Tag Archives: Toshiro Mifune

RED BEARD (Akira Kurosawa, 1965)

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Kurosawa saw RED BEARD (1965) as a turning point in his filmmaking, acknowledging that his subsequent films would be different. The film shows no traces of all the experiments with sound, editing, portable cameras or narration that younger filmmakers from all over the world were engaging with at the time. It’s classic, humanist cinema in the best sense. Structurally it’s almost Dr. Kildare -ish: a young doctor (Yuzo Kayama) learns wisdom from a gruff wiser one (Toshiro Mifune) who gently guides him through whatever ethical or medical problems present themselves. A comparison to MARCUS WELBY MD  would also not be inappropriate, given the episodic structure of the Kurosawa film. But these are only surface comparisons.

The episodes in RED BEARD are much grittier, harsher: A young mad woman tells stories of sexual abuse as she kills men with her hairpin (Is this where Almodóvar got his opening for MATADOR?) The second story is of a woman who rejected her husband for his younger clerk and married off their daughter to him so she could continue her relationship with him. When the clerk asked his now wife to ask her father for money after he’d stolen his wife and his daughter, she stabbed him. The third story starts with a body found after a mudslide. A man reveals it’s his wife and tells of an impossible love – she’d been bonded for ten years to another — that led her to commit suicide. We see also a young girl captured into sexual slavery at the age of 12; of a young boy who causes his whole family to attempt suicide after he’s caught stealing food. ‘ Poverty’s a political problem they say. But what has politics ever done for the poor?’ asks Red Beard.

The story is the young Doctor’s. He’s been educated in Western medicine and expected to work for the Shogun but circumstances and politics force him into this clinic for the poor, who he initially sees as smelly and inhuman. The change and journey are his. Red Beard’s guidance and his own experience lead him to understand fragility, empathy, compassion, kindness. In his marvellous review of the film, David Denby said that it should be required viewing for all doctors.

RED BEARD is 185 minutes with an intermission half-way through at 1h47. It took two-years to make and would be Kurosawa’s final collaboration with Mifune. The film is set in the 19th century and it views a bit like the equivalent of reading a 19th-century novel, with sweep, detail, and a moral centre. It has a touch of soap which makes the viewing compulsive but cut through with the style of telling and the grit of the tales themselves. The mise-en-scene is as precise, economical and evocative as good writing. And it’s a film that is always conscious of the viewer: Mifune’s fight scene outside the brothel being the most blatant example. It’s a film that can seem old-fashioned but which I prefer to call classic. I loved it.

Images

José Arroyo

I Live in Fear (Akira Kurosawa, 1955)

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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

THE LOWER DEPTHS (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

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Kurosawa followed is adaptation of Macbeth, THRONE OF BLOOD (1957), in which he deployed the basic premise and some of the structure but none of the dialogue, with yet another adaptation of a classic author, this time Maxim Gorky’s THE LOWER DEPTHS (1967), which he follows quite closely. The former ingeniously deploys the theatrical within the cinematic, the latter balances at the other extreme. The film is basically shot in one set, sometimes in very long takes, the dialogue is a fundamental vehicle of meaning, and yet each framing and reframing is precise and expressive.

Beginning:

I loved THRONE OF BLOOD; THE LOWER DEPTHS  is a film I admire and can’t fault but also don’t like. It’s quite a grim premise, which begins with a marvellous shot of workers emptying their garbage bins down the side of the cliff which lands on the rooftops of the down and out dwellers of the lower depths as they’re eating. We’re introduced to a landlord (Nakamura Gangiro II), his wife (Isuzu Yamada), his wife’s sister (Kyoko Kagawa), a thief (Toshiro Mifune), a prostitute, a gambler, an actor on his uppers, a tinker and his dying wife, an ex-samurai. We’re shown how relations of power are merely reproduced no matter at what level. The landlady’s sister is treated like a slave by her own kin. The thief has been having an affair with the landlady but has fallen in love with the sister. The cooper only appreciates his wife after she’s dead. A pilgrim arrives in the middle of all of this to offer wisdom and support. All bear up with their current situation with illusions of who they once were and hopes for change. Near the end the landlord gets killed, the thief and the landlady end up in jail, people leave, there’s a new landlord and new tenants but nothing changes. The film ends on a musical number and a killer last line, which refutes some of the accusations of sentimentality made against the film. The film is also quite funny. The whole ensemble is superb – accounts tell of a rehearsal period between 40-60 days before the film’s shoot — Mifune and Yamada winning prizes.

