's claiming to be. Everybody gets their day in the sun in terms of plot lines, although the biggest one involves Sutekichi since Mifune is the biggest star in the cast.

For me, The Lower Depths was a bit tough to come up with an assessment of, in part because of the lack of an overriding plot. I already mentioned Dodes'ka-den, which I watched first, and that was deliberate because there are certainly some similarities between the two films thematically. But The Lower Depths feels like it moves even slower, and is more philosophical.

Fans of foreign films will probably enjoy The Lower Depths, although if I were recommending Kurosawa I'd probably start off with something else, probably One Wonderful Sunday.

Clickety Clack

I've got quite a few foreign films on my DVR that I need to watch before they expire. One of those is the Akira Kurosawa film Dodes'ka-den.

The movie is, like Street Scene, a look at the various inhabitants of a poor neighborhood, although in this case, the residents are much, much poorer, basically on the edges of society in conditions much closer to a shantytown or the Brazilian favelas than a tenement. The movie's title comes from an onomatopoetic word for the sound that rail wheels make on a track. A young man lives with his single mother and they both seem to have substantial mental problems. She engages in very loud religious chanting, while the son goes off to "work" as a streetcar conductor, although none of it is real. The son prays for his mom to be granted intelligence by Buddha; left unmentioned is how the two of them survive.

We are then introduced to other inhabitants of the neighborhood, all of them poor, but some vastly poorer than the others:
One man makes hairbrushes by hand, supporting a wife and several kids, with the wife getting pregnant again. Eventually, the eldest son says he gets bullied by other kids at school saying that Mom is sleeping around and none of the kids are the dad's biological kids.
Two couples appear to be in an open relationship, in that the husbands, who both work menial jobs, come home and may or may not, depending on their moods, go home to the women who are their legal wives.
One kid begs for food, and then goes "home" to his father, who lives in the back of Citroën 2CV; not being able to cook the food properly, the kid eventually gets food poisoning.
Another woman is raising her adolescent niece, who is being pursued by an adolescent sake delivery boy. The woman's husband is an alcoholic. Eventually, the niece gets pregnant, leading to violence.
An old guy who worked as a silversmith is the sort of wise old man of the neighborhood, letting a thief take his cash when the thief inadvertently tries to steal his tools.

Eventually, the stories get resolved, more or less, although the movie runs at a slow pace and it takes a while for those stories to resolve.

Alicia Malone presented the movie as part of TCM's Imports, and mentioned in her outro that Dodes'ka-den is a movie that divides critics. It was a box-office failure in Kurosawa's native Japan, while some latter-day critics give it high praise. I tend towards the somewhat negative side. For me, that's largely because of the film's structure. If it had been written as a traditional anthology, with each story getting its own segment, I think it would work a lot better. But it's more like one of those ensemble cast movies, except that the stories don't work so well together.

But because of the decidedly mixed reaction, Dodes'ka-den is one you'll probably want to watch and judge for yourself.

Thoughts on Seven Samurai

I had Seven Samurai on my DVR from when it aired last on TCM as part of TCM Imports if memory serves. YouTube's cloud DVR only saves stuff for nine months, so it was about to expire from my DVR and I wanted to make certain to watch it and do a post on it before the expiration.

This is going to be a bit different from my normal posts, though, because I think most people more or less know the story of Seven Samurai, largely because Hollywood decided to remake it and set it in old Mexico as a western, calling it The Magnificent Seven. Indeed, director Akira Kurosawa wanted to make a movie reminiscent of the Hollywood western.

For me, part of the reason this post is not quite like my other movie reviews is that I'm not well-enough versed on Japanese cinema to recognize how famous the cast members are apart from Toshiro Mifune as Kikuchuyo, the crazy member of the samurai group that defend the peasant villagers from the bandits. Not knowing much of the cast means not having preconceived views about any of them, although I'll admit I probably have preconceived views about what to expect from director Kurosawa.

The movie is mostly good, but I have to admit that as with Raging Bull I don't know that I would put it in the "one of the greatest of all time" that a lot of critical lists put it in. Part of that is the fact that the movie is a shade over 200 minutes, and a pretty darn slow pace at that. The head of the samurai, the first one to be contacted by the villagers, goes out and assembles the rest of the group, which seems to take way too long, and then there's more infighting before the bandits finally attack. There's also a lot of subplots among the villagers. I think the movie could have easily been scripted so as to run at least a good hour less.

Kurosawa unsurprisingly gets a very good performance out of Mifune, and also unsurprisingly has quite nice black-and-white cinematography. Not that I'd want to live in 16th century Japan, but there's something about the presentation of the simple peasant life here that's appealing, even though these are desperately poor people being attacked by bandits.

