Review #842: 'Ran' (1985)

Ten years in the making, Akira Kurosawa's Ran took it's toll on director Akira Kurosawa. Following a highly successful career in the 1950's and 60's, Kurosawa fell out of favour with modern audiences and producers due to his traditional film-making styles and topics. Japan had experienced it's own New Wave, where directors used innovative techniques to look forward, rather than looking back. Eventually backed by Sidney Lumet, Kurosawa developed his labour of love, based on Shakespeare's King Lear, and made Kagemusha (1980) - a 'warm-up' for Ran - while developing the project. He storyboarded every scene with beautiful artwork, ensured that every costume was made by hand, and even built a castle to torch it down for the movie. On top of this, his wife passed away during filming (Kurosawa took only one day off work to mourn), and by the film's completion, Kurosawa was almost completely blind.

Such dedication and rigorous planning doesn't always work out, but Ran is Kurosawa's final masterpiece. The term 'epic' is thrown around far too often these days, but if one film could really be labelled as epic, it is Ran. Epic in scale, length and scope, it's a complex, exciting and bloody movie, capturing the tragedy of Shakespeare's play, and invigorating with it's Machiavellian intrigue. The ageing warlord Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai) decides to pass his throne to his eldest son Taro (Akira Terao) so he can spend his remaining years in peace. To his other sons, Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu) and the youngest Saburo (Daisuke Ryu), he leaves two large castles. Saburu objects, calling the decision folly and foreseeing instability, and is banished by his father for his loyalty.

Before Taro's backside has warmed his new throne, his wife Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada) is whispering doubts into his ear. With Hidetora still residing in the castle, Lady Kaede tells Taro that his crown is hollow and his men will never earn his respect until his father is removed. After Hidetora kills one of Jiro's men who was about to kill his fool Kyoami (Funeral Parade of Roses' (1964) Pita), Jiro banishes his father, who then seeks refuge with Jiro. But Jiro has plans of his own, and seeing Taro as a weak leader, pretends to side with Taro in preparation for a future betrayal, and also sends Hidetora packing. With nowhere to turn, the broken and increasingly senile old man wanders to the ruins of a castle he conquered in his warmongering days. But when Saburo hears of his brothers' betrayal and Lady Kaede's scheming, war begins to brew.

Kurosawa's precise planning pays off, as Ran is a gorgeous canvas of colours and scenery, to the extent that any scene could be paused, printed and hung on the wall as a piece of art. The costumes, a sumptuous blend of red's and yellow's, bring the battle scenes to life. Bodies litter the ground, streaming with bright red blood that give the movie a grim and apocalyptic feel, and when juxtaposed with Hidetora's mental decline, makes it feel like the world is literally crumbling around him. The acting is surprisingly subtle and subdued, especially when compared to Kurosawa's earlier works. Nakadai is outstanding as the lost old man, though he is helped by some impressive make-up, but the film belongs to Harada, whose ruthless conniving truly embodies Shakespeare's text. Quite simply one of the finest films ever made.


Directed by: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, Daisuke Ryû, Mieko Harada, Pîtâ
Country: Japan/France

Rating: *****

Tom Gillespie

Review #800: 'The Bad Sleep Well' (1960)

Akira Kurosawa's lambasting of Japan's post-war corporate culture, The Bad Sleep Well, is one of many collaborations with actors Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura and one of several of his film's rooted in the work of William Shakespeare. It's been somewhat unfairly overshadowed by the brilliance of those other films, but given the near-perfection of those movies, many of which regularly make those awful, generic 'top 100 movies' lists created by various magazines and websites, it's hardly surprising. But The Bad Sleep Well is one of Kurosawa's most ingeniously paced, clinically filmed and potently pessimistic movies.

Beginning with one of the most exceptional opening sequences in cinema, a crowd of journalists gather at the wedding reception of Nishi (Mifune) and Yoshiko (Kyoko Kagawa) attended by a host of corporate high-flyers. Yoshiko is the daughter of Corporation Vice President Iwabuchi (Masyuki Mori), whose company is facing scrutiny over suspected bid rigging and corruption. The press have gathered to witness the awkward toasts given by the various sweaty workers, delivered on a podium reminiscent of a witness stand. As the speeches are given, the wedding cake is wheeled in and revealed to be in the form of the corporate office building, with a single red rose protruding from the window in which Assistant Chief Furaya committed suicide from years earlier.