Mifune’s Entrance:

 

Maxim Gorky’s play was written in 1902, very much of its time, from the beginnings of that revolutionary period in Russia. Stanislavski directed the original Moscow Arts Theatre Production, a big hit, and the film found its way across the world, becoming part of Japan’s theatre repertory from the twenties. By the time Kurosawa made this version there had already been a Japanese adaption from 1921, SOULS ON THE ROAD, (Minoru Murata), a 1946 adaptation in India, NEEDHA NAGAR (Chetan Anand) a 1947 version in China, NIGHT INN (Huang Zuolin); and perhaps most famously, Renoir’s 1936 adaption LES BAS FONDS with Jean Gabin and Louis Jouvet.

One of the film’s major themes is that of harsh truths of existence vs the comforting illusions that allow people to live that existence. The issue of truth is an ongoing one in Kurosawa’s work. I suppose the reason I didn’t like the film is firstly, that I’m more with Blanche Dubois regarding illusions, even if it might lead to the madhouse. And it also brings to mind the Butler’s comments to Sullivan in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS: ‘You see, sir, rich people and theorists – who are usually rich people – think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches – as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn’t, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned.’ I don’t agree that the subject itself should be shunned but certainly a bourgeois gaze on it, which I take Kurosawa’s version to be, is an uncomfortable one.

Ending of Film:

José Arroyo

Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

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Last night’s Kurosawa was THRONE OF BLOOD (1957), which made me think of the poetic in cinema, which I take to be something like a complex idea or feeling communicated precisely through a minimum of means that nonetheless reverberates, the initial clarity opening itself up in the viewer to development, change or even contradiction.  Kurosawa’s great and beautiful adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is full of such moments – Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) and Wiki (Takashi Shimura) coming in and out of the fog in Cobweb Forest; Washizu’s wife, Asaji (Isuzu Yamada) advocating for murder, walking into a dark room, with only the sound of her kimono, swishing on the floor, into the darkness, and out of it holding an urn; the final, relentless and inescapable hail of arrows on the usurper at the end. It’s in this sense that Kurosawa reminds me of John Ford, who is one of the greatest exponents of the poetic in cinema.

Throne of Blood is also an adaptation of a play and ‘the theatrical’ is also evident everywhere in this great work of cinema. I know practically nothing of Noh theatre but even I can detect its influence in the design and performance of Isuzu Yamadi as Lady Asaji, the Lady Macbeth analogue in the film, her clothing, make-up, the way of walking, the minimalist movement. There are traces of it too in the design of the spirits in the forest (here not only the make-up and special effects but also the chanting, the music). But the uses of the theatrical in Throne of Blood extends beyond this. Think of the very beginning where battles are won, lost, won again, in a few minutes, all happening offscreen, as they would need to be narrated in a play (though here also so beautifully dramatized visually). The use of space also seems theatrical to me, minimalist, sparse, with figures placed in it in a highly stylised way.

People have argued that it can’t be an adaptation of Shakespeare because it doesn’t deploy the language. But it’s Kurosawa’s Macbeth that we’re seeing here and it has its own language and its own poetry. The plot is taken from Shakespeare but the language and poetry is all sights, sounds, rhythms. I found it beautiful.

