Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro)

Snatch Processing

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell 
(Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro)
1968 Japan 
Directed by Hajime Satô
Shôchiku via Criterion Eclipse 
USA DVD Region 1

Warning: I’ll be honest, there are some spoilers here, 
including the wild ending, but they are such glorious 
ones that they’ll probably just make you want to grab 
a copy of this movie and have a look for yourself.

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell, is the second of the four films which make up the Criterion Eclipse boxed set When Horror Came To Shôchiku and, frankly, it’s more than made up for my slight disappointment with the first film in the series, The X From Outer Space (reviewed here) and is easily worth the price of the box set on its own merits.

This one is kind of a mix of styles and genres and has a heck of a lot going for it. One of my more pleasing discoveries of last year, to be sure. That being said, the film is full of terrible dialogue and bad acting, in keeping with a lot of the Japanese mini fantasy epics of the time. Even so, the fact is that this film rises above being more than the sum of it’s cheesy parts by a clear mile and, like the blurb in the liner notes, I’d have to say that it’s not quite like anything I’ve seen before... at least not in terms of this particular blend of elements coming together in one venue.

The film starts off with quite a lengthy pre-credits sequence inside a plane. The discussion among the passengers is about the ‘violence of today’, with acts of terrorism creating a new world of fear which nobody wants to live in. During this pre-credit’s sequence we are introduced to all the stereotypes you would normally get in an airplane disaster movie and, that’s pretty much where the plot seems to be going for a while. You have the boss and his humble employee trying to impress him, the humble employee’s wife who is blatantly having an affair with her husband’s boss, the nervous passenger (who, of course, turns out to be a mad, suicide bomber), the terrorist (no, a different terrorist), the American lady who is flying to pick up her dead husband from the Vietnam war (one of the many aspects of the political issues being pushed throughout the course of the movie) and so on. You also have a couple of scientists or professor types on hand... one who makes himself known when he is needed for expositional dialogue in the plot and another one who only seems to make himself known when the first scientist is dead and is also needed to do the same job. Yeah, I know, it’s full of genuinely sloppy and unintentionally comical writing but, like I said, the film rises above this.

The plane is flying through a red sky like “a sea of blood”, as one character puts it, which is really beautiful and brings to mind the apocalyptic sky effects used in the opening of the 1980 version of Flash Gordon. It has to be said, however, it’s rendered much more beautifully here and it’s at this point that I became aware that the models used (the plane, for example) are made and shot to an absolutely first class degree. This is made even more evident when the plane crashes a little later and is easily the match for some of the better model work used on various kaiju eiga at the time.

As the passengers talk, there are schock punctuations to the discussions as the occasional bloody, flapping bird is seen hurling itself at the windows from inside the plane creating, at least once, a genuine jump scare moment. Another thing used to punctuate this sequence, and the film in general for that matter, is when a flashback to inform a character or idea is introduced. Black and red shots of an assassination which took place before the narrative has started and various shots of war (many of them archival shots) are edited in quick staccato, both visually and on the soundtrack, to create ultra-fast slide shows to help push the points being raised. These are genuinely skillfully done and add another layer of interest to the movie.

At this point, the pilot and his crew are alerted that there is a suspected suicide bomber on the plane.. so they go through everyones luggage with the usual arguments ensuing until they come across a sniper’s rifle in a briefcase. The assassin makes himself known (although he has nothing to do with the suicide bomber, who is undetected at this point) and hijacks the plane, forcing the pilot to change route to Okinawa. After he does this, however, a UFO flies over the nose of the aircraft and the aircraft is left damaged in its wake as an engine bursts into flame. Thus, the plane crashes and the film then becomes a survival movie, with the surviving passengers bickering amongst themselves as tensions increase. This is where the film turns into a less pro-active version of Flight Of the Phoenix for the duration... except a version of it where an alien vampire is on the loose.

Yeah, okay, I was getting to that...