As a couple of higher-ups are arrested, Nishi steps in to reveal his plan of revenge. He has donned the disguise of a eager hopeful looking to marry himself up the corporate ladder, but is actually Furaya's son and has uncovered the trail of greed and corruption that led to his forced suicide. And all roads lead to Iwabuchi. Loosely based on Hamlet, The Bad Sleep Well is less faithful to the source material than Kurosawa's other Shakespeare adaptations. Working for the first time with his own production company, Kurosawa instead took the chance to voice his disgust at Japan's post-war capitalist takeover, where underlings are expected to take their own lives to save their boss's skin and back-hand dealings are less suspected than expected.

The title suggest something noir-ish, a genre Kurosawa is not unfamiliar with. But this has only brief shades of noir, and the title only serves as a warning of the grim pessimism smeared on thick throughout. At over two hours, the film is perhaps too long, becoming muddled at the points in which it should be tight and thrilling. But this is certainly a display of the director's formidable talent. The aforementioned opening wedding section is an expert mixture of comedy, tense drama and mystery, and was almost certainly paid homage to in The Godfather (1972). Mifune too, delivers a powerhouse performance as Nishi, stepping out of the shadows to become the beast he seeks to destroy. The climax may be too overtly bleak for some, but for the most part this is beautifully filmed, riveting stuff.


Directed by: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Toshirô Mifune, Masayuki Mori, Kyôko Kagawa, Takashi Shimura
Country: Japan

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #696: 'Ikiru' (1952)

As difficult as some Japanese films can be, Akira Kurosawa was always welcomed by Western audiences due to the director's embracing of the cinematic, as opposed to, say, the static, conversation-heavy work of Yasujiro Ozu. Still known primarily for his samurai action films and his film noir homages, Kurosawa's movies were action-packed and grandiose, shot beautifully through a lens that brings to mind the great American westerns or the shadowy mise-en-scene of Orson Welles, making them almost Western in tone. Ikiru, one of Kurosawa's most spiritual and tonally dark films, took a few years to make it across Pacific Ocean, and it's not hard to see why. Although, in my opinion, this is probably Kurosawa's greatest achievement, the subject matter is sobering, it's satire alarming and it's story-telling techniques unconventional.

The film opens with an X-ray of our protagonist, Watanabe (Takashi Shimura). The narrator tells us he has stomach cancer, but he does not yet know this, and so we join him, reluctantly, as he goes about stamping his papers in his stagnating job as a bureaucrat. Quiet and eternally hunched, Watanabe is an introverted man, spending little of what he earns to the frustration of his selfish son. When he learns that he has only about a year to live, Watanabe goes through the familiar stages of acceptance as he drinks, parties, fails to turn up for work, becomes involved with a much younger woman and angers his family. But he soon turns his attention to building a children's playground, a project he has seen passed around by the many pencil-pushers in the various departments within the council he works for, which has frustrated the residents of the decaying area.

It's with this shift of focus that comes the true masterstroke of Ikiru. Up to this point, we have been with Watanabe every step of the way, but suddenly, as the narrator informs us, he's dead. We no longer get the first-person perspective, but the third-person perspective, as various colleagues and political players gather for Watanabe's funeral. The film becomes less a human drama, and more of a social-political statement, as the other dead-eyed civil servant's in his office slowly come to realise the greatness of the man. The deputy mayor is there, claiming Watanabe's work was within the confines of his job and proving the bureaucratic machine works. This, of course, is simple electioneering, but the others reminisce and the truth begins to slowly reveal itself in the final months of Watanabe's life.

A lot of the film relies on the performance of Shimura, a long-time collaborator with Kurosawa. He is utterly magnetic here, remaining a hushed presence and developing his persona into a weapon to ensure his work gets done before he bites the bullet. In a heart-breaking moment, he croaks a quiet song in a packed bar for it to fall silent. The young hipsters slowly move away, while Watanabe's companion, a booze-addled writer, looks emotional. Kurosawa, only 40 at the time, was also making a comment on the post-war social outcasting of the elderly, embodied in the aforementioned bar scene and in Watanabe's success and money-drive son. Ikiru is many things, but it's the humanity of the story that will linger on in your mind after the credits have rolled, and it ends with one of the finest closing shots in history.


