Throne Of Blood

Arrowing Experience

Throne Of Blood
aka Kumonosu-jô
aka Cobweb Castle
aka Macbeth
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Japan 1957 
Toho 
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

Finally revisiting an old favourite by the greatest ever director... Akira Kurosawa’s Throne Of Blood, one of his many masterpieces, which is somewhat surprising since it comes from a source writer who I do not rate at all highly. That writer being one William Shakespeare, as this movie is an adaptation of his infamous ‘Scottish play’, known to audiences as Macbeth... transposed by Kurosawa and his company to the days of ancient samurai. 

The film starts off announcing its arrival on the credits with an attack of jagged percussion instrumentation while an unsettling, almost atonal melody plays against it as part of the great Masaru Satô’s incredible score (one of many he provided for Kurosawa and other directors). 

So this is the story of Macbeth which, as it happens, I’ve only ever known through this adaptation of it so, honestly, I can’t tell you much about how it shapes up compared to the ‘dread bard’s’ words... other than the three witches have been transposed to a singular character who, always sounds male to me but the subtitles assure me it’s a lady. S/he shapeshifts into other versions of the same apparition throughout the course of the film.

Okay, so this is jam packed with great actors such as my two favourites, Toshiro Mifune as the main man and the exceptional Takashi Shimura in a much more minor role this time around, it has to be said. Added to this are excellent performances by the likes of Isuzu Yamada as this film’s equivalent of Lady Macbeth and Minoru Chiaki as Mifune’s once best friend, before the combined treachery of the prophesised vision and the scheming machinations of the lady come to fruition and turn Mifune against that friend.

And, true to form, the director decided a mock castle would not do so, he had the US Marines stationed in the area help him build portions of a real one to shoot on. Everyone uses this and other locations (including studio bound sets - Cob Web forest being a combination of a real forest and interior sets) to great advantage. Of course, Kurosawa’s trademark shot design and editing combine to make some very sophisticated shots, sometimes including more elabourate camera movements than you might notice, happening without attracting any attention to themselves, blending into the overall edit in an almost throwaway manner.

For instance, early on in the film when the two friends, returning from battle, find the witch in the forest, there’s a brilliant shot (which I had to rewind this time to take in what I’d just thought I’d seen) where the two samurai dismount facing the camera, come towards it and then past it with the camera following from behind, looking over their shoulders at what they are seeing, before going even further, past them and taking their point of view completely. Pretty sophisticated stuff which, like I said, feels just like a throwaway shot when, actually, it’s imparting so much visual information. 

Not to mention some fantastic stuff done with the sound design, such as the sound of the wife’s kimono as she walks in one sequence, being repeated as a forewarning of her presence in the next scene. 

A couple of points of interest about the film. 

One is, the story goes, they had to get Mifune good and drunk for his final scene where hundreds of arrows are shot at him... and also in him... in a sustained sequence. No special effects for that kind of thing in those days, of course. Just blocks of wood under the armour and a reliance on hitting your marks and hoping the company sharp shooters wouldn’t hit you in the face. I still have no idea how the effect with the arrow going through his neck was achieved (nor do I really want to... it’s ‘movie magic’ innit?).

The other thing is... this was the inaugural film played at the opening of the National Film Theatre. Which leads me to my one big criticism of this presentation of it. Apart from the shape certain sections of the print seem to be in (surely you should have been able to get rid of some of those lines digitally?), the BFI have not sought fit to provide subtitles for the male chorus narrating the story at the beginning and end of the film. A terrible oversight if you ask me. 

Still, Throne Of Blood is yet another Kurosawa masterpiece and something that’s not to be missed, although a US version by someone like Criterion may well be a better way to go with it, it has to be said. 

Seven Samurai

Village Of The Doomed

Seven Samurai
aka Shichinin no samurai 
Directed by Akira Kurosawa 
Japan 1954
Toho/BFI Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers.

“Find hungry samurai. Even bears leave the forest when they’re hungry.”
Seven Samurai

What can one say when talking about Seven Samurai? 

The film was made by my favourite director, Akira Kurosawa, around the same time that both Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto, starring Toshiro Mifune (my second favourite all time actor) and Godzilla, starring Takashi Shimura (my all time favourite actor) were also being filmed. This film stars both these actors in the leading roles (I seem to remember they were friends and next door neighbours for a time, too). All three films were expected to sink Toho studios without trace so, with Kurosawa filming for an unexpected 148 days and with costs going four times over the projected budget, you can understand why production was shut down a number of times. Kurosawa’s alleged response was to just go off fishing, figuring that the studio had already spent so much money, they wouldn’t want to pull the plug. 