The sniper splits away from the group, gets drawn into a landed spaceship and his head is split open in front, to reveal a make up effect like the opening of a vagina on his face throughout the rest of the film. A blobby rock creature slides into the cavity and controls his brain. As we will find out from a similarly possessed lady passenger later in the film (for some reasons the ladies don’t grow a slot on the front of their heads like the male passengers who are ‘possessed’ do), the aliens have landed and they plan to destroy all humanity. However, the way they plan to do this seems to be for the guy they have taken over to get as close as he can to people and bite them in the necks like a vampire, in order to kill them.

This, of course, makes absolutely no sense as an invasion plan but, by this point in the proceedings, I was having way too much fun with this movie to care. Not only does it have a bizarre mix of shoddy B-movie plots and characters so stereotypical that you know what they’re going to say before they do... it does it all in such style. The cinematography, shot design, set design (with some spectacular colours in the alien spaceship, for example, which are like organic shapes forced to adhere to straight angles) and editing are all way too good for what you would normally expect from a film of this calibre and it’s just like sitting down in front of a screen and eating dessert for the duration of the piece. For instance, when the pilot is forced to turn the wheel of the aircraft and change route on the instructions of the hijacker, the camera is tilted so the frame changes to an angle and speed matching the wheel turn. Phenomenal and inventive work going on here.

As the bad aliens make good on their highly impractical invasion plan, going through the passenger manifest one neck at a time and replacing their injured host with a new one as needed, we are treated to one of the most mesmeric B-movies I’ve seen in a long time. Not only that... the special effects are both very effective and highly resourceful, beating out what a lot of American and British studios (such as AIP and Hammer, for example) were doing at the time. For example, when a human host is dead and required to disintegrate, it looks like the special effects team have actually sculptured extremely life-like versions of them out of sand and, as the floor not shown “in camera” is slowly dragged out from under, they crumble and dissolve before your very eyes. This is great stuff and when it looks this good, I can’t work out why this technique hasn’t been used in other films I’ve seen.

As a pièce de résistance, just to top off the film and leave you with a truly apocalyptic finale, the surviving pilot and his air hostess/love interest escape the clutches of the aliens and walk across the desert, not knowing where they are... until they find themselves to be crash landed near a Japanese city after all. As they walk into the city they find that everyone is dead and that the aliens have landed everywhere and killed off, presumably, the entire rest of the population of the planet except for these last two. We pan out from them as we ponder this bleak realisation... out and out and zooming right out until we are left with a shot of the earth. As a final sucker punch, loads of UFOs arrive in space (much like the opening credits sequence of Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks) and then scorch the Earth to a cinder. This is definitely an overkill situation we are in now, in terms of general pessimism, and it’s like the writer wants to make up for man’s inhumanity to fellow man through war and strife by wiping us all off the face of the planet in this movie.

This is all great but it’s also highly questionable, of course, Frankly, why would you want to go to all that trouble of finding human hosts and then biting all their necks like some kind of cosmic vampire if all you needed to do in the first place was to park your fleet in orbit and laser us all to death in a few seconds. This makes no sense people!

It makes no sense, has no logic and is, frankly, one of the most rewarding and unmissable B-movies I have ever seen. I don’t understand why this one is not more well known in this country (nor why it took 11 years after it’s initial Japanese release to get a release in American cinemas, apparently). Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell... who isn’t a body snatcher and is definitely not from hell... is easily one of my most enjoyable movie experiences of last year. A real treat for these jaded eyes and definitely a major reason to splash the cash on the Criterion Eclipse When Horror Came To Shôchiku boxed set of DVDs... I just wish they’d released a Blu Ray edition. I’ll definitely be upgrading to a higher resolution format if one ever becomes available. Truly... miss this one at your vagina-headed peril.

The X From Outer Space

Guilala Land

The X From Outer Space
1967 Japan 
Directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu
Shôchiku/Criterion US DVD Region 1
As part of “When Horror Came To Shôchiku” box set.

Wow. What can I say to start off this review other than, from a film which is part of a boxed set of Criterion films called When Horror Came To Shôchiku... I was expecting more of a scary movie to be honest. At least in intent, if not in the final presentation. However, sitting through what, for a Japanese movie of this nature, is an unexpectedly silly and almost intolerable cheesy opening credits song, made me wonder just what it was I was letting myself in for here.

