Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

This is the latest installment in a survey of Akira Kurosawa movies, mostly from early in his career and never seen by me before. Given a choice between Netflix rentals and the risk of crappy movies and bedbugs at my local Cineplex, there’s no contest.

As you may know, Kurosawa adapted Shakespeare’s King Lear in the 1985 Ran. But in 1955, he had his first shot at adapting the tragedy in 1955 with I Live in Fear, a movie that starred Toshiro Mifune as Kiichi Nakajima, the elderly owner of an iron foundry who has become paralyzed by fear over the threat of nuclear war. In the opening scene, he is in family court surrounded by his many children and grandchildren (including a number from his two mistresses) who want him judged incompetent. They want to prevent him from selling the foundry and using the proceeds to buy a ranch in Brazil where he is convinced that will elude the fallout from nuclear war.

A heavily made-up Toshiro Mifune as a Lear-like figure

Even though he has offered to bring everybody along with him, where they will continue to receive the allowances they now receive, they refuse to go. They clearly view him as having lost his mind. Not only do they understand that Brazil is no haven from all-out nuclear war, they also have ties to Japan that they do not want to break. The irony, of course, is that Nakajima’s fears are not that irrational. In 1955, Japan was only 10 years removed from Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the recipient of radioactive rain, courtesy of American H-Bomb testing in the South Pacific.

I can recommend I Live in Fear despite a couple of problems. Toshiro Mifune is actually quite believable in a role that arguably should have been performed by a true oldster but has a limited range of emotions to convey. He is either in a state of rage over the refusal of his offspring to come to Brazil with him or in a total state of panic fearing nuclear war. The other characters are not that well-developed as well, mostly expressing the venality of King Lear’s daughters and little else.

The movie has a stunning climax, however, in which Nakajima finally goes off the deep end.

I recommend the Turner Classic Movies website article on the movie:

Kurosawa later claimed that I Live in Fear was inspired by conversations he had with his longtime film composer Fumio Hayasaka, who had become seriously ill during the making of Seven Samurai. Hayasaka had said to him, “The world has come to such a state that we don’t really know what is in store for us tomorrow. I wouldn’t even know how to go on living – I’m that uncertain. Uncertainties, nothing but uncertainties. Every day there are fewer and fewer places that are safe. Soon there will be no place at all.” These thoughts eventually led to a screenplay about the nuclear age and a man who was driven insane by it but at first, Kurosawa wanted to approach it as a satire. “But how do you make a satire on the H-bomb?” he asked. Instead his story became a tragedy and the somber tone deepened when Hayasaka succumbed to tuberculosis during the film’s production.

When he wasn’t drawing from Shakespeare, Kurosawa turned eastwards toward Russia. As a long-time Russian literature devotee, something like Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths would prove irresistible. It is structured around an ensemble cast of humble people such as the kind found in Seven Samurai.

Apparently Kurosawa’s adaptation is quite faithful to the original, including much of the dialog. He relocates Gorky’s play to the 19^th century Edo period, one which shared the economic misery of Russian Czarism. Gorky of course was a Marxist revolutionary who became close friends with Lenin. After growing disenchanted with Bolshevik rule in the USSR, he moved to Italy. He eventually returned to Russia and became an apologist for Stalin. Some argue that this was motivated primarily by economic duress just as was the case of G.W. Pabst’s return to Nazi Germany.

Despite the author’s leftwing politics, Lower Depths was anything but socialist agitprop. The story is much more evocative of a Eugene O’Neill play with its characters lost in booze-soaked reverie, especially The Iceman Cometh.

Nearly all of the action in Kurosawa’s version takes place in a barn-like structure where the characters live pretty much like in the Bowery flophouses of yore. There is very little action as such. Instead the movie consists of dialog between one denizen and the other, mostly along the lines of pissing on each other’s pipe dreams.

The central drama involves a love triangle between one of the dwellers, a thief played memorably by Toshiro Mifune and two sisters—one the vicious wife of the landlord and the other her abused younger sister, a Cinderella like figure.

But the most interesting character is a Buddhist monk named Kahei who offers up wry commentary on the others after the fashion of a Greek chorus. He is played by Kurosawa favorite Bokuzen Hidari who steals every scene he is in.