However, all three of those films have stood the test of time and ended up saving Toho Studios and securing its future as the number one Japanese studio of all time. Japanese critics at that time were somewhat soured on the film, claiming it to be too Westernised. Kurosawa, while freely admitting that he was somewhat influenced by the cinema of John Ford, made something that took in a lot of money in Japan, regardless of these criticisms. And of course, many films (including Westerns) have been remakes of Kurosawa films... in terms of Seven Samurai, my favourite two remakes would be The Magnificent Seven and Battle Beyond The Stars (reviewed by me here).

The story is well known and it consists of bandits threatening to raid and pillage a village, once the barley has ripened and been harvested... with a small bunch of the poor farmers journeying to a town to try and hire a number of samurai to protect them when this occurs, although all they can offer is three meals a day. Seven are acquired and, by the end of the three and a half hour picture, only three are left standing... and one of them stays to join the farming community, pursuing a local girl.

The film starts off brilliantly and, after about a quarter of an hour of the farmers being taunted and jeered at in town (and after, I think, we get a very brief glimpse of future Kurosawa regular and acting giant  Tatsuya Nakadai playing... and I quote the IMDB... ‘samurai wandering through town’), we finally meet three of the main characters. The lead, played by Takashi Shimura, has been hired to kill a thief holding a local baby hostage, holed up in a barn. In a scene which must have ben absolutely electrifying to Japanese audiences at the time (let alone the characters of the town people watching him do it) he slices off his top knott (something unheard of for a samurai, even a ronin such as that which Shimura plays) and shaves his head to look like a priest. Then, with a clever ruse utilising two balls of rice, he makes short work of the thief who we see only in aftermath, in slow motion, as he rushes out of the barn and then falls to the floor. 

Now I can’t write a whole book about this movie for one blog entry (although some people have... you should maybe read one) but even this scene gives a look at the genius of Kurosawa (apart from the dynamic use of slow motion and editing which is used more than once in the movie). And I'm talking about the way he puts people who will become important a little later in the film into the audience’s mind by stealth. For instance, the character of ‘the kid’,  Isao Kimura, walks in behind a group of six watchers in the 4:3 frame behind them (making a group of seven, not the last time this number of characters in a frame crop up in the film) and when they all leave to follow the action, he stays in frame for a few seconds, which embeds him into the audience consciousness when, a few minutes later, he turns out to be one of the leads. 

And not only that... the next shot where he walks behind a bunch of onlookers watching the show from behind, with the camera now looking at the scene from behind him, Toshiro Mifune’s character is sitting on the floor in the shot too. It’s all good stuff and is just another sign that Kurosawa was an absolute master of his art. As is his use of verticals to compartmentalise a frame a while later, in a believable way while still conforming to the small, almost square frame of the aspect ratio. It’s great stuff.

And the drama between all the characters is absolutely amazing... even though my two favourite characters in the film played by two other Kurosawa regulars... Minoru Chiaki and  Seiji Miyaguchi... are both dead by the end of the story. There are also some of the greatest action sequences in movie history, with frenetic editing, fury and sound, especially the final battle where everyone is slipping around and drenched in rain and mud. It’s a film which truly sticks in the mind, not least because of  Fumio Hayasaka’s phenomenal score (I even like the song version of the main samurai theme, not used in the movie but which is in one of the discs in the first of the Kurosawa soundtrack box sets put out in Japan some decades ago) which livens things up when it needs to and which also, in one particular theme, seems almost the inspiration for Elmer Bernstein’s bandit theme from the remake known as The Magnificent Seven.

Another thing I like about the movie, a concept sadly lost nowadays, mostly, is that there is respect for the older people in the village. When the villagers are stuck and don’t know what to do, they go and see the village elder and listen and take note of his wisdom... a nice thing to see. 