 

A last observation is how strikingly Kurosawa uses the elements (fire in STRAY DOG), wind and rain in numerous films, here the fog. The whole film is drenched in it. And the scenes in the forest, where Kurosawa, who’s clearly learned from Ford, films from below, through bushes and trees, where it’s the entanglements that are in focus, and the riders lost, often out of focus in the background, running in and out of the fog, is quite extraordinary.

Clips:

fog

forest and fog:

sound and darkness:

A hail of arrows:

José Arroyo

 

SEVEN SAMURAI (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

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Last night’s Kurosawa was SEVEN SAMURAI (1954). At almost 3 ½ hours, much longer than I remember, though it ends up being a brisk watch. It’s easy to see why the film became a template for a particular type of action film, a village in danger, the search for help, the coming together of various ‘defenders’ into a group, the planning of the defence, the final battle. This has been copied in films from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN to THE AVENGERS  films and beyond.  The action here is varied, exciting, brutal, funny: as good as it gets. But unlike so many of the copycats, this one also has unexpected depth. The world of the film is hierarchised. The villagers have been driven to despair by marauding bandits that come after every harvest, take all their food, kill some of their young men and sometimes steal and enslave the women. The villagers and the samurai come together to defend the village – to paraphrase one of the characters, ‘working together, we can protect the individual; acting on individual interest, the individual gets destroyed’. Throughout the film we see a village change, transform, come into being in a different way. But a samurai can never be a villager, as is illustrated by a beautiful and romantically filmed thread in the film.  Thus, beautifully realised character vignettes of not only the major samurai but also some of the villagers – a major difference if I remember correctly from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN which I remember as a series of star turns (Yul Brynner, McQueen, etc) and which focusses on those magnificent, almost supernaturally skilled individuals at the expenses of the collective (I can barely remember any of the villagers though the plot follows the earlier film closely). There are star turns here as well of course, Takashi Shimura’s introduction, Toshiro Mifune in a broad comic role, whose carapace than adds to the pathos when his origins are revealed. It has very romantic moments (the lovers in the forest amidst the flowers) and very moving ones (the villager who upon raiding the bandits’ lair, sees his captured wife, and she is so ashamed that she turns back into the burning building). A very long film that is a surprisingly easy watch. An influential film that remains a great one.

José Arroyo

Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

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RASHOMON (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) is one of those films you hear so much about that you feel you’ve seen it, though in my case I hadn’t. The name of the film has come to stand for a type of narrative where one gets different points of view on an event. But Rashomon tells a much more complex and interesting story than this and in a more sophisticated way. Sheltering from the storm a priest and a woodcutter talk about a trial they’d just witnessed. A bandit (Toshiro Mifune) had apparently raped a woman (Machiko Kyō) and killed her husband (Masayuki Mori). We get four versions of this story, each correlating to an extent but differing in important and contradictory ways. They can’t all be true.  Each of the witnesses trying to present themselves as a version of their ideal self. But are they lying consciously? Or is each merely understanding from a different perspective? A combination? And each version is narrated in different ways, so for example the dead Samurai’s story is told by the ghost of the Samurai via a medium as told by a woodcutter. Moreover, watching I was struck by the significance of the woman’s story being a rape – it could have been some other crime — and the way we’re getting a mid-twentieth century Japanese cultural attitudes on an event set in the past but understood from a present perspective where these events resonate in similar but different ways (‘The woman’s story is not to be believed’, says one of the witnesses in the trial). The film begins with the phrase ‘I don’t understand’. At the end the film acknowledges that the full truth can never be known, that ‘objective’ truth doesn’t exist, and yet one of the characters at the beginning says that if people don’t tell the truth life is impossible and we’re mere animals. But of course even telling ‘the truth’ is no guarantee that things happened as told. It’s a film that packs a lot in a short time – at 88 minutes it’s the shortest Kurosawa film I’ve seen —  and poetically: the rain, the light effects with a camera pointed at the sun, that poetic scene just before the rape where the woman’s mysterious beauty and the bandit’s sexual desire are so powerfully evoked, the bandit under a tree, face and body dappled by sunlight, waking up feeling he has a right to everything he can take.

