Hi Thomas,
Terrific post. First, my Ayn Rand allusion (not de- or il-lusion!) re THE SOUND BARRIER....My comment was somewhat facetious -- I for one am not a Rand admirer, nor was she in any manner benevolent (God, no!), although she had some valid points, unfortunately taken to extremes. (I don't believe she's "revered" in America at all -- certainly some people must, but the vast majority have no idea who she was [good old American educational standards], and many who do dislike her -- even a leading conservative thinker such as Wm. F. Buckley, while agreeing with her on the primacy of the individual, found her atheism and materialism off-putting and did not get along with her). My point was merely that RR's driven aircraft manufacturer emphasized technological advancement over all else, and coldly (not unfeelingly) understood the risks to individuals and put the work first. I do think the film was a glorification of man's progress and did see such progress as a good thing, while taking account of its costs to individuals. In that sense it isn't Randish, in that for all her devotion to objective materialism (her term), while revering the concept of the individual, she showed little real human concern for actual, flesh-and-blood people. RR's character did, which made his single-mindedness in his quests even more difficult, for the other characters as well as the audience. I quite agree with you, Rand did have a sort of disdain for the "masses" -- curiously akin to her despised Communist approach, which professed concern for them but insisted on lumping them all together, as "masses". (Easier to kill them off or enslave them that way, perhaps.) Rand wasn't devoted to ruling them, she opposed that, but did hold them in a sort of uncaring, unfeeling disregard. You're also right, that Howard Roark's (the architect) dynamiting the bastardized building in THE FOUNTAINHEAD is little more than an act of terrorism, though I'm sure few would have thought of it in those terms in 1943 (novel) or 1949 (movie).
Movie trivia: For THE SOUND BARRIER, Ralph Richardson was the first man to win the NY Film Critics' Award for Best Actor (here the second-most prestigious film award) and not even be nominated for an Oscar for the film (Tallulah Bankhead, for LIFEBOAT (1944) was the first such actress). He was always one of my favorites.
Kurosawa's concentration on the individual is most astonishing given Japanese culture and its racially homogenous, society-oriented (no pun) tilt, which emphasizes mass action, the mass mind in part, certainly much more so in his heyday than perhaps today. In that sense, could there have been some slight hint of Randist thought in some of K's work? Not consciously, as I think K would have found AR unappealing, but the disdain for the masses, if you will, and glorification of the individual leader, or individual protagonist, which you so brilliantly cite, is somewhat along the lines of what we've been speaking of. I've not quite thought about it in precisely the way you've posited, but I think you have an excellent point. Interesting also, because I quite agree that NO REGRETS is his only political film (perhaps RHAPSODY IN AUGUST might partially qualify, given its background story), and is striking both on that account and because of its lead being a woman. I always interpreted that film as damning of the Japanese man, the male-dominated hierarchy, that had led Japan to disaster in the 30s and 40s, and that now was the time for women, so long repressed, to come into their own -- a very un-Kurosawan theme, before or after. But I don't think he was a right-wing firebrand, rather he was pretty liberal, and NRFOY was his effort to document the sudden changes overtaking Japan and contrasting them with the (to him) discredited old order. His (or his characters') contempt for their society in this era is clear throughout most of his work in the immediate postwar years: change is needed, but where it will take them is also unclear, and it won't be without pain. STRAY DOG is another such film thematically, and also one of my favorites of his -- except here society is simultaneously changing and being threatened by such change, at a very personal level (THE QUIET DUEL has some slight similarities in this sense too).
By the way, THE MOST BEAUTIFUL, as I said elsewhere, is unavailable in the West, but there is hope it might someday surface as part of a wartime Kurosawa set. It involves women working in a factory producing weapons for the war effort, and is apparently quite a landmark film for its varied and sympathetic treatment of women, especially so for wartime, male-centric Japan. It's where K met his future wife, actress Yoko Yaguchi, who was the film's star. From what I've read it sounds an excellent film, certainly one worth seeing, so let's hope! (Oh, and is SANJURO underrated? I like it very much, and YOJIMBO, and never thought it neglected critically...unlike, say, RED BEARD!)