Decades ago, a friend and I went to see a day long bunch of seminars about Kurosawa at the National Film Theatre, followed by one of the movies (I think it may have been The Hidden Fortress). Among the guests were Kurosawa’s friend and biographer, the late, great Donald Richie and, also, the great director Alex Cox. Cox had a bunch of postcards representing all of Kurosawa’s films and he asked the audience to vote on whether each film was a ‘masterpiece’ or not, implying that this is a good way to tell the worth of a film director. In the case of this experiment, there were well over half of the director’s films which were argued by various members of the public as being masterpieces... which really says something about how well appreciated this director is. And, of course, nobody hesitated in proclaiming Seven Samurai a masterpiece. If you’ve not seen this one, maybe sort out that oversight sometime. One of the most entertaining films in the history of cinema, for sure.

Rashômon

Deceitful Rider

Rashômon
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Daiei Japan 1950 
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

“Women can’t help crying. They’re naturally weak.”
The Bandit

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story ‘In The Grove’, which I have read in English translation but not for a couple of decades now, is the basis for this very important film, Rashômon, by the great Akira Kurosawa. It’s a landmark for so many reasons and, hooray, it has my two favourite actors in this one, Toshiro Mifune as a bandit and the great Takashi Shimura as a woodcutter. 

It’s a film which starts at the Rashômon Gate*, various static shots of which, in the pouring rain, punctuate the opening credit cards. And then we see two characters, Shimura and yet another of he and Mifune’s Seven Samurai co-stars (I think there’s a fair few of them in this, despite the small cast), Minoru Chiaki as a priest. Both are sheltering from the kind of hard rain that only Kurosawa could create and capture (I think with added black ink rather than milk in this case), when they are joined by a third person, played by Kichijirō Ueda, who wants to know why the two are puzzling, despairing in fact, about various witness accounts they’ve just seen in the trial of the aforementioned bandit. 

Okay, so from here the film goes into various flashbacks, both from this refuge and also within the stories from the trial, which tells the tale of a murderous (or possibly even suicidal) forest encounter between Mifune’s bandit, a samurai played by Masayuki Mori and his wife, played by Machiko Kyô. And each person tells a completely different version of the events that the woodcutter himself saw, in his fourth version of the story, which even then is not believed. Each version differing wildly in tone and intent within the same basic set up of a bandit raping the samurai’s wife. Even the samurai who was killed, by one means or another, by the end of the sequence of events, gives his side of the story, being brought back to speech at the trial through a spiritual medium, played by Noriko Honma

Six performances so electrically charged that they positively crackle with energy, combined with what was then deemed, at least by the West, as groundbreaking cinematic technique.

There are a few reasons why people still worship at the cinematic temple of Rashômon to this day and one of them, of course, is that the very phenomena of various eyewitness accounts and people’s memories conflicting with each other has slipped into common usage in the English language, being known now as a Rashômon-like occurrence. I, myself, on numerous occasions where I’ve had to do jury service, have seen how the eyewitness evidence of two or more witnesses can often be diametrically opposed to each other (either that or the police are incredibly stupid... take your pick).

But this is not the only reason why it is remembered...

The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and, two years later, won an Honourary Academy Award, the film often being credited as to why the Academy invented the Best Foreign Movie category. In other words, it was the film that put Japanese cinema on the map (which to the Japanese meant that the film must be somehow deficient, if the crazy Westerners could understand it... and not be a true Japanese product). I mean some film was bound to do that for Japan at some point but... yeah, this was the one. But why?

Well, the first flashback and many subsequent scenes has the moving camera pointing up directly at the sun (with the tree canopy against the sky almost becoming another character here)... often accredited as being the first film to do so (although there were, I suspect, silent films doing that before 1950) but, as importantly, the film uses a lot of hand held camera technique, which was also a bit of an eye opener. I’ve heard many directors tell of the first time they saw this and the way the camera was freed and allowed them to contemplate what else could be done with cinema. Also, in reference to the fact that the different flashback sequences, each eliciting very different performances by the lead actors (it’s quite something when, in the fourth segment, Machiko Kyô kinda goes mad and slips into the trademark, over enthusiastic, wild Mifune laugh from the first sequence which would later reappear in Seven Samurai, and make it her own) and they way the medium of film suddenly seemed so free and flexible. And the rigorous fight between the bandit and the samurai in the first recollection is performed as two inept men fighting comically when it’s observed for the fourth time.

Plus, of course, what Kurosawa could so with a 4:3 aspect ratio is just amazing. Here are just three of the many shots which are utterly brilliant here...

The samurai first coming across Mifune sitting against tree on the opposite side of screen, a huge tree trunk turning the vertical space between them into a thick black separator, framing the actors in their own slivers of space.