I wonder how the film would play with students today, this meditation on truth relayed over the body of a woman raped, and raped again in each telling with her body available to whomever has the force to take it, her word discounted, being blamed for what happened to her, and in one version, with the husband disowning her from what he could not protect her from. The significance of the crime being a rape is more significant in my viewing than it had come across when I perhaps too glancingly read about the film in years gone by.

To perhaps restate the obvious, a film to see: much more interesting and complex, better, than the most laudatory hearsay would have it.

José Arroyo

Scandal (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

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Very enjoyable but perhaps the least successful of the Kurosawas I’ve been seeing recently. Each individual episode is masterfully shot but the film as a whole doesn’t cohere. It begins as a light and glamorous screwball about a famous artist (Toshiro Mifune) who meets a star (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) in a mountain retreat, the paparazzo take a shot of them together and sell them to the Amour magazine claiming evidence  of a secret affair. They decide to sue and hire a lawyer (Takashi Shimura) with a gambling addiction and a tubercular daughter. At this point the film shifts tone and focus, leaving the glamorous couple behind to focus on the moral failings of a good but weak man. The film then shifts again, this time into a Christmas film, with lots of orchestral versions of famous American holiday songs, culminating in Auld Lang Syne and highlighting the redemptive potential of the holiday season itself. Will the lawyer whose sold out his clients to the pulps honour his now dead daughter and do the right thing for his clients? This is drawn out in the finale which becomes a courtroom procedural. So, a film with serious themes —  the limits of free speech in the age of mass media —  but of dual protagonists, various genres, too sudden shits in tone, that doesn’t quite cohere. What I liked best were the montages, first a 30s style one of the pulp press sinking its teeth into the story, then the cycling races affording opportunities for gambling. There’s also an incredible shot of Mifune looking very dashing, riding his motorcycle with a fully decorated tree at the back being followed by children. It’s a film of many pleasures that is not quite good.

José Arroyo

The Scandal Montage:

At the (bicycle) races:

Cool Yule turns melodrama:

An illustration of the mastery of compositions, a triangle structure of paparazzo at the centre as the lawyer on the left speaks, leaving room for another court official on the right, thus illustrating the tension of the theme, the law vs the press:

José Arroyo

HIGH AND LOW (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)

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For the first 55 minutes HIGH AND LOW (Akira Kurosawa, 1963) is a sparse and minimalist chamber piece in which moral and ethical considerations are put into play, in dazzling long takes and expressive compositions. Mr. Gondo’s business associates present him with a plot to oust the current head of the shoe company they all work for. Sales have been stagnant.  The current president is old fashioned. They would make more profits by making more fashionable shoes with in-built obsolescence. If they all gather their shares they could take control of the company. Mr. Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) turns them down. What he doesn’t tell them is he’s mortgaged everything he owns in order to get 50 million to buy a majority share, take over himself, and build shoes that are both fashionable and good quality. As he kicks his associates from his house, Gondo gets a phone call saying his child has been kidnapped and they are asking for a 30 million ransom. If he pays this, it will cost him all he’s worked for since he was a 16 year-old apprentice, his plans for his future, possibly his home. He’s willing to do that for his son. But he will he do the same for someone else’s son? It turns out that the kidnappers have made a mistake and have kidnapped the chauffeur’s son instead. The two moments were the chauffeur gets on his knees, first to beg for his son’s life, and then, once again, when Gondo agrees to pay the ransom and the chauffeur realises the full extent of the sacrifice , were most moving. What is a life worth? Is the life of a chauffeur’s son worth the same as that of an industrialist’s son. What is loyalty? What are a person’s obligations and responsibilities and how should one act to meet them? It’s superb.

The second hour and a quarter turns the film into an exciting police procedural. Who did it? Why? How to find the culprit? In this half, the film descends from the heights of Mr. Gondo’s apartment to the lower depths. The transition is an exciting scene on a train shot with multiple handheld cameras of the exchange of the money for the child.