As I started watching, signs were good that this would be some kind of IT! The Terror From Beyond Space/Alien kind of variant... with a smallish monster at loose on a rocket ship eating its way through various crew members. Right from the start of the movie, the plot seems to be going in that kind of direction, to be sure. It starts off dealing with a Japanese rocket crew, plus token American babe (you always have a few American or British actors in your cast at this point in time if you want to try and distribute your product overseas), who are launched into space towards Mars. They even have a second ship which flies out of their initial rocket via a front opening into four pieces, just like the one in the previous year’s box office smash You Only Live Twice (reviewed here), which also owed a lot to the designer of the clutch pencil. The hope for our crew here is that their mission will finally be the one that will, this time, get past the pesky UFOs which patrol the route to Mars and which have caused all the Earth’s previous rockets to crash or fail in their missions.

No, I’m not making that bit up and, it has to be mentioned here that Japanese films of this kind at the time were always making assumptions that their audience would not find a casual belief in space aliens from their highest scientific minds and intrepid heroes in any way... credibility straining. It’s just something everybody seemed to accept back then... like, it’s no big deal. I guess if you’re not familiar with these kinds of kaiju eiga films, for that’s what this eventually turns out to be, then you may find this open admission of common UFO activity a little strange, to say the least. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself again.

Our intrepid crew do actually meet the dreaded UFO on the way to Mars and one of their number is injured. So they postpone their trip to Mars and spend a night at a handy, well populated space station on the Moon. Here they chat and meet up with various colleagues and friends and then, the next day, set off with a replacement crew member on their mission again. This time they fail more spectacularly when attacked by a UFO but are rescued by their friends on the moon who send out a rescue rocket. During the process they collect some kind of weird space fluff sample, taking it with them back to Earth for further analysis.

Now so far we are something like a third to a half of the way through the movie and the majority of the scenes that make up the running time have been scored with the most ludicrous and unbelievably inappropriate music I’ve possibly ever heard for a film score. It’s deliriously upbeat and loungy, even when it’s being used to score scenes of suspense. I honestly can’t find the words to explain just how ham fisted and clumsy the scoring sounds on this one. Very strange.

However, it’s at this point that the film shows its true colours for, when it’s left improperly supervised, the furry sample of space flotsam grows itself into what is, it has to be said, a quite improbably looking giant monster which then goes off on a giant Gojira-like stomping tour of Tokyo. And it’s a pretty tough, if silly looking beast, it has to be said. It’s in the scenes of common or garden monster stomping that the film’s soundtrack cuts to a much more  appropriate, if not particularly complex or changeable, stomp style ostinato, which is definitely inspired from similar melodies and rhythms found in the best kaiju eiga movies by the likes of Akira Ifikube and Masaru Sato. This musical phrasing is then repeated ad infinitum whenever the monster is on and doing typically monster-like things. However, when our heroes find a purpose once more, it’s crosscut between cues scored like the first half of the movie and then back again to the plodding, monster stomp motifs... so it does get a bit jarring in those transitions, it has to be said.

That purpose being to go up into space yet again (what is this, a serial?) and use the special equipment they have on the moon to make something to combat the monster in question... known as Guilala, for some unknown reason. However, although he looks quite silly, we know he must be the real deal because he has a grumbling signature sound when he’s out on a decent night’s stomping and he also has special, kaiju powers. One of those powers being that he can absorb energy and, when he has enough of it, he turns himself into some kind of floaty, flying egg of destruction before crashing into a body of water and reverting to the former of his three forms... a less floating, non flying, stomp monster of destruction.

It goes without saying that our heroes are going to win out and reduce Guilala into something which resembles an actor in monster suit who accidentally filled his costume with an abundance of shaving foam but, it has to be said, the situations our team of lively scientists put themselves through in this movie just keep getting sillier and sillier... almost as silly as the opening title song, in fact.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about The X From Outer Space, I’m afraid. A short review I know but I’m a big lover of these kinds of giant monster movies and, while this is not among the most boring or the worst of them it’s... well... it’s not among the best of them either, to be completely honest with you. Give me Invasion Of The Astro Monsters or King Kong Escapes any day of the week as far as I’m concerned. However, if you are as gung ho about your Japanese giant monster movies as I am then you’d probably have to count this as one of, I’m sure, many reasons for purchasing Criterion Eclipse’s When Horror Came To Shochiku DVD set. When all is said and done, though I’d not recommend this particular movie to the casual fan, I am very glad to have seen it, you can be sure of that.