Another shot of the upper torso and head of Shimura in close up, centred large in the screen, with two other characters in long shot over each shoulder as they converse. Again, another separator, this time made from one of the characters (see one of the shots pictured above).

Finally, Minoru Chiaki clutching one side of a column in close up, the structure taking up the right half of the screen as an area of darkness. Then Shimura says something and we pan right, the column now taking up the left hand side of the screen as we catch up to a medium shot of Shimura standing in the background all in one motion. It’s like a moving series of frames and all this stuff I’m describing in terms of visual creativity is just a small handful of much of the movie in terms of excellence in shot composition (which, to be fair, you expect from the greatest director in the world... which is, of course, Akira Kurosawa). 

And that’s just about it from me about Rashômon, I think. It’s obviously influential and has also been remade a fair few times... I still need to see the Western remake with Paul Newman and William Shatner entitled The Outrage but, even the great Mario Bava had a crack at this when he turned it into a fairly sexless sex comedy in his film Four Times That Night, if memory recalls (what do you expect when you let Dick Randall produce your movie, eh?). Rashômon, though, is definitely the film that put Japanese cinema and, by default, Kurosawa, on the international map and most cineastes would have surely seen this one by now. But, if you haven’t, you should probably look this one up... it added greatly, I think, to the grammar of cinema in all it’s forms. Another of the great director’s masterpieces. 

*Originally an entranceway to Kyoto but destroyed by storms over the 9th and 10th centuries.

Everything I Know about Filmmaking I Learned Watching Seven Samurai

Curiouser And Kurosawa

Everything I Know about Filmmaking I Learned Watching Seven Samurai
by Richard D. Pepperman
Michael Wiese Productions
ISBN: 978-1615932115

This book is a nice idea and the author, Richard D. Pepperman, comes more than recommended, in the blurb on the inside cover, as being one of the world’s leading authorities on the craft of motion picture making. That being said, while Kurosawa, my absolute favourite director, is certainly leading by example in all of his extremely masterful and influential films, I can’t quite get my head around the idea that everything you need to know is something that can be observed by watching a single motion picture. Still, it’s a good hook of a title and it certainly dragged me in. Frankly, anything with Kurosawa’s name on it is going to drag me in.

Everything I Know about Filmmaking I Learned Watching Seven Samurai is not quite what I expected in terms of size or content, as it happens. I should really start looking at those dimension specifications they give on Amazon when they ‘shop window’ these things because, far from being a coffee table tome, the book is actually almost as small as a standard paperback... just landscape instead of portrait.

I suspect the unexpected sizing comes from the idea that, if I were a film student, I’d be able to carry it around in a coat pocket and in his introduction to the book, Mr. Pepperman seems to imply that the book is meant more as some kind of scholarly aid as opposed to a general entertainment for the masses. Not sure I’d agree with that completely but the author has gone so far as to suggest that the book is accompanied by a screening of the movie as you read and, furthermore, has taken the timings and mini chapters of the Criterion Edition DVD as his point of reference to explain where he is in the film as he goes. Which seems kinda unusual, co-opting the great Criterion Collection into the structure of his book. Especially for readers like myself, who live in countries where the Criterion edition of the movie is not readily available.

As it happens, I have two different editions of the Criterion version of Seven Samurai, including their original, first DVD release with spine number 2 on it (spine 1 was a delayed release) and I am assuming the chapter stops in this book relate to their later re-release of the film (or possibly both). That being said, I opted to not take the writers advice on watching as I read because, frankly, I know the movie pretty well by now and there are a large number of screen shots from the film accompanying the text. In fact, as Mr. Pepperman describes each scene, I could pretty much remember the way the dialogue was spoken, the attitudes/expressions of the characters and what sounds and music was on the soundtrack as I read along, so I don’t think it’s completely something you have to do while you read, truth be told.

The book approaches the film with little bursts of text a paragraph or two long, often accompanied by a screen picture, followed by a ‘Lesson Learnt’ paragraph or two. I have to say that, many of the lessons in here weren’t really things I learned and I wondered at just how much of this was new to me as I was reading, a lot of which seemed more common sense and something which you pick up as you watch the work anyway. Of course, there’s always the issue that one person’s interpretation of a film-maker’s intent, especially when you are just putting one film under a microscope, can be something where more is being read into things than were intended but, at least with Kurosawa, I think it’s fair to say that he was pretty much aware of all the marvellous things he was doing and which Pepperman has rightly picked up on. Kurosawa is not a director who I would associate with the term serendipity, for example.