As for Ford, I think we basically agree. Politically he was actually always hard to pin down, and the best I've been able to see is that he's considered a populist, a very broad and broadly-interpreted American political ethos, one used variously by both left- and right-wingers. Essentially it's a concern for the forgotten individual, being crushed under by powerful forces (usually economic) beyond his control. I think Ford instinctively felt for the little guy, a consistent theme throughout his work, visible in some form in almost every one of his pictures, though often obliquely or incidentally. Yes, I have seen Sturges's HOUR OF THE GUN, which is evidently a bit closer to the truth surrounding the O.K. Corral gunfight than other films -- also remarkable in that it opens with the gunfight, unlike most films, which use it as their climax: though of course that's the point of the movie. MY DARLING CLEMENTINE is very loose on the facts of the Earp/Holliday alliance vs. the Clantons, and as to the nature of the characters themselves; Struges's GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL is much closer to reality, and many of the characters there were actually real people. MDC, in fact, has a couple of glaring historical errors: when you see the tombstone of the young Earp brother (name?) who got shot down at the start, it reads "Died 1882"; the O.K. Corral fight took place in October 1881. Also, Doc Holliday didn't die at the OKC, but five years later at a TB sanatorium, in Denver I believe. But the gunfight itself lasted all of 30 seconds, tops. Ever see a 1939 film called FRONTIER MARSHAL? It's a fictionalized version of the same story, and much of the dialogue and incidents were lifted verbatim into MDC seven years later; though for some reason the character is called Doc Halliday in this one. (A fun aside: DeForest Kelley co-starred as one of the Earps in GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL in '57. Well, some writer must have seen the movie on TV 10 or 11 years later because there was a "Star Trek" episode called I believe "Day of the Gun" (guess where that title must've come from?), in which the Enterprise crew finds themselves on a planet whose race forces them to relive the gunfight, this time as the Clanton gang, meaning certain execution. Of course, they find a way around their prescribed fate. A common danger in space travel, of course, and one I understand NASA trains its astronauts how to handle on lunar and orbital missions.)
Whew! From Dostoyevsky to Captain Kirk. What an eclectic thread have we here. Akira-san would be proud. Or maybe appalled!
hob
reply
share
tsavc
16 years ago
I didn't think you sounded like the sort of person who would be attracted by Ayn Rand, but people who do like her seem to get very evangelical, and I've learnt the hard way that it's best not to upset them if at all possible. Hence I pussy-foot around for a while when her name crops her. I understand her latest high-profile disciple is Angelina Jolie, who wants, of all things, to see if she can get a version of "Atlas shrugged" off the ground. Ahem. One wishes her well.
There are so many things that you mention in passing, that I always forget to cover all bases, so I'm going back a couple of posts when I say, wow, Dan Dailey was your cousin? That's quite cool. He always looked just like a film star ought to look, and I thought it a shame that he seldom had the chance to stretch his acting wings - he was Betty Grable's leading man too often for anyone's good. One film I particularly remember him in was Larry Cohen's scurrilous J. Edgar Hoover movie, although that may not be how he would want to be immortalised. Still, raise a glass to your cousin for me, sometime.
Good that we agree on so much about Kurosawa. "No regrets for our youth" is completely unavailable on any Region 2 disc, so I bought one off a Chinese website a couple of years ago, because it promised to have English subtitles. Which it kind of did, although they seemed to have been translated via Portuguese and, quite possibly, Martian. This made understanding what on Earth was going on extremely difficult. It had the benefit of sending me down the library, though, to find a book on pre-war Japanese politics, after which I could make sense of the movie a bit more second time around. It would be nice to watch it without having to fill in so many blanks, though. I think your assessment of it is correct, and I believe it was considered extremely provocative in its day in that it dared to criticize the political class (even a discredited one). Given that not only did Kurosawa barely ever return to direct political comment in his films (as we have said), and given that so many of his later films, and not just the Samurai ones (there's a proper Japanese word for this genre, but I've just forgotten it), are indeed about individual struggle and the championing of it, I wonder whether the reaction to "No regrets..." coloured Kurosawa's thinking. He is not, I believe, nearly as revered in Japan as he is in the west, or as people like Mizoguchi and Ozu are, and is considered a little un-Japanese, for the exact reasons you point out. I wonder how much he saw himself as an "Idiot"-like individual, going his own way among people who are fascinated by him, but who cannot - or do not want to - understand him.