They Who Tread On The Tiger's Tail

Burning Bright

They Who Tread On The Tiger's Tail 
aka The Men Who Tread On The Tiger’s Tail
aka The Men Who Tread On The Tail Of A Tiger
aka Tora no o wo fumu otokotachi
1945 Japan
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Criterion Eclipse Region 1

If you’ve been reading this blog/column/haphazard archive of film reviews for any length of time, you’ll already know that I regard Akira Kurosawa as the ultimate force in film directing. A true artist of the cinema if ever there was one. This makes makes me somewhat trepidatious when reviewing his movies because, whenever I see one, I am often humbled by the sheer artistry on display and feel somewhat less than worthy of passing comment on this great man’s works. But, then again... you know me, even if I look foolish passing judgement, I’ll give it a go. ;-)

This was a first time watch of this particular Kurosawa masterpiece. There’s only one of his movies now that I haven’t yet seen but, don’t worry, it’s on the “to watch” pile so I’m sure I’ll be reviewing it here soon... not counting Those Who Make Tomorrow, of course, which is more or less a documentary and very difficult to see, as far as I can make out. I was bowled over by this one though since, quite apart from this being only his fourth film and showing all the signs of self assured greatness that marked pretty much all his work right from his directorial debut with Sanshiro Sugata, my understanding is that budgetary conditions were not exactly ideal when this was being made.

That being said, everyone was in the same boat in Japan in terms of making movies at this point. There was a little conflict called World War II going on at the time and this was not the film Kurosawa was initially scheduled to be making but, he had to give up on his original project due to the obvious wartime budgetary constraints (the sleeve notes on the Criterion Eclipse edition of this work inform me that the abandoned project eventually mutated into what became Kurosawa’s epic Kagemusha in 1980). So, when faced with these challenging times, Kurosawa wrote this movie, based on an incident from Japan’s past and also on two plays of the events, and he wrote it pretty much over the course of a day, by all accounts. I guess anyone can write fast if they want to.

The film is extremely budget conscious in that the whole of the action pretty much takes place on one set, redressed a couple of times. I find it quite astounding that the set is a forest set and that it still looks quite realistic, although I really shouldn’t be all that surprised at this. After all, think of the final sequences in Jame’s Whale’s 1931 classic Frankenstein, where the villagers are pursuing Karloff’s monster in the coutryside with raised pitchforks and burning torches... it all looks great and you would believe they were all outside, if it wasn’t for the blatantly visible wrinkles on the backdrop of the sky.

This film is about an incident where a lord is being pursued by his brother, who means to kill him and, with the whole countryside out looking for him, he and six of his men disguise themselves as priests and attempt to reason their way through a roadblock. They also have a porter in tow, and it takes about ten to fiteen minutes of the running time before he, himself, realises the importance of the group he finds himself attached to. All very simple and, indeed, it’s Kurosawa’s shortest film, clocking in at around 59 minutes in length. That being said, the fact that it’s a very short film does nothing to dilute its strength and there are scenes of suspense, as the main protagonists try to pass themselves off as priests to the questioning authorities, which are absolutely riveting.

Susuma Fujita, a Kurosawa regular who played the lead protagonist in the director’s first film, Sanshiro Sugata, brings a kind of strange, laid back gravitas to the role of the man responsible for deciding whether to let the group pass the blockade and another regular Kurosawa actor, one of my favourites, Takashi Shimura, also has a small role in this movie. He makes the most of a few lines and facial gestures but, even with so small a role, he still manages to shine and bring the weight of his presence to the screen. The real stand-out actor in this move is Ken'ichi Enomoto, who plays the comical role of the porter just beautifully, going from a character who just can’t shut up over the first ten minutes or so of the movie to some absolutely amazing silent-movie comedy acting later, during the more suspensful parts where the “monks” are trying to lie their way through the barrier. His gestures and facial contortions are quite exaggerated but he uses his reactions to events so naturally that, within the context of the film, they never actually seem to be as over the top as he actually is and, like these kinds of lowly characters often turn out to be, he is the eyes and ears for the audience into the world we are being asked to partake of for the duration of the movie and it is through him that we perceive these events.