If I wanted to recommend Kurosawa to people, I'd probably pick some of his other movies before Seven Samurai. But I can also see why some people really love it.

Kagemusha

A couple of years back, FXM had the Akira Kurosawa movie Kagemusha in the rotation. I recorded it, but never got around to doing a review on it before Dad and I moved and I had to get rid of the old DVR. Recently, FXM put it back in the schedule and I recorded it again. Since FXM runs most of their movies in the rotation a lot, it's getting a couple more airings in quick succession, with the first of those being tomorrow (Oct. 21) at 12:20 PM.

Kagemusha is set in a period of Japanese history I didn't know much about. I had heard about the Tokugawa era, a long era of peace and isolation from the early 1600s until the US Navy forcibly opened up the country in the 1850s (you may recall the movie The Barbarian and the Geisha set in the 1850s). Before that was a period of warlords and clan warfare. Takeda Shingen (Takeda is the surname) is the head of one of those clans; his brother Nobukado recently found a thief who was supposed to be put to death but who Nobukado realized bore an uncanny resemblance to Shingen, leading to Nobukado sparing him. This could somehow be useful.

Sure enough, it does become useful. Shingen goes off to war, besieging one of Tokugawa's castles. However he gets fatally shot. (Japan had known Chinese-style firearms for a few centuries, and about 30 years prior to the action in the movie, the Portuguese had introduced western-style firearms to Japan.) Before he dies, he tells his subordinates to keep his death a secret for three years. Nobukado figures that this is where that thief who's a doppelgänger would come in quite handy. Perhaps they can have the thief impersonate Shingen, since very few people know that Shingen actually died.

It seems like a daft idea, and of course there's the question of whether the thief even wants to do it. But it's not as if he has much choice, so he agrees to it. Enough excuses are put to the powerful that they're able to go along with it without much disbelief; it often seems to be the case in real life how much crap people are willing to put up with to try to get more power in the end. The one person who disbelieves at first is Shingen's grandson. Shades of The Emperor's New Clothes.

Things get a lot harder when Nobukado marches off to war. The thief probably doesn't know much about military tactics, so in theory can just let Nobukado make all the decisions. But in the fog of war in the era when leaders actually went off to battle, things happen, and the thief is forced to take command of some of the troops. He's surprisingly successful, but this is also a pyrrhic victory as his getting high on power ultimately screws up the whole plan to keep the real Shingen's death a secret....

Kagemusha shows up on FXM because of the arrangement in funding that got the movie produced. Kurosawa was filming for Toho in Japan, but fell short of funds to finish production. So Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas stepped in, convincing 20th Century-Fox to fund the rest of the project in exchange for the international distribution, which is why you see references to the international version of the movie. Coppola and Lucas also get executive producer credits.

As for the movie, I'm sorry to say I think it's something that wouldn't have any recognition if it didn't have Kurosawa's name tied to it. The print FXM ran was 159 minutes, although I've read that other prints are from 162 minutes to a restored version of 180 minutes. And that long run time is also rather slow in developing. This is material that I think really would have worked better in miniseries format or some other form of limited-run TV series instead of one long feature film. I think that people who don't speak Japanese (that includes me) could also benefit from more exposition about the period of Japanese history in which the film is set.

For anybody who doesn't know much about Kurosawa, there are quite a few of his movies I'd introduce them to first. But for people who have seen a bunch of his movies, or people who are into Asian warlord movies, they might like to give Kagemusha a try.

Drunken Angel

Some months back, TCM ran a day of films for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. Among the movies, I recorded Drunken Angel. Recently, I finally got around to watching it to do a post on here.

Nominally, the star is not Mifune, but Takashi Shimura. Shimura plays Sanada, a doctor who lives in a slum region of Tokyo that was probably poor even before all the devastation caused by World War II. The neighborhood has a festering open sewer that Dr. Sanada warns the children about. Also, beaten down by the unrelenting poverty of his neighborhood. Why couldn't he have gone into a more lucrative private practice like his classmate Takahama, he wonders?

One evening, into his practice comes Matsunaga (that's Mifune). Matsunaga claims to have injured his hand on a piece of nail protruding from a door. But when Sanada goes to extract it, he finds that it's actually a bullet, which implies that Matsunaga is part of the yakuza, since Japan's strict gun laws mean there's no way law-abiding people are going to get access to guns. But worse than that, Sanada discovers that Matsunaga has a bad nagging cough that's likely tuberculosis. Sanada suggests going to Takahama to get x-rays.