This is introduced by a wipe, and there’s something to be thought about in the way Kurosawa uses wipes, it’s not just a transition, it’s a move in time, space, mood.

There will be another wipe when we’re introduced to the perpetrator, the camera picks up his reflection in a pond, follows him, through a slum, and into his room where we finally see his face as he then checks out the newspapers and radio to find out where he stands in relation to the police’s investigation.

There’s another incredible scene in a heroin den that is as brilliant a piece of cinema as I’ve seen (the way Kurosawa frames, the balance between close-ups underlining individuals, and the more crowded shot symbolising crime and affliction, the frames within frames, the way the camera is often outside a window looking in, often also through a curtain or screen, the moments of showmanship (the light reflecting on the sunglasses). It really is quite extraordinary.

The film ends with a conversation between the industrialist and the perpetrator. I won’t spoil the film by divulging the reasons for the kidnapping but will merely note that Kurosawa films the reflection of one on the face of the other. Then in the last shot we are left with a pensive industrialist meditating on his own reflection, interestingly with his face not being visible either in the foreground or in the reflection.

It’s a great film. It was also the number one box office success of its year.

I also very much liked Spike Lee’s remake of this, which I will now see again but I don’t remember it being as elegant or as moving.

More images from film:

THE BAD SLEEP WELL/ Warui Jatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru (Akira Kurosawa, 1960)

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Another extraordinary crime film from Akira Kurosawa, this one dealing with corporate corruption. What I found most remarkable was the story-telling, of which the opening scene is an extraordinary example. It starts theatrically with a group of waiters making a greeting line in front of a lift. The doors slide open, and we get a wedding party. The door opens again and this time it’s a whole gaggle of paparazzi, who will act as a Greek chorus, doing quite a bit of exposition, telling us who the main characters are, filling in background, contradicting or elaborating upon what the characters themselves are telling us. It’s a wedding, a happy occasion but after the first 30 seconds the drama begins. We see that the bride is crippled, walking on crutches with one foot higher than the other. The father is the head of the corporation. The groom is poor. Did he marry her just for her money? As the wedding banquet proceeds, the police arrive, we see messages of an imminent arrest passed around and on top of it,  the brother says if the groom doesn’t make his sister happy he’ll kill her. After the nervous applause dies down, the wedding cake gets brought in. But there are two, one of them a scale-model of a building where a man jumped off the seventh floor, with a rose marking the exact spot, linking the current scandal and some of the top managers who work there to the previous one where they had worked at before. As one of the journalists says at the end of the opening scene, ‘A funny wedding, the best one-act play I ever saw’. ‘A one-act play,’ says another. This is merely a prelude’. And indeed a newspaper appears on the screen, ‘A big scandal unfolding. Police raid Dairyu. A chain of investigations’. The main narrative is well and truly on its way. It’s fantastically told visually (the choice of shots and compositions), musically (the abruptness with which the music often stops), the use of close-ups to single out individuals, how every beat in the story adds information whilst increasing the drama.

It is really superb and so is the rest of the film. A revenge film in which Mifune seeks to avenge his father’s death by destroying the life of the father of his wife. It’s supposedly influenced by Hamlet, though I can at best detect a loose resemblance. The themes are however Shakespearean, a man destroying his life to keep his position, a young man seeking to write wrongs who commits even worse ones, a wife torn between love for her husband and duty to her father. It’s a film where no one wins except the viewer.

 

Tony Zhou has a very fine short essay on Kurosawa’s compositions in The Bad Sleep Well, which you can see here.

PS I see now from wiki that ‘ Francis Ford Coppola has listed The Bad Sleep Well as one of his favorite films, citing the first thirty minutes of the film “as perfect as any film I’ve ever seen” and used it as inspiration for the wedding sequence in the 1972 Oscar-winning gangster drama The Godfather,’ which makes all kinds of sense.