Well... through him and the occasional singing on the soundtrack, manifested in male, female and mixed choirs... which comments and explains bits of the story as the film progresses. This is somwehat a throwback to Noh Theatre traditions, is my understanding, and one of the plays used as the inspiration for this movie was done as a Noh version. Of course, being Noh influenced, it has no females in it (in proper Noh I am reliably informed that the female parts would be played by men wearing female masks) but this could just be a coincidence since, at the time Kurosawa was directing this one, all the women and children had been evacuated from the city anyway and so there would have been nobody available to take on a female role, at this point, even if he’d required one.

When the film was finished, it wa a bit of a hot potato, being as it was based on and therefore possibly reinforcing Japanese feudal concepts at a time when the country was losing the war... so it didn’t actually get released over there until the 1950s.  I’m not sure about this but I’m guessing the short running time of the film would have been more about lack of filmstock and other such materials to spare as opposed to any cuts to the work... although that is just a guess and so it may not be the case.

What is the case, though, is the fact that, with only one movie left of his to see, I’ve so far never seen a bad Kurosawa movie and, certainly, They Who Tread On The Tiger’s Tail is no exception here. If you are a fan of Kurosawa you will surely love it but, even if you’re not, Kurosawa’s natural cinematic fluidity is as confident and assured in these early pictures as it was later in his life. This film is in the Criterion Eclipse set called The First FIlms Of Akira Kurosawa, which also features Sanshiro Sugata (reviewed here), The Most Beautiful (reviewed here) and Sanshiro Sugata Part 2 (reviewed here) and, frankly, anybody remotely interested in cinema should be picking this stuff up.

A Colt Is My Passport

Cold Colt Ground

A Colt Is My Passport 
1967 Japan
Directed by Takashi Nomura
Nikkatsu/Criterion Eclipse DVD Region 1 
(as part of the Nikkatsu Noir boxed edition). 

Warning: Reading this review is a passport to very slight spoilers.

The last in Criterion Eclipse’s astonishing collection of Nikkatsu thrillers, A Colt Is My Passport maybe lacks the shot compositional flair of most of the other movies in this boxed set (apart from one amazingly framed sequence where the main protagonist is waiting, sniper’s rifle in hand, to make ‘the kill’) but it more than makes up for it with the style of the camerawork in certain sections and, very much so, in the way the footage is edited.

The opening, for example, is a tour de force of style over substance. Following a credit sequence which utlilises a brilliant pseudo-Morricone spaghetti western scoring style of sound to great effect, we go through a scene where the main protagonist, hitman Shuji played by Nikkatsu superstar Jô Shishido, is being briefed and shown the details of his new target. The man hiring him provides a steady stream of narrative for the first few minutes over shots of him and Shuji following the target and being shown and told where the target will be over the course of the next few days (it is up to Shuji how and when he completes his mission for hire).

During this sequence the camera is not the steady glide or mesmeric static shot of many a NIkkatsu crime flick. Instead we have something which seems far ahead of its time, as I watch it now. The camera does all kinds of acrobatics to catch things and people as they are pinpointed by the voice over instructions to Shuji. It’s like the camera is looking around and then stops and concentrates on parts of the shot when it stumbles upon the correct piece of visual information. Normally, this is not the kind of shot sequence a studio of that period would have indulged their directors in, I would have thought. It’s very much a sequence of fast paced POV ‘camera reactions’ edited together in one big, narrative scoop.