Eventually, we find out that Matsunaga had already gone to Takahama and the x-rays reveal a case of TB that, left untreated, is going to kill him in the not too distant future. We also learn that he's only temporarily the top dog in the neighborhood. He took that role over while the previous top dog, Okada (Reizaburo Yamamoto) spent four years in prison, and is on the verge of getting out. Matsunaga doesn't want to give that spot back to Okada.

Okada's looming freedom is also going to cause problems for others. Dr. Sanada's nurse, Miyo (Chieko Nakakita) was Okada's old girlfriend, and has absolutely no desire to go back to Okada. She is naturally worried that Okada is going to come looking for her, find her, and expect her to come back to him. Her family has a farm out in the country so she could probably go back there, but for whatever reason hasn't done so already.

Sure enough, Okada eventually does get out of prison. He approaches Matsunaga and finds that Matsunaga isn't intending to go back to the way things used to be, so Okada goes to the big boss. When they realize that Matsunaga has TB, they plan to use him as a sacrificial lamb. That's going to come when Okada's underlings recognize Miyo....

In some ways, Drunken Angel is one of those little movies that doesn't have a whole lot going on, at least not on the surface. But it's actually a fairly deep movie. Sanada and Matsunaga seem unlikely partners, but they both wind up on the edges of society, Matsunaga as a not very high up member of the yakuza, and Sanada only being a slum doctor. Both actors give very good performances as the story reaches its fairly obvious conclusion.

Drunken Angel has received a standalone DVD release courtesy of the Criterion Collection. That means it's rather pricey; I wish it could have been included in the Eclipse set of Postwar Kurosawa.

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.

One Wonderful Sunday

I've briefly mentioned One Wonderful Sunday once or twice before, and I finally got around to re-watching it off of Criterion's Eclipse Series box set of early Akira Kurosawa movies.

Yuzo (Isao Numasaki) is a young man who at the start of the movie is waiting for somebody. He's clearly in poor financial circumstances, as he sees a half-smoked cigarette on the ground and thinks seriously about picking it up to smoke. The person he's waiting for is his girlfriend Masako (Chieko Nakakita), and her arrival shames him into not picking up the cigarette even though, as he tells her, he hasn't had a smoke in three days.

This is Sunday, presumably their one day off during the week as it's postwar Japan and I think it wasn't uncommon to work 5-1/2 day weeks. The two plan to spend the day together... but there's one problem. Between the two of them, they only have ¥35 between them, which is a paltry sum. Yuzo clearly feels like he's not enough of a man for not being able to do right by Masako financially.

They start spending their day together, and immediately money -- or more accurately the lock of it -- crops up, as it's going to do again and again throughout the day. They see an open house for a new type of house construction. They'd love to have a place of their own, but even this sort of lower-quality build costs ¥100,000, or far beyond their means. They can't even afford to live on their own, Yuzo living with a friend and Masako living with her sister.

Still, the two try to have fun, but after a series of disappointments, they realize they've got just enough money to get tickets to the concert that includes Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. But just before they get to the ticket window, somebody buys up all the ¥10 tickets and decides to start scalping them for ¥15, right in front of the box office! And, having spent a bit of that ¥35 the couple started off with, they can't afford the higher price for the tickets.

One Wonderful Sunday is one wonderful movie, even though most people talk about it being one of Kurosawa's "lesser" movies. In some ways that's true, if only because on the face of it the movie isn't particularly big in scope. There's also one scene near the end where Masako breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience that a lot of reviewers have some difficulty with. (I didn't.) However, beneath the surface there's really a lot of subtle messages about love and hardship and what money can do to people even though we all need it. The movie is also a nice look at a Tokyo that probably doesn't exist any more.

I don't think that One Wonderful Sunday is available as a standalone DVD, but the Eclipse box set is in my opinion certainly worth it.

Stray Dog

So I watched Stray Dog over the weekend, having DVRed it when TCM ran it on Akira Kurosawa's birthday back in March. TCM lists it as being available from the TCM Shop, although being part of the Criterion Collection it's a bit pricey. In any case, since it is available, I'm comfortable doing a full-length post on the movie. And it's well worth watching to boot.

Toshiro Mifune playd Detective Murakami, a young police detective who joined the Tokyo force after serving in the Japanese army in World War II. The story begins with Murakami being distraught over the fact that he's lost his service weapon, a Colt pistol. This being Japan, firearms are pretty unknown outside the government and the yakuza, and another gun falling into their hands is a problem for Murakami. He's going to have to investigate, and he's desperate to find his gun before it's used for evil purposes.

He first goes to the larceny unit, where they've got huge files of all the known pickpockets, cross-indexed by age, sex, modus operandi, and so on. This leads Murakami to a woman who is probably just a fence. But he wouldn't know where to find the woman, so partnering Murakami on the case is the veteran Det. Sato (Takashi Shimura). Sato knows how things work, and can tell what Murakami is doing wrong in the investigation. Anyhow, the investigation quickly leads to the underworld, and Murakami is forced to wait and wait until a tout will take him to one of the gun lenders.

