Continued from Part 1.

Akira Kurosawa

To many, the quintessential Japanese filmmaker, Kurosawa's works are widely available on DVD. Criterion alone has made available the cream of the first half (1943-65) of his long career: Stray Dog (1949), Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo (1961), Sanjuro (1962), High and Low (1963) and Red Beard (1965), all backed with excellent extras including documentary footage of Kurosawa at his peak. Documentaries on the director include Chris Marker's AK, filmed while Kurosawa was shooting his late masterpiece Ran (1985).

Drunken Angel

Entering cinema as an assistant director, Kurosawa rapidly made his mark with his debut Sanshiro Sugata (Judo Saga, 1943), an early display of his command of screen action. Both his wartime propaganda feature The Most Beautiful (1944) and his postwar film, No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), about a family who suffers due to the father's dissent from the militarist regime of the 1930s, have similar themes of self-sacrifice.

More recent gangster dramas such as Battles Without Honor and Humanity (Kinji Fukasaku, 1973) paint a bleak portrait of postwar Japan. Kurosawa, meanwhile, was determined to try and show his fellow Japanese a way out of despair, dramatizing this resolution in his crime dramas Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray Dog and the compelling testament of a nonentity who achieves heroism, Ikiru. In the book Japanese Film Directors, Audie Bock (translator of Kurosawa's memoirs) groups Kurosawa with a number of other directors who began their careers after World War II that she dubs "the Postwar Humanists" (Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi, Keisuke Kinoshita). Their films express the new ideals of democratization and humanitarianism. While Rashomon became world famous for its plot that questions the nature of truth, one is meant to come away from the film not with existential despair but with the positive moral of the poor man who takes in the abandoned child. The brilliantly conceived and choreographed Seven Samurai is another vehicle for this overt morality.

As the 1950s progressed, and an economically revived Japan fell further and further away from the ideals of sincere postwar resolutions, Kurosawa's films turned darker. Kurosawa's samurai films from this later era are essays in mock-heroism: The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo and Sanjuro. His parallel films set in contemporary Japan - I Live in Fear (1955), The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and High and Low - are scathing satires of a modern Japan that live less and less up to the ideals expressed in Stray Dog, Ikuru and the codas to Rashomon and Seven Samurai. This period - perhaps Kurosawa's most interesting, as he engages with an increasingly corrupt Japan with fewer and fewer illusions - is book-ended by two other period, but non-samurai, films: The Lower Depths (1957), cleverly paired in the Criterion Collection edition with Jean Renoir's 1936 version of the same Maxim Gorky play, and Red Beard (1965). Red Beard is a rare example of a successful film about a genuinely good man, the gruff doctor (Toshiro Mifune) of the title.

Throne of Blood

Kurosawa was long the west's favorite Japanese director. He returned the favor; throughout his career Kurosawa evinced a great admiration for foreign literature, specifically Shakespeare's plays and Russian literature - The Lower Depths, and his adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot (1951), which is (unjustly) widely disliked. But Kurosawa's Shakespearean adaptations are generally admired. Throne of Blood (1957) may well be the best filmic adaptation of any Shakespeare play, dispensing as it does with the playwright's words but finding images worthy of the Bard's poetry. His industrial drama The Bad Sleep Well borrows from Hamlet while Ran successfully transposes King Lear to medieval Japan. The dynamic High and Low, meanwhile, is a successful transferal of one of Ed McBain's American police dramas to Japan.

Many of Kurosawa's films were remade abroad: Rashomon as The Outrage (1964), Seven Samurai as John Sturges's expansive western The Magnificent Seven (1960), and, infamously, Yojimbo as the first of Sergio Leone's "Man with No Name" spaghetti westerns, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), which made Clint Eastwood an international star. Leone's producers never bothered to pay Kurosawa's production company for the rights to his film, which held up distribution of Dollars in the US until 1967 and, truth be told, Leone's amorally cynical take on Kurosawa's morally cynical samurai film does betray the spirit of the original. Given that Kurosawa was influenced by American western filmmakers, notably John Ford, it is appropriate, however, that The Outrage, The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars are all Westerns.

But if you want to see how East and West diverge, compare Kurosawa's sequel to Yojimbo, the class-based Sanjuro, to Leone's follow-up, For a Few Dollars More (1965) - they're wholly different. It's worth mentioning as well that Yojimbo owes more than a little to the one Dashiell Hammett detective novel which has never been filmed, Red Harvest (1927), which involves a good bad man selling his services to both sides of a battle between two equally corrupt gangs. Red Harvest (an American crime novel) is the source material, then, for not only Yojimbo (Japanese samurai) and A Fistful of Dollars (Italian western) but the Coen Brothers' Millers Crossing (1990) and an acknowledged remake of Yojimbo, Last Man Standing (Walter Hill, 1996), with Bruce Willis, both crime dramas set at the time of Hammett's original. (Only Last Man Standing acknowledges the debt to Kurosawa.)