This is something which I’ve noticed modern TV shows, especially in the science fiction genre, using to great effect nowadays (to the point where it’s become a cliché almost) but I can’t imagine the creative freedom to throw out the prescribed way of shooting these things could have come easy back in the late sixties in an environment like Nikkatsu. Shows like Firefly and the rebooted Battlestar Galactica tend to use this “taking you unawares” style of catching things out of the corner of the camera eye before swivelling around and focussing, quite frequently to help push the credibility of shots set within a fantastic universe, which would be less easy to buy into without this style of camera work. Artificial lens flares on the model and CGI shots seem to be another favourite nowadays. I find the fact that Takashi Nomura was able to get away with a similar sensibility in the first 5 or 10 minutes of A Colt Is My Passport very interesting. He must have been either a very confident director or pulled a lot of weight at the studio, is my guess.

This is one of the films where Jô Shishido’s star presence really comes through and helps to carry the movie... in as much as he is the main focus of the narrative and he manages to hold your interest by, for the most part, not doing very much. Shishido is extremely low key in this, showing neither emotion or interest for a great deal of the running time... although it does transpire that he is a big softie where friends and family are concerned (as these kinds of characters usually are).

Even though he doesn’t seem like he’s emotionally available for most of the film, it’s probably this kind of cooler than ice attitude which makes him stand out more against the other actors, even though there’s not a bad performance in this film. It’s an interesting contrast between his indifference and the emotional investment of some of the other characters in this.

The one thing which will make you sit straight up in your chair is the opening musical notes on the credits, followed by a string of gunshots, followed by a main theme tune which, as I noted earlier, sounds like it was torn straight from the score a spaghetti western. I mention this again because all the way through the movie,  there’s not a heck of a lot of music (at least not by modern, wall-to-wall standards) but when the music does come in it’s usually this bold Morricone-esque, ride-your-horse-to-death-and-beyond, wild spaghetti western style scoring. And it makes sense because Japan has always been a country where spaghetti westerns have been extremely popular (more so than America and the UK I suspect) and treated with a certain amount of respect where they wouldn’t be as well recieved in other countries. This movie seems particularly influenced by the genre... what with Shishido’s distanced and iconic anti-hero characterisation and the climax of the movie which basically ends in a many against one duel in a wasteland of dust, doubling for a western desert. Even the title, A Colt Is My Passport, is quite similar to the English translations of some of those movies.

This is a great piece and it’s a film full of details. Shishido lighting a cigarette, for example, purely so he can judge the speed and direction of the wind before he settles down to make his killing is particularly spell-binding. Another thing the director goes out of his way to do is have the various weapons’ audio signatures different to the others in the film... so the sound of bullet shots pitched against each other gives a more interesting sound dialogue than it would in a movie where the same kinds of gun shot sounds are used for all the weapons. This is a tactic Spielberg used for absolute realism on Saving Private Ryan and, more artificially and artistically, in the Indiana Jones films... where Indy’s revolver actually utilises the sound of a shotgun on the soundtrack. Shishido even digs a trench and makes his own version of a sticky bomb at one point in the proceedings.

It’s stuff like this, the cool music, the cool anti-hero and the little quirks and details that make A Colt Is My Passport another unmissable Nikkatsu treat and Criterion’s boxed set of five of these gems is definitely worth picking up if you’ve not seen them before. My only regret is that there aren’t more of these kinds of movies on the market right now. if you’re into the “cinema of cool” then this movie is not something you’re going to want to let get past you.

Sanshiro Sugata (The Films of Akira Kurosawa #1)

Sugata De Blanc

Sanshiro Sugata

Japan 1943

Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Criterion Eclipse Region 1

About a decade or more ago I went, with a friend, to a one day seminar on my favourite director Akira Kurosawa in London, followed by a special screening of his chanbara The Hidden Fortress. The day was held at the National Film Theatre and it was filled with presentations by various experts and fans of his work such as his main biographer and friend Donald Richie. Another director I admire somewhat, Mr. Alex Cox, showed us all a packet of postcards issued by the Japanese post office on the occasion of Kurosawa's death, each reprinting the original poster art for each of the 30 feature films that Kurosawa had directed (I would really love to get my hands on a set of these if anyone has any leads on where to get them).