And it’s really not a bad book. Simply written it conveys many concepts and techniques that Kurosawa used in this movie.

For instance, deliberately leaving a character who is clandestinely observing a scene between two other characters in soft focus and having him come more into focus (but never in sharp focus) as he approaches the objects of his scrutiny. Or the practice of sometimes starting a scene transition off without an establishing shot and focussing on a specific character, only to cut to what he is suddenly reacting to as the main focus of an establishing shot.

And so on.

With other ‘lessons learned’ occasionally having very rich pay offs like how a fade into a scene followed by a fade out can be used to smooth over a transition from night to day. Or the use of the sound of galloping hooves in the final battle scenes even when the camera is off in a different part of the village to maintain the audio focus of the peril of the sequence. These, along with other rich gems like the brevity of showing just the consequences of an action, rather than the action itself, are all something which students can learn from and, I suspect, is something that much of modern Hollywood could learn even more from.

As I read some of the writer’s observations, I couldn’t help but think of how one particular Hollywood motion picture seems to be a rich beneficiary of the kind of knowledge found in this book and how some of these techniques highlight how brilliant a certain director and the way her film was put together, adhered closely in some instances to the lessons that Kurosawa and others have gifted the cinematic art with. I was thinking, of course, of Patty Jenkins and one of the true masterpieces of modern American cinema which she bestowed upon the general public last year with her Wonder Woman movie (reviewed here)...

The use of slowing down certain actions such as Kurosawa does in a couple of moments in this movie is something which modern cinema has been doing effectively for a while (I don’t particularly like The Matrix films but I bet Kurosawa was well loved by the directors) and it’s arguably used in a different manner but I thought Jenkin’s use of this during certain small sequences of Wonder Woman were definitely an example of this kind of theatricality done right. I usually hate this kind of thing as its used these days but it didn’t jar and was, instead, used to highlight in a way which is, arguably, more in keeping with Kurosawa’s aesthetic. Similarly, the idea that Kurosawa, with Seven Samurai, wanted to make an action film which wouldn’t sacrifice or minimise the portrayal of the human characters at its heart is something I very much feel is one of the more potent and successful aspects of Jenkin’s cinematic feast.

One thing I did question about the book... and it’s something I need to check... is the fact that Kurosawa is ‘cutting shots mid action’. Now I knew he used to do this but Pepperman talks about this practice as being a “traditional and prescribed directive of the era”. Really? I thought that was kind of frowned upon in the mid 1950s. Indeed, I thought that when editor Peter Hunt brought that kind of ‘against the rules’ dynamic to Dr. No and the James Bond films which came after, he was being perceived as a little bit rebellious and breaking the rules. Perhaps, though, it was a way of doing things in Japanese cinema, at the time, which simply wasn’t in general practice in Western cinema? I don’t know, I’m going to have to explore that one further but it certainly raised the question in my mind.

Everything I Know about Filmmaking I Learned Watching Seven Samurai is fairly short and it’s a pretty quick read for a movie of such length. I’ve no doubt both students of film and those audience members who are less familiar with Seven Samurai will get a heck of a lot more out of it than people who have been watching it, off and on, for a few decades but even so, this book is an invaluable aid and certainly entertaining... especially if you are picturing the expressions and tones of voice of the actors as they deliver the lines in your mind’s eye. Not a bad book to find on any cineastes shelves but, and this goes without saying, not a substitute for sitting in a room and watching the work repeatedly yourself... the film’s riches are not as inscrutable as the reputation often associated with the nationality of the director.

Mifune - The Last Samurai

Mifune Valentine

Mifune - The Last Samurai
2016 Japan Directed by Steven Okazaki
Screening as part of the London
Film Festival - October 15th 2016

My first experience of watching Toshiro Mifune was when I was 12 years old, seeing him play Lord Toranaga in the 1980 TV series Shogun. It was a role which stuck in my mind for a long time but I had no idea who he was. When I discovered my favourite director, Akira Kurosawa, a few years later, I was absolutely entranced by both him and, of course, both his main acting collaborators, Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura. They soon became my new favourite performers and, after all these years, that pretty much stands. So when I saw that there would be a new documentary about the life of Mifune at this years London Film Festival called Mifune - The Last Samurai, I jumped at the chance to grab tickets and I’d have to say that, of the five movies I saw at this year’s LFF, this was probably the one I was most looking forward to.