Other Kurosawa remakes arguably include George Lucas's original Star Wars (1977), which draws heavily upon The Hidden Fortress for inspiration, including the device of telling much of an epic story of a princess's escape across hostile territory from the perspective of two outsiders (cowardly peasants in the Kurosawa version, robots in Lucas's). A screenplay Kurosawa developed in the late 1960s was eventually filmed by a Soviet filmmaker in the US as Runaway Train (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1985). The great catastrophe of Kurosawa's career was his failed involvement in a Japanese-American co-production about Pearl Harbor, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1968), from which Kurosawa was dismissed as co-director in pre-production (he retains a screenwriting credit). The American studio and jealous enemies of Kurosawa in Japan spread rumors about Kurosawa's competence, a contributing factor to a 1971 suicide attempt.

Before this, in 1970, Kurosawa had filmed an expressionist color film, Dodes'ka-Den, returning to the subject of the lives of society's rejects which he'd already addressed in The Lower Depths. A consortium of Kurosawa and three other directors - fellow postwar humanists Ichikawa, Kinoshita and Kobayashi - financed the film as, by 1970, Kurosawa was no longer thought bankable by the Japanese film industry. His films cost too much to make in this period of severe industry retrenchment, a period that ended many other careers besides Kurosawa's. Indeed, while Kurosawa had produced roughly one film a year from 1943-1965, the next several of his films came at precise five year intervals, mostly financed by foreign backers. Thus: Dodes'ka-Den in 1970, Dersu Uzala (1975), financed by the Soviet Union, and filmed in Siberia, and the samurai epics Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985), financed in part by successful American filmmakers who admired Kurosawa's achievement, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. Kagemusha and, in particular, Ran were longtime dream projects of the director, who had, frustrated in his attempts to find money to produce them, painted scenes from them. A resigned bitterness underlays both.

Ran completed, Kurosawa experienced a late-career blossoming that allowed him to complete three more films in the last years of his life: Yume (released here as Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, 1990), Rhapsody in August (1991) and Madadayo (Not Yet, 1993). Dreams recalls the color expressionist of Dodes'ka-Den, notably in the scene in which Martin Scorsese, playing Vincent Van Gogh, runs through a field of paint. Rhapsody in August echoes the anti-nuclear war parable of Record of a Living Being, while Madadayo, the story a beloved teacher who loses his home in a wartime bombing, but whose students continue to seek his support, brings Kurosawa's career in a full circle back to No Regrets for Our Youth (1947). After Kurosawa's death in 1998, a number of his unproduced scripts were filmed, among them Alley Cat (Ichikawa, 2000) and The Sea is Watching (Kei Kumai, 2002).

Stars and Trends of the Postwar Era

One of postwar Japan's biggest stars, Toshiro Mifune (1920-97), was closely associated with Kurosawa for the first and best half of his career: from his surprise casting, a relative unknown, as a self-destructive gangster in Drunken Angel (1947) to the title role in Red Beard, Mifune was in 16 of 17 of Kurosawa's films (all but Ikiru) from that period. He essayed such disparate roles as the determined young detective of Stray Dog, the clownish rapist of Rashomon, the would-be samurai of Seven Samurai, the elderly man afraid of atomic war in Record of a Living Being and the business tycoon of High and Low. Along the way he also acted for Kenji Mizoguchi (beheaded for love in the opening sequences of The Life of Oharu) and Masaki Kobayashi (Samurai Rebellion, 1967).

Several of Mifune's most popular films were directed by genre specialist Hiroshi Inagaki (1905-80), a child actor who began directing at age 22 and who, among other achievements, collaborated on screenplays with Sadao Yamanaka in the 1930s under the pseudonym "Kinpachi Kajiwara." He helped define the period-film genre, particularly in his hugely popular Samurai trilogy (1954-56), The Life of Matsu the Untamed (shown abroad as The Rickshaw Man, 1958), the 1962 version of Chushingura, Samurai Banners (1969) and Incident at Blood Pass (1970). Mifune starred in all of these, winning a Best Actor award for The Rickshaw Man at the Venice Film Festival.