Of these photographs, Mr. Cox invited the audience to discuss and vote whether each of the films could be considered a “masterpiece” and, after much lively discussion from the audience as to what the actual definition of the term masterpiece could usefully mean, the exercise began. It was Mr. Cox’ idea, I believe, to prove (and he really didn’t have to since we already knew the answer in regards to Kurosawa) that the measure of a film-maker’s success, influence and general richness as an artist could perhaps be measured, for fun, by the percentage of his work that could be considered to be masterpiece works. As the exercise continued using debate and shows of hands, the audience agreed that at least two thirds of Kurosawa’s output could be considered to be the great and influential works that prove him to be an artist of exceptional worth.

I relate this story by way of explaining to the reader a) what a daunting and challenging task it is to write my first review of a director's work when he's a director who I personally hold in such high regard and b) to say, having seen all but three of this director’s films to date (but don’t worry, they’re all in the pile to watch), that although the seminar day was fun, I’d have to disagree with the final verdict of Alex Cox’s presentation. For me, you see, Kurosawa is the perfect director and I believe his films are so riveting and full of absolute artistic genius (and integrity) that they are all masterpieces and couldn’t fail to be anything else. Each time one watches a Kurosawa film it’s like taking in a mini course on film making by osmosis... it’s that good.

So here, then, I present my review of Kurosawa’s first ever feature film as a credited director and, therefore, my review of the first of his many “masterpieces”...

Kurosawa worked his way through the Toho Film Studio’s apprentice system and after working on loads of movies as script editor, script writer, second unit director etc, he had become someone to be reckoned with and, for the first film he picked to actually direct himself, Kurosawa asked the studio to buy the rights to a novel he liked called Sanshiro Sugata, a period piece which tells the story of the competition and rivalry between the Martial Art of Jujitsu and the “new” form of self defence, Judo.

Sanshiro is a reckless youth played by Susumu Fujita, a regular Kurosawa actor who would later be supplanted by the “explosion of acting” that was Toshiro Mifune (a nice visual metaphor for “out with the old and in with the new” can be found in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo where Susuma Fujita plays the former bodyguard of one of the warring clans who does a runner and waves cheekily to Mifune as he makes his exit from the films of Kurosawa... at least as a major player). The character of Sanshiro is played pretty much as an “adult child” who wanders the slow path to enlightenment as he learns the spiritual and practical skills of Judo... although he’s still pretty much a wide eyed innocent at the end of the movie.

Loads of the classic Kurosawa signatures are already in place in this, his first feature. Those moving wipes that George Lucas favoured in his Star Wars films (which I suspect Kurosawa probably inherited from his love of US movies anyway... the Flash Gordon serials are full of those wipes) are already present, as is the really groundbreaking stuff like cutting a shot on motion... which was thought not to be the done thing and was, frankly, considered a mark of bad filmmaking for a long time in the western world... until film editor (and later director) Peter Hunt used the same techniques to add excitement and prove to Westerners that it is a valid technique all over again when he edited the first of his Bond films, Dr. No.

The film starts off brilliantly by leading, after a deliberate lull to show the inferiority of the jujitsu men that Sanshiro has initially come to study with, to a fight scene where the older sensei of the Judo school is harassed by the jujitsu guys and forced to despatch them all. Sanshiro joins up with him by replacing the man’s rickshaw driver, who has run off. He casts off his clogs to be able to run better and already, less than ten minutes into the film maybe, Kurosawa gives you a long visual metaphor of the casting off of his former life by fixating on one of these clogs as time marches on and you see it go, in a series of transition shots depicting the abandoned footwear while it passes from season to season, down a street in various states of distress until it is last seen floating away in the river in which the Judo master dispatched his opponents.

Fantastic stuff! And this is Kurosawa’s directorial debut? What style!

There are lots of visual and audio “surrogates” used in the film, such as Sanshiro throwing himself into a dangerously dirty sump for a number of hours/days after his chastisement (for his fondness of brawling) until he has an epiphany, of sorts, in the form of an appreciation of a flower (a thing of beauty surviving in the ugliness) growing at the side of the sump and sees himself, presumably, as this growing flower.

