Snapshot: Episode Eight: 1950s - Akira Kurosawa

Discussions of the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa invariably centre on his samurai films.  In part, for good reason.  “The Seven Samurai” is the most humane, the most profound, the most dramatically engaging of all action films.  The inevitable reduction of it to the status of template for the mundane western “The Magnificent Seven” too seldom acknowledges its own brilliance and misses the point of its wider influence.  Every Asian epic since 1954 is indebted to “Seven Samurai”; the recent work of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou in particular cannot escape the shadow of Kurosawa’s masterpiece, with neither director able to match it in either spectacle or intimacy.

It is to Kurosawa’s credit that he refused to become a prisoner of its success.  He made other samurai films, to be sure, but seldom on the same scale and each had a flavour distinctly its own. “Hidden Fortress” for example, is an adventure film, closer in tone to a fairy tale or legend, with a princess trapped in hostile territory being assisted by a loyal samurai-knight.  George Lucas remade it twenty years later, calling his version “Star Wars”.

Such was Kurosawa’s appreciation of western literature that he even made samurai interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays.  “Throne of Blood” is a dark, appropriately brooding take on “MacBeth” with a memorable climax in which Toshiro Mifune is turned into a giant pin cushion.

Many of Kurosawa’s finest achievements came outside the samurai genre, however, or on its periphery. “Rashomon”, in which Mifune is cast for the first time as a period warrior, is less an action film than a finely wrought meditation on the subjective nature of truth, with the same event seen from four distinct viewpoints.  “The Lower Depths” similarly has a samurai character, but is an intense, faithful rendering of Maxim Gorky’s 1912 play.

Lesser known and comparatively less successful Kurosawa films from the 1950s are “Scandal”, “The Idiot” and “I Live in Fear”.  “Scandal” in particular deserves a better reputation.  A fascinatingly prescient study of the growth of post-war mass media, it anticipates the contemporary cult of celebrity and the rise of gossip magazines.  It also demonstrates Kurosawa’s awareness of how quickly and uncritically Japan was adopting the culture of its occupier: a set piece in which various characters prepare for Christmas with an almost fetishistic enthusiasm for western ornaments and carols verges on parody.  It is though Kurosawa is sending up Frank Capra.
Kurosawa’s most renowned contemporary drama is “Ikiru”.  The story of a terminally ill petty bureaucrat whose situation leads him to starkly question the meaning of life, it displays all of the director’s warmth and humanity.  The potentially trite message, that service to others is ultimately more rewarding than hedonistic indulgence, gains much weight through the depiction of a cynical and uncaring backdrop against which the man struggles to do one last good deed. Kurosawa was an optimist, but such sentiment as his films contained was always counterbalanced by an awareness of mankind’s baser side.