Yojimbo

Mifune's apotheosis was as the cynical ronin in Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Sanjuro, a role he reprised either openly (as in a late entry in the popular "blind swordsman" series Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (Kihachi Okamoto, 1970) or borrowing from it for films such as the spaghetti western Red Sun (Terence Young, 1971). At home, in movies or in many TV mini-series, Mifune found himself playing variants of his Yojimbo character for the remainder of his career, although some of his later films are well-regarded (as with his work in genre specialist Okamoto's Samurai Assassin, 1965, Sword of Doom, 1966, and Red Hair, 1969). A symbol of his country to the rest of the world, Mifune retained great international popularity, acting in the Hollywood productions Grand Prix (John Frankenheimer, 1966), Midway (Jack Smight, 1976), Winter Kills (William Richert, 1979), 1941 (Steven Spielberg, 1979) and the 1980 TV miniseries Shogun. Mifune's gruff warrior is still the basis for our popular image of samurai - as per John Belushi's slovenly samurai character on Saturday Night Live.

While making Red Beard, Mifune and Kurosawa had a falling out that led to the end of their working relationship. His failure to reach a rapprochement with the ailing Kurosawa pained his last years; he would have loved to have played in either Kagemusha or Ran, and would have been excellent in either.

A number of Japanese female stars have also played in Hollywood productions, as with Machiko Kyo (Rashomon, Ugetsu Monogatari, Gate of Hell) cast with Marlon Brando in Teahouse of the August Moon (Daniel Mann, 1956).

After the Postwar Was Over

As noted, other postwar filmmakers besides Akira Kurosawa expressed a resolute idealism in their work. The films of Keisuke Kinoshita (1912-98), include, in addition to the colorful comedy Carmen Comes Home (1951) and the honestly sentimental Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), about the romance of a stripper and the struggles of a rural schoolteacher, respectively (both played by Hideko Takamine), the excellent dramas A Japanese Tragedy (1952) and The Ballad of Narayama (1958), the latter remade by Shohei Imamura in 1983.

Of the postwar humanists, second only to Kurosawa in ambition and talent would be Masaki Kobayashi (1916-96), who challenged Japanese behavior in the war in the ambitious, nine-hour epic The Human Condition, released in three parts (1959-61). Tatsuya Nakadai played an idealistic soldier who tries to improve the lot of everyone whose path he crosses in Japanese occupied Manchuria, be they exploited Chinese miners or Japanese soldiers, only to meet resistance at every turn. Kobayashi's subsequent films include two superb anti-heroic samurai films, Harakiri (1962) and Samurai Rebellion (1967) - both starring Nakadai - as well as the four-part ghost story Kwaidan (1964), a brilliant exercise in style.

Harp of Burma

The career of the versatile Kon Ichikawa (born 1915, and still active as of 2002) reminds one of an American filmmaker like John Huston in its longevity and wide shifts in tone and style. Harp of Burma (1956) - which the filmmaker remade in 1985 - is the quintessential postwar humanist work in its story of a Japanese soldier in occupied Burma, who takes on monk's robes and devotes himself to burying his dead comrades after war's end. The tragic absurdism of Fires on the Plain (1959) seems to come from some other director in this savage film about defeated Japanese soldiers in the Philippines struggling to survive, and in some cases resorting to cannibalism. Conflagration (1958), after a novel by Yukio Mishima, is a brilliant psychological study about a misfit's destruction of a temple he loved (Paul Schrader used this same story as an episode in his film Mishima). His other films include the grotesque sex drama The Key (1959), about an aging man's obsession with virility; the child's point-of-view, puppet mouse-starring Topo Gigio and the Missle War (1967). His best known film in the US is probably the documentary record Tokyo Olympiad (1965).

Also expressing idealism in films seen by millions is the work of Akira Kurosawa's former assistant director and good friend, Ishiro Honda (1911-93). Honda shot the very lengthy montage of detective Toshiro Mifune's tour of the Japanese underworld in Stray Dog and returned to Kurosawa as an assistant director for Kagemusha and Ran. What he's best known for, however, is his work directing Godzilla (1954) and its many sequels and variants - Rodan (1956), The Mysterians (1957) and many more. His honest, non-condescending handling of genre material marks him as a master of his craft. He ended his career as the uncredited director of some of the episodes of Dreams as well as Madadayo.

Japanese films of the later 1950s anticipate the disillusionment that will mark later Kurosawa films and the Japanese New Wave alike. A good example of this is Giants and Toys (Yasuzo Masumura, 1958), a satire of consumerism that parallels American films like Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and The Apartment in its dyspeptic cynicism. Japanese cinema underwent a radical shift after 1960, a New Wave emerging of directors like Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura breaking stylistically and politically with their predecessors. Within a few years the long-established studio system would collapse and an industry-wide slump rendered filmmaking very difficult in the 1970s and 1980s. New genres rose and fell. In the 1990s, new filmmakers emerged and currently, in the new century, Japanese cinema is enjoying something of a renaissance.

Understanding and appreciating the work of great filmmakers like Takashi Kitano and Hideko Kore-eda is made easier with the recovery and circulation of Japan's silent, wartime, and postwar film heritage.