Another good tool Kurosawa uses is a children’s made up song about Sanshiro being a force to be reckoned with, which is chanted as they go about their play in a couple of scenes and is here used as short-hand by Kurosawa to get the message across to the audience that Sanshiro has moved on a little more over the course of the months/years.

There’s loads of dynamic moving camerawork... a lot more motion than you’d probably expect from someone who was labelled by his own people as being more of a Western director than an Eastern director, after his international success with Rashomon... although this was pretty much rivalry, jealousy and xenophobia on behalf of the Japanese for having to tolerate that Westerner’s could understand Kurosawa's films. And why is that? Because he’s using the international language of good cinema and strong semiotics which can be understood worldwide... that’s why. Even though, it has to be said, Kurosawa was an acknowledged admirer of the films of John Ford.

Also heavy in the mix on this debut movie is Kurosawa’s sheer genius of having establishing shots and, I guess you could call them “establishing moments” sneak up on you before you are aware of them on screen on a conscious level. Check out the young samurai’s introduction on Seven Samurai for an excellent introduction to this “technique by stealth” as the character is masked into shot with a load of other people before his appearance is slowly highlighted by the way in which the extras are aligned with the key players in those scenes. It’s almost like Kurosawa has found a direct line to the collective audience subconscious and uses it to throw elements of importance at you to begin their work before you’ve even consciously registered what they are... Steven Moffet uses the same approach with his “scary moments” in his writing for Doctor Who.

And this also, of course, is where Sergio Leone and the traditions of Italian spaghetti westerns truly begin... yes, I know Leone’s directorial debut was a remake of a Kurosawa film which didn’t originally get made until some 18 years after this one, but hold on a second and I’ll explain my theory...

This is where the Kurosawa action sequence starts and, hopefully most people will agree with me when I say that the majority of Kurosawa action pieces do not rely on great, strung together pieces of action. They may seem dynamic in speed and, in the case of epics like Kagemusha and Ran, scale... but they are actually more about pauses and machismo and the way in which the action is actually highlighted in intensity between the slow pacing and build up between each little segment of an action piece. And this is what Sergio Leone went on to do with his own action cinema when he started out with his Yojimbo remake A Fistful of Dollars. It’s all extreme close ups of the eyes and music and twitching facial muscles with Leone and, in the case of Kurosawa’s approach, though not overtly as stylised, it’s very much the exact same thing. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it unless proven otherwise. The final fight in a field of wheat in the extreme wind, for example, is all about the atmosphere created by the weather and that long, tall, rippling wheat in contrast to the martial arts skills being used. It is the atmosphere of action and the intensity of the feeling of action that Kurosawa seems more interested in... and not the actual details of the action itself, it seems to me. I believe without these early demonstrations of this kind of film-making, you would never have gotten to the Leone style which was taken up as a template for all Spaghetti Westerns after his first one... or at least, the Spaghetti Western would have evolved in another direction. So yes, I am saying that Kurosawa was accidentally responsible for creating a genre of Italian cinema which he had nothing to do with... just as he himself was influenced by the Westerns of such luminaries as John Ford and his ilk in his early career.

I first saw Sanshiro Sugata at the cinema in a retrospective of his work of which the aforementioned seminar was a part of and then, later on, went on to buy the awful Region 3 Poker industries release of this movie... which was muddy and had subtitles written by somebody who did not seem to be able to speak, or at least successfully write, the English language to such an extent that it was almost impossible to follow the story with the words which were being, almost randomly, thrown up on screen. This new Criterion edition is a definite improvement on all predecessors but I am annoyed that Criterion chose to release this movie as part of their “bare bones” Eclipse series as I would have loved to have seen the accompanying documentary episode of the TV show Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful To Create which accompanies the regular Criterion editions of Kurosawa’s movies. Perhaps one day.

Still... no contest. The Criterion Eclipse boxed set of The First Films of Akira Kurosawa (which includes his first four movies) is definitely the best way of seeing this movie so far, next to seeing the thing projected properly at a cinema.

All of Kurosawa’s movies are a definite recommendation from me... this is the first one... it won’t be the last.