José Arroyo

STRAY DOG/ NORA INU (Akira Kurosawa, 1949)

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I’d only really been familiar with Kurosawa’s famous samurai films. The post-war noirs in the BFI’s box set have been a discovery: the more I see of them the more my admiration for Kurosawa as a filmmaker grows.

STRAY DOG is a re-teaming of Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura from DRUNKEN ANGEL (1948). Mifune plays a young cop whose knapsack gets stolen on the bus. Inside it is a Colt revolver with seven bullets. It’s now being used to kill innocents. How many will have to die before the weapon is recovered? Will the cop survive his guilt?

Kurosawa is a master of conveying the elements themselves. Here it’s the heat and humidity of a Tokyo Summer, exacerbated by  having a killer on the loose. People perspire, wipe their faces, sigh with tiredness (see the gorgeous montage below).

As the two investigators move from suspect to suspect, we get a panorama of post-war Tokyo society, all the low-lifes, criminals, prostitutes, dancers’ all with  lives that exceed the activity or profession society defines them for; poor people without space; professionals on low incomes and their way of life, a rich lady who shuts her window to a crimes she’s witnessing before returning to her piano, a young dancer for whom a dress has become a symbol for a different kind of life, wished for but forever out of reach. In fact the killer ends up being someone not unlike the young inspector, a war vet whose also had his knapsack stolen, as a result left desperate and derelict, who ends up making bad choices.

The last chase scene is exciting, beautiful and expressive. Both men now handcuffed together, occupying the lower third of the frame, as young innocent children walk in the background at the top of the frame singing, and then the thief begins to weep at the choices he’s made. It’s gorgeous and moving (see clip below), as is the whole of the film. I’ve included frame grabs from some of the compositions to illustrate the variety, originality and expressiveness of Kurosawa’s compositions, which continue to astonish me.

The incredible extended montage from the beginning.

The moving and beautiful final chase scene (above)

Examples of the compositions (below)

José Arroyo

Red Sun (Terence Young, 1970)

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The kind of movie Quentin Tarantino likes: lots of action, excitingly filmed, with characters that are all attitude and swagger, visual sweep, dead-pan tough-guy humour and not much substance. This one is sumptuously mounted and directed by Terence Young, fresh of his recent successes with Bond (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Thunderball) and others (Wait Until Dark), to take advantage of its sometimes snowy, mountainous Spanish locations. One of the ways you can tell it was filmed in Spain is that when the characters are eating you find the traditional bread, lemns and a big serrano ham on the table. The great Henri Alekan makes the most of the stars, the locations and the light: it looks gorgeous throughout. The director and cinematographer combine to incite real visual pleasure in the light, the mountains, the way the horses move in the landscape, a great shoot-out near the end filmed through reeds. Charles Bronson had not yet headlined and American production. But this is one of a series of films that would make him into an international box-office star without yet having made a dent at the US box office; something akin to what happened with Clint Eastwood a little bit earlier, and Bronson, approaching 50 was much older. This film is clearly indebted to Leone’s Westerns in various ways, particularly in Maurice Jarre’s attempt at personalising a Morricone style in the score. It’s great to see Alain Delon as a villain—a rare treat — all in black, with a silver tooth, much attitude and no scruples. Ursula Andress is the prostitute who loves him. Capucine is very charismatic as a Madam. Toshiro Mifune is one of the last of the Samurais who uneasily teams up with Bronson to return a sword intended as a gift from the Japanese emperor to the President of the United States in order to save the honour of Japan (and the Ambassador’s and the Samurai’s). Bronson only wants the money. There are many things to admire in this film: it moves beautifully, looks smashing, and is exciting to watch. It’s also one of those films in which every woman is either a prostitute or an innocent about to be raped; Mexicans are all victims; Comanches unknowable but for their violence and brutality. A blu-ray that looks terrific but with sound levels bouncing all over the place is still available; an indication that whatever its ultimate merits, the film has become a landmark or classic of some kind.

José Arroyo