Unfortunately, although it has a lot of good things about it, I’d have to say that it’s the one film in this years festival which disappointed me somewhat. Perhaps it’s my own expectations which brought me to this state of mind in that I was expecting a proper biography of the actor but, when I saw that the film is only 1 hour and 20 mins long, I should have possibly realised that there’s no way anybody could have done justice to the legend that was Mifune in such a short running time. I’m assuming that the curtailed running time was a contractual obligation and that this film is ultimately destined to be a DVD or Blu Ray extra... at least that’s my guess. Personally, I would have liked to have seen it expanded on by a couple more hours.

Now let me just start off by saying that it’s actually a pretty good movie and, to a certain extent, is a good primer for anyone unfamiliar with the actor and his work. That being said, it’s a bit of a puff piece in some ways and there seems to be some pretty glaring ommissions which could lead to a very slanted view of events in the actor’s life, if you don’t know anything about him. Certainly it rolls along at a fast pace and has some interviews with a lot of people still with us who worked with Kurosawa way back when. Not only still with us, it seems, but looking way younger than their years might suggest and one of the strengths of this documentary is that it’s primarily told by people who were a witness to the lives of the main players in this film and, mostly, not second hand stories.

So you have people like Haruo Nakajima, who acted for Kurosawa and who was sometimes the “man in the suit” in various Godzilla films (both Kuroswa and the Godzilla films came from the same stable, Toho Studios). Or Kurosawa’s long standing script supervisor Teruyo Nogami, who wrote a wonderful book a number of years ago about her experiences called Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa, which is well worth a read. There are also talking head interview excerpts from the likes of admirers such as Martin Scorcese and Steven Spielberg, not to mention Miffune’s son Shiro and Kurosawa’s son Hisao. Perhaps it’s the inclusion of so many people so close to the subject matter of the documentary that ensures it turns out as uninformative on certain periods of Mifune’s life as it seems to be in places... perhaps Japanese politeness won out over reportage of the facts. There is some pretty important stuff which is excluded here, I think.

I guess the clue is in the title but one of the main weaknesses of the movie is that it seems to focus, with the exclusion of almost all else, on Mifune’s period, samurai movies... which isn’t, by any means, all he did. It also, and I did find this strange, seems to dwell almost exclusively on Mifune’s time working with Kurosawa. Now Kurosawa is my favourite director, for sure, but both he and Mifune had a longish career away from each other too... so this seems to be a very strange way of producing a fair and unbiased documentary. While other films in Mifune’s CV are briefly mentioned, such as his international work on productions like Grand Prix, Hell In The Pacific, 1941 and the aforementioned Shogun, the main interest in this movie is absolutely on the artistic collaboration between the two and, though it’s a very important cinematic collaboration to rival other successful celluloid partnerships such as Scorcese & DeNiro or Hitchcock & Herrmann, one has to wonder if the film might have been better coming clean about what it really wanted to say and making it a movie specifically about that collaboration, rather than throwing the odd mention of other things into it too... after all, the running time is so short, there’s barely enough time to cover either of these subjects adequately.

As I said earlier, the film is also very spare with its facts and glosses over some important stuff. For instance, it mentions Mifune and Kurosawas last film together and says that they had nothing more to give to each other and decided to stop the collaboration... which makes everything sound nice and polite. However, for years I have been hearing the stories of how Kurosawa’s thirst for perfectionism extended to crazy extremes on Red Beard, with him trying to get authentic set dressing from the period of the movie for things like the insides of drawers which would never even be opened while the camera was rolling... presumably to properly immerse his crew in the right atmosphere. Consequently, with stuff like this, Red Beard’s shoot ended up taking two years... years in which Mifune, now with his own ‘struggling to be cash solvent’ production company, was not being able to work in films for that company and help keep the required revenue coming in. Tensions on the set of Red Beard must have been pretty fierce, I suspect.

It’s also said that Kurosawa saw the roles in other films that Mifune had been taking as inferior to the pictures he was making and he didn’t, for instance, have a good word to say about Mifune’s work on Shogun, amongst others. All of these things must have taken a toll on Mifune and Kurosawas relationship and it’s no wonder that, after Red Beard in 1965, they would never work together again, although I believe Mifune was still loyal to Kurosawa and spoke in his defence. After all, it was due to Kurosawa that he started off his career in acting.