The case gets more urgent for Murakami when there are a couple of shootings, and Murakami, having found one of the bullets he fired at the practice range, is able to confirm that the shootings were committed with the gun that was stolen from him. Murakami feels incredibly guilty about it, and feels a personal responsibility in solving the case.

Eventually, the key witness is Harumi (Keiko Awaji), a chorus girl whose boyfriend is the gangster Yusa. Yusa can get Harumi nice things, in a time not long after Japan's total defeat in the war, when nice things are very hard to come by. But at what price will those things come?

Stray Dog is a very well-told story, and a very well-made movie. Watching the movie, I almost got the impression of Kurosawa wanting to show that he could do any genre, except for the fact that this came at the beginning of his career, when he wouldn't have had as much choice in projects. The opening scenes of Murakami losing his gun somewhere along the bus ride home reminded me very much of the early scenes of Pickup on South Street with Richard Widmark picking a woman's purse, although since the focus is on the victim here, we don't actually see who did it. But this and the first scenes of the investigation make me wonder whether the folks behind Pickup on South Street saw this one.

The story is also set at the height of summer, and the sweltering heat is almost a palpable character, inevitably giving way to thunderstorms just as the movie is about to reach its climax. You might think this is a cheap cliché, but Kurosawa has the genius to use this as a vital plot point later in the story. In addition to the heat, the other well-photographed thing is the Tokyo as it was in the late 1940s, just a few years after that war. A lot of the people live in pretty dire conditions which look even worse than what Hollywood was able to put on screen. Japan as it was, as well as a scene set at a baseball game, are interesting historical artifacts.

Ultimately, Stray Dog is a movie that would fit in well with the Hollywood noir cycle that was happening at the same time this movie was made. It's very accessible for people who might think having to sit through two hours of subtitles might be a slog. It's a shame that it's not better known.

The Bad Sleep Well

TCM is spending Monday morning and afternoon in Japan with a mix of Hollywood films about Japan, and actual Japanese films. Among the movies in the latter category is The Bad Sleep Well at 9:45 AM.

This movie starts off with a bang. The opening sequence is of the wedding of Yoshiko Iwabuchi (Kyoko Kagawa), the daughter of a wealthy industrialist/head of one of those large Japanese conglomerates (Masayuki Mori). She's getting maried to Koichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune), who is the executive assitant to Iwabuchi. It's a big wedding, and because of the nature of the man giving the bride away, it's a wedding that's attracted the elite of the Japanese business world as well as the equivalent of the tabloid press of the day. It all goes on like an elaborate show, but then the most elaborate part of all comes out: the wedding cake. And here is where the bang comes in. It's not a traditional wedding cake, but a cake shaped in the form of the corporate headquarters. And one of the windows of this corporate headquarters is very clearly marked, as it's the window from which a former mid-level type at the corporation have jumped to his death. That's something every bride wants at her wedding!

So there's a corruption investigation. There had been one in the past, which resulted in the police detective heading the investigation committing suicide, and thus the investigation having to be closed for lack of evidence. And now there are more suicides surrounding the current investigation. Nishi is able to stop one of the attempted suicides at which point he reveals a truth: his father was the detective who had conducted the old investigation. Not only that, but Nishi has good reason to believe that the suicides that have been going on are in fact not suicides, but murders! Nishi is out to get the evidence that will prove all of this, but of course that's not going to be easy. Especially because he's beginning to fall in love with Yoshiko.

Meanwhile, Yoshiko's brother Tatsuo learns what's going on and that Nishi pretty much married his sister under false pretenses. Tatsuo tries to shoot Nishi, but Nishi is able to escape. However, Dad also begins to figure out what's been going on, and pressures Yoshiko to reveal where her husband is hiding....

The Bad Sleep Well is an interesting movie, although it's also one I'd call difficult. Mostly, that's because you really have to pay attention to keep track of exactly what's going on. Perhaps that's because I don't know any Japanese; it might be a lot easier for a native speaker to follow the action. But it's also in part because the movie goes on and on and on, running nearly two and a half hours. It's probably a bit too long. Still, it's more than worth a watch. Akira Kurosawa directed, and I've always been a bigger fan of his contemporary movies than the samurai-era films he made. That having been said, if I were going to recommend a Kurosawa movie for somebody who hasn't seen any, I'd start not with The Bad Sleep Well, but something a lot simpler and more straightforward like One Wonderful Sunday.

The Bad Sleep Well is on DVD, but it's a Criterion Collection release, so it's a bit pricey.