Although the movie is great fun throughout (despite its grim material, Kurosawa played it as comedy just as Gorky intended), the final two minutes consist of a drunken song-and-dance played by the cast ensemble. It is just one more example of the director’s uncanny sense of how to use madcap musical performance to great effect. Below you can see this scene, as well as a scene from Drunken Angel that I have reviewed here previously and that is also inspired madness.

(Second in a series of articles on early Akira Kurosawa)

Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel, made in 1948 just a year before Stray Dog, shares the latter film’s unblinking gaze at the social, psychological and economic misery of Japan immediately after WWII.

It is also the first movie that allowed Kurosawa full creative control, not having to deal with Japanese wartime censorship or that of the Allied occupying power. It is also the first movie to feature two actors who would become part of the director’s ongoing company, just as much as Max Von Sydow became associated with Ingmar Bergman. Toshiro Mifune is cast as Matsunaga, a Yakuza who comes to the drunken angel of the film’s title, a doctor in the slum neighborhood controlled by Matsunaga’s gang. Doctor Sanada is played by Takashi Shimura, who would appear opposite Mifune in Stray Dog and star in Ikiru, one of Kurosawa’s greatest masterpieces. In Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, the two actors share a father-son relationship with Mifune’s character given to youthful impetuousness. Doctor Sanada has a big job on his hands dealing with the snarling yakuza, who despite suffering from TB, insists on continuing his wastrel ways: drinking and fighting.

Sanada’s office abuts a fetid pond, almost a cesspool, where local children play despite his warnings that they can catch typhoid. This is not the Japan of later years. Like the postwar Italian neorealist movies, it is a landscape of poverty and disease with a Tokyo as ruined as Rome. Ironically, Kurosawa finds ways to turn this meager setting into something almost beautiful, as a local street musician plays a haunting tune not far from the pond late at night as the moon is reflected in the dank water.

Sanada is a drunken angel because he is an alcoholic and because he goes out of his way to keep Matsunaga alive, even turning away gangsters from his door out to punish his ward. He sees the humanity of the yakuza beneath the truculent surface, even continuing to care for him after Matsunaga beats and curses him after learning about his illness from the doctor. In the Homeric tales, the messenger of bad news is killed while in Drunken Angel, he is merely beaten and cursed.

Mifune’s performance is something to behold. As the dying man, he is determined to live each day as if it his last, which in his world means doing everything he can to undermine his health and hasten death’s arrival. In this scene from a yakuza nightclub hang-out, you get a sense of his desperate clutching at life. It is also a startling view of the Japanese embrace of American swing era customs that would appear in a similar scene in Stray Dog. Mifune is as exciting to watch as any scene in his samurai classics. Look at the crazed expression on his face!

Made in 1951, The Idiot, I’m afraid, can only be recommended to Kurosawa fans. It is an adaptation of the Dostoevsky novel that had an original length of 265 minutes, to be shown in two parts. The studio bosses cut 80 minutes from the film and the director was forced to use clumsy voice-over exposition to fill in for the deleted scenes.

I am not sure if seeing the uncut version would make much difference since the original material constrained what Kurosawa could do. The “idiot” in question is Kinji Kameda (Masayuki Mori), a World War Two veteran who came to within a whisker’s width of being shot by a firing squad for war crimes he did not commit. The trauma led to  epilepsy (an unlikely medical outcome) and a lengthy stay in a mental hospital. Kamada is not really lacking in the IQ department. He is an “idiot” only because he approaches people in a childlike manner, often committing social gaffes that would expect from a young child.

As such he is a passive and somewhat unknowable character. As I have pointed out in the past, the director is taking a calculated risk by making the lead character a victim of mental illness. When you cannot identify with a character whose experience is so at odds with everyday behavior, you put a wall between him or her and the audience just as was the case in Mussolini’s demented lover in Vincere. Not having read Dostoyevsky’s novel, I cannot say how this plays out in the original version but Kurosawa’s does not work for me.

The most interesting character in The Idiot is Akama, a crude and swaggering young man who has befriended Kamada mostly out of pity. Played by Mifune, this Akama manages to steal every scene he is in.

The movie is shot on location on Hokkaido Island, the northernmost part of Japan whose close proximity to Russia was meant to convey the atmosphere of Dostoyevsky’s novel. Snow falls throughout the movie. As evidenced below, the movie is often very lovely to look at even if it insists on keeping you at arm’s length.