In between SEVEN SAMURAI (1954) and THRONE OF BLOOD (1957), Kurosawa directed I LIVE IN FEAR, a critical and box office failure that brings up the old adage, was it by Sarris (?), that went something like, ‘the worst film by x (in this case Kurosawa) is more interesting than almost anybody else’s best film’. It enrages critics who see the director as just one in an ensemble of collaborators probably because there is a grain of truth in it. After all, there’s a reason why I have now organised the last three weeks’ viewing around one director. But it’s a claim, unnecessarily limiting, that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny for very long, thus my old colleague Victor Perkins’ reframing of these issues to ‘director-centred’ criticism in a move to shed all the unwanted and largely indefensible baggage attached to ‘auteurism’. Who directs a movie matters, why and how it might matter are questions for criticism to illumiinate. But the director is not the sole organising principle of criticism; film is indeed a collaborative medium. One now reads all those 50s classifications, lists, fights over rankings, as bro macho posturings, not unlike those one regularly finds online, though still entertaining and often informative.

Setting up the premise through double exposure:

All of this as a preamble to saying I LIVE IN FEAR is not good but worth watching. It made me aware that though Kurosawa is best known for the Samurai films and for his literary adaptations of a certain type of Western cannon, his films address all the contemporary issues of his society from post-war housing shortages (ONE WONDERFUL SUNDAY), celebrity and the mass media (SCANDAL), the post-WWII Yakuza during the American occupation (DRUNKEN ANGEL), and here the post-Hiroshima fear of nuclear Armageddon.

I LIVE IN FEAR tells the story of an old industrialist, Kichi Najamira (Toshiro Mifune), with four legitimate children, three children out of wedlock and two con-current mistresses, who wants to move all his families to Brazil to escape future radiation that he is sure will blow his way. His eldest children are dependent on the foundry their father founded for their livelyhoods, don’t want to leave, and take him to court to have him declared mentally incapacitated. But is he crazy to be afraid? The father loves his children and when he thinks the only thing holding them back is the foundry, he burns it down, which proves to them that he is indeed nuts and also makes the father realise he’s being selfish. What about the workers and other people who can’t afford to leave?

Actors in Space:

The story is too complicated and not complex enough. But the film has beautiful demonstrations of extraordinary skill, the choreography of the camera in relation to space that go from close-ups to background context and seem a formal tour de force, the expressive compositions,  the use of long-lenses to create a sense of compressed space, the evocation of heat and humidity as a context for the feverish angst of its protagonist.

heat and humidity

Most of all, whilst the film might not be essential Kurosawa, it is essential Mifune.  As Kichi Najamira, Mifune, then 35 was playing double his age. It took me a while to recognise him, with his grey hair and bent body. But this film made me aware more than any other of the physicality of his acting, that combination of theatrical and subtle, the exaggerated outward with the delicate interiority. He’s great.

I have now seen all Kurosawa’s 50s films. He made nine, all fascinating. He had made ten in the forties (and this beginning in 43). He would make five in the sixties;  two in the seventies; two in the eighties; ending with three in the 90s. He continued making great films until the end (RAN, his adaptation of King Lear, is a masterpiece) but the bulk of the films he’s best remembered for are that extraordinary period of productivity from the late forties to the early sixties, as extraordinary an oeuvre as any in the history of cinema.

I LIVE IN FEAR  is not good — the blacked-up face, the first I’ve seen in Japanese cinema, which is not quite ‘blackface’ as it applies in American cinema,  is nonetheless cringey (see below) but with wonderful moments, a great subject of its time, an illuminating performance from Mifune, some tour-de-force filming from Kurosawa and co, and thus worth watching.

José Arroyo