Directed by: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Takashi Shimura, Shin'ichi Himori, Haruo Tanaka, Minoru Chiaki
Country: Japan

Rating: *****

Tom Gillespie

Review #472: 'Yojimbo' (1961)

A perfect example of how film style can be influential across continents, and can project that influence back into a dying genre, Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo took its plot from Dashiell Hammett's crime novel 'Red Harvest' (which also influenced Miller's Crossing (1990)), retold as a samurai jidai-geki (Japanese period film), but fundamentally the film was a stylistic homage to the widescreen American westerns, of particularly John Ford. By the 1960's the western genre was diminished in the United States, but Italian director Sergio Leone borrowed the entire scenario of Yojimbo (this translates as The Bodyguard), cast then unknown Clint Eastwood, and made one of the greatest westerns, A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Kurosawa's influence can be seen in many post-1960's American directors in a wide range of styles and genres.

Set in the 1860's, where the shogunate, samurai tradition was suffering due to modernisation and changing attitudes. The lone samurai figure (known here by a false name, Sanjuro), played by Kurosawa's favourite actor, Toshiro Mifune, arrives in a feuding small town. Two rival gangs fight and bicker to gain total control over territory, and Mifune, a hired killer, brings his own bitter vengeance, and begins playing off the rival gangs off of one another. He changes sides at whim, and bargains for the greatest offering of money. His skills as a samurai are displayed when he first arrives in town, and his abilities are lauded, and the head of each gang vies for the samurai's attention, and for the chance to win the war.

Kurosawa's love of the widescreen format (tohoscope is used here - the branded system - like technoscope/vitascope et al. - for Japan's Toho studios that Kurosawa was working under), is obvious, and he uses it incredibly well. The incredible widescreen compositions are a beauty to behold, enhanced by black and white photography and the cinematography of Kazuo Miyagawa. Kurosawa was also a master of atmosphere, from character tensions to the more ethereal: Capturing feudal hostilities in western genre iconographic imagery, the opposing groups standing at each end of the street, Kurosawa adds the consistent movement of the wind moving the autumnal leaves - this is the kind of detail that heightens the visual experience.

Kurosawa's influence is undisputed (George Lucas - living off his one idea as he does - was hugely influenced), his style and storytelling genius would be hard not to homage - or "borrow" from. His imagery alone stand as fundamentally beautiful, the compositions' mis-en-scene holding the story together, making it believable and in fact becomes the films foundation - you could easily watch the film with the sound off, and still become totally absorbed in the story. With a genuine sense of humour (very black humour consequently), the film shows its intentions as a funny story about the foolish nature of war, in a diminishing world of tradition and the coming of modernity, with all of its machinery.


Directed by: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Toshirô Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Yôko Tsukasa, Isuzu Yamada
Country: Japan

Rating: *****

Marc Ivamy

Review #382: 'The Idiot' (1951)

It's pretty difficult to judge this film fully. The first half is erratic, and filled with jolting edits, characters that appear and disappear without any introduction. It's a damn shame. The scatological nature of this epic project, adapted from the Russian classic by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, was due to it being horrendously cut down by the studio that funded it. Originally, Akira Kurosawa had created a 266 minute cut of the - incredibly faithful to the source novel - was shortened by 100 minutes. Unfortunately, it would seem that the world may never see the original version, as even when Kurosawa hunted for the missing scenes in the vaults several decades later, he was unable to locate them.

As it is in its now 166 minute format (the longest version available), it is still an incredibly important piece of melodrama. After the devastation of the war, Kinji Kameda (Masayuki Mori) and Denkichi Akama (Toshiro Mifune), travel back to a remote island. Kameda claims that he suffers from an illness, cause by the suffering of war, and simply referred to as idiocy - when expressed on film, this idiocy seems simply to be an innocent, and fundamentally naive view of people. He simply only sees good in people, even if this is not the case. On arriving they both seem to fall for a disgraced woman, Taeko Nasu (Setsuko Hara), who was someones concubine since the age of fourteen, and is being offered for marriage at a price.

What ensues is a strange love triangle that divides not only the two male protagonists, but the community. The film is beautifully shot in black and white by Toshio Ubukata, who had worked with Kurosawa on his previous film, Scandal (1950). It is unfortunate that the films first half suffers so evidently due to extensive cutting. However, it is the relationship between Kameda and Akama that provides the climax (which is seemingly more intact) that provides the films central theme, and its most poignant elements.


Directed by: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Setsuko Hara, Masayuki Mori, Toshirô Mifune, Yoshiko Kuga
Country: Japan

Rating: ****

Marc Ivamy