Little things like these and the implication rather than straight forward presentation of Mifune’s role in the Second World War training Kamakazi pilots seem to paint a very one sided picture of the main subject of the documentary and I thought this was such a shame because, although the film is wonderful and it’s nice to see all these people turn up for it, it would have been better to have a more accurate portrayal of the man on film, I feel.

However, there are some nice things about it too. There are sections early on in the documentary which show excerpts from rare, silent chanbara movies and it was nice to see these and realise that, in many respects, they are not that different from ones still being made today.

The music in the film, composed by Jeffrey Wood, is quite minimal with a percussive quality which doesn't seem completely out of place when you pitch it against some of the classic Kurosawa movies excerpted, such as Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood and Yojimbo. It doesn’t intrude on the proceedings and lends it some appropriate support when required... so that's all good.

Also, although I somehow failed to realise this until I saw his name on the credits at the end, the voice-over narrative for the film is performed by Keanu Reeves. This seems entirely fitting as I can think of nobody better, at least in Western cinema, who can play a modern day incarnation of the wandering ronin (aka masterless samurai) with such style and confidence. Think, for example, of his stray dog of a character, John Wick (reviewed here), in the recent film of the same title... practically a living embodiment of certain parts of the mythos surrounding the honourable samurai.

And that's my take on this particular movie done. If you've never seen a Kurosawa movie or looked at anything with Toshiro Mifune in it then you should probably take a look at this film and then follow it up with Stuart Gailbraith's excellent book The Emporer and The Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. If you're already a fan of either then this is still a very interesting, if not nearly as informative, look at the two of them. However, as an extremely good friend of mine remarked, when I told her about the movie... "No story tells the whole story."

2016 London Film Festival @ NUTS4R2

Zoology (Zoologiya)
Women Who Kill
Mifune - The Last Samurai
Prevenge
Spaceship

Red Sun (Soleil Rouge)

Bron-shido!


Red Sun (Soleil Rouge) 
France/Italy/Spain 1971
Directed by Terence young
Optimum Region 2

I’ve been trying to obtain a watchable home video edition of Red Sun for many years now. Usually the prints available of this one are presented in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio but we’ve finally now got a release which restores the original theatrical 1.85:1 ratio (even though I suspect, having now seen it in this aspect ratio, that it was originally shot in 1.33:1 and cropped down for cinemas).

This is good because, Red Sun is a bit of a curio as a Western, in that it stars my favourite actor Toshiro Mifune, rubbing shoulders with an all star cast which includes Charles Bronson, Alain Delon, Ursula Andress and Capucine.

I’ll say that lot again while elaborating further so it can sink in why this movie screams out to be watched by anyone who loves cinema...

It stars Toshiro Mifune as a yojimbo who finds himself in the Wild West, aided (unwillingly at first) by the roguish outlaw Charles Bronson as they seek the current possessor of a precious sword and the loot which Bronson’s gang had stolen from the train carrying Mifune and his diplomat/retainer. The villain who has run off with all this is Bronson’s double crossing, evil and deadly former gang member as played by Alain Delon. On the way they stop by in Capucine’s whorehouse to pick up Delon’s girlfriend Christina, as played by Ursula Andress, to use as a bargaining chip. And the whole thing is directed by James Bond director Terence young, who also taps one of his regular character actors Anthony Dawson in a small role (well it would have to be a small role sharing screen time with this cast, wouldn’t it?).

Despite the pitfalls of the enormity of these stars coming together in this movie, and the politics of three countries co-financing the venture, Red Sun actually turns out to be, not just an interesting movie, but an entertaining one. It’s a little inconsistent in places but ultimately it’s held together by the strength of the actors (who really are, in this case, very much “movie stars”) and you really can’t fault the performances here (this is possibly the best I’ve seen Ursula Andress do in a movie, if not the most I’ve seen of her in a film... although she does briefly go topless for one scene).

The film seems, maybe, just a little too comfortable to watch in places although I don’t know why that is because in terms of content, Terence young doesn’t steer clear of nudity and he certainly doesn’t skimp on the blood, usually evident when Mifune runs someone through with his sword. But I did have some issues with some of the footage and the way it’s been cut together in general. There are a lot of Western landscapes with the small figures of our main protagonists (usually it’s Mifune and Bronson together in these kinds of shots) in contrast to the environment which threatens to engulf them and this visual style seems to work really well in some places, nicely framed with a sense of scale implied within the confines of the shot... and then there are other shots of a similar content which just look sloppy and badly framed like they’re missing a major element which could have made them work. Unfortunately, the two kinds of shots are cut next to each other as often or not which gives the viewer a sense of unease... it’s like some of the shots were taken by the main crew and other shots were taken by the second unit, who were perhaps a little less on the ball when it came to selecting a similar style of shot design. It does tend to lend some sequences in the film a certain lack of consistency which I found wore on my nerves after a while.

This movie is a bit of a Western road movie so there are a lot of shots which are one or two (occasionally more) riders on the trail of their ultimate treasure but it’s the characterisations when the camera moves in a tad tighter that make this movie so darned entertaining. Toshiro Mifune’s “honourable warrior” who has seven knots tied in his sash and who has to undo one knot each day, moving him further forward to the point where, if he fails to recover the sword after seven days have passed, he must commit seppuku and join his ancestors... is a typical Mifune characterisation. That is to say it’s damn good and you can just feel the loss of history in the character when he reveals that, due to the political climate in his own country as forced by people like the Americans, he is probably of the last generation of samurai before they are no longer needed and die out as a breed.

Charles Bronson’s relationship to Mifune in the film is not dissimilar to the relationship dynamic which plays out between Mifune and Lee Marvin in John Boorman’s Hell In The Pacific. Bronson always trying to lose Mifune or get the drop on him and Mifune repaying in kind... and sure enough the two soon become thicker with each other and form a genuine friendship, a friendship which ultimately leads Bronson to throw away his dreams of finding the gold and instead, at the last knockings, embracing the strength of character to sacrifice his goals and instead, do the honourable thing.

Alain Delon is just bad and you can’t trust him from the start. You know he’s bad because he’s incredibly well dressed and wears a black jacket and jeans. You also know he’s evil because he enjoys killing people more than... well... more than not killing people and also, he tries to kill Bronson, who is supposed to be his partner in crime... his boss even. Delon plays the most ruthless of the characters in this movie and you absolutely buy him as a villain. A thinly drawn, clichéd villain to be sure... but one who will worry you as to what he will ultimately do to the characters you have come to care about.

Then there’s Andress. She’s got “a thing” going with Delon and her character matches him in some aspects. You learn fairly quickly not to trust her (bewitching a man with her topless breasts before reaching for his gun... hey, she’d have shot me no problem) and luckily Bronson’s character knows not to trust her too. This doesn’t stop her having some depth to her character when she speaks up on behalf of our heroes after they have rescued her from a Comanche death torture. Andress doesn’t have a lot to do in this one but she really brings the character to life when she gets the chance. True, like the majority of the performances in this one (perhaps excluding Mifune’s who’s vast experience invests his character with a certain gravitas), it’s a very comic-book, stylised and blatant characterisation... but it’s just right for this film and it fits right in.

The music to this film comes from someone who is, to me, a surprising source to get to score something which is trying very hard to be an American Western. Directed by Young who was actually born in China, as was Mifune (although he was always synonymous with Japanese film), with a prominent French actor and a famous Swiss actress (who had worked with both Young and Dawson before on the set of Dr. No)... its a film where you wonder if Charles Bronson was just cast in it to be the “token American”. But it’s a Western with a difference and so to find the score written in a mode which doesn’t really harken back to Western Americana in it’s construction, nor more obviously to the then more fashionable style that Morricone brought to the Italian Western, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that famous Lawrence Of Arabia composer Maurice Jarre was chosen for scoring duties. He seems to have approached this very appropriately in some ways, highlighting a theme which is very much something with an “oriental” flavour to underline (and, of course, underscore) the unusual element of Mifune as a samurai in the West. It’s less of a Western score and more of a score which illustrates the warmth which grows between the characters... as opposed to relying on the tools-in-trade of the Great American Western. It’s not an absolutely wonderful score, but it is pretty interesting and won’t bump you out of the picture too much.

I could go on and try to persuade you as to why Red Sun is a gentle Western with a difference but I don’t think I really need to do that. Nor do I have to give it a full on recommendation because the main reason for seeing it is right in front of your face.

Mifune! Bronson! Delon! Andress! Capucine!

How many more reasons do you need to see this movie?