Someone pointed out to me yesterday, when I mentioned this conversation, that Kurosawa's other lasting hero and influence (along with Ford) was Shakespeare, and that Kurosawa's love of an individual putting himself above an often dismal or corrupt society, and relishing the "struggle" as much as anything else, could be said to come from Shakespeare. Quite apart from his direct adaptations, all of which I love, does this seem sensible to you, as a theory? I shall put it to the test later on, while watching "Red Beard", which, now my friend has mentioned it to me, seems a very Shakespearean film (even things like the sudden change of tone which you mentioned, when Tosh starts banging heads together, has something of the Bard about it).
A couple of other points, briefly: yes, Ralph Richardson is always fun (and was a proper eccentric, too, in real life). He's one of the few actors whose mannerisms I even find endearing (and he could be a very mannered actor if the director wasn't strong enough).
"The most beautiful" sounds fascinating. I must have a hunt for it (avoiding Chinese versions).
And a last word on the OK Corral. Other versions of the gun-fight might be more historically accurate, but I think you'll agree that none of them have the resonance and the artistry of Ford's. Hence, let's "print the legend". It's more fun.
Thomas
reply
share
hobnob53
16 years ago
I've heard something about Kurosawa's admiration of Shakespeare, though I don't think I'd stretch my understanding of the Bard's plays (most of them) as pitting an individual against his corrupt society, at least not to the degree evident in Kurosawa. S's characters, if they were heroic, were more prone to try to uplift their fellows, not merely surmount or survive among them, which strikes me more as K's themes. K's characters often betray their contempt for their society, or its "masses", and the individualism they express is defiant, and personal -- intended as a form of self-expression, even self-preservation. In Shakespeare many of his leading characters are throughly unattractive, even reprehensible in some way, whereas virtually all of K's leads are admirable. Good or bad -- perhaps weak or strong would be a better way of putting it -- S's characters try to meld with their surroundings, their times, their contemporaries, whether to uplift or in some vain attempt to mollify some inner demon. But K's protagonists are mainly interested in proclaiming their independence from their society -- a real challenge in a non-individualistic society such as Japan's -- and while they may occasionally lead by example, that is not their intent, as it often is in S. They are self-contained and hence really self-absorbed, but in the sense of seeking strength through their individuality; in S, the self-absorbed ones are generally weak, the truly strong eager to use their strength for the greater good as well as their own. This is all rather over-simplified, of course, but this is one reason why I find more of a hint of a kind of Ayn Randism to K's leads than you'd ever find in Shakespeare. I'm sure Kurosawa found inspiration in S several times (even beyond THRONE OF BLOOD), but I'm not sure I see so many parallels between their handling of the people, or the societies, they bring to life.
But when Kurosawa died in 1998, Steven Spielberg called him "the pictorial Shakespeare of our time". Others have likened his characters more to those of Dickens, which is interesting, and I can see perhaps more parallels there than to S. It's also true I agree, picking up on another of your points, that K was much more revered abroad than at home in the last third or so of his life, and it's true he spoke very highly of American filmmakers such as Spielberg, Scorsese, even Lucas, than of his own countrymen, during this time -- probably not uninfluenced by the fact that these guys championed and revered him and helped finance some of his later films. Still, when he died, 35,000 people showed up for a memorial service to which only 4000 had been invited. After you're gone, people suddenly realize what they've lost, of course.
There is (or was) a MOST BEAUTIFUL DVD (I've mentioned this) available from Hong Kong, quality unknown, with the characters all given Chinese names, so it sounds extremely risky -- especially after your hilarious NO REGRETS experience. (Okay, I must ask if you have any regrets about purchasing that...oh, never mind.) Can you get a Region 0 DVD player? They're available here, though I don't own one, but several people have recommended them -- this way you can buy any region's DVDs and they should play. I have several so-called Region 0 DVDs (from Russia and Japan), which play fine on my R1 player, and apparently you can get the same quality with an R0 player using any region's discs. I'm thinking of buying one sometime, especially as there are a lot of films on R2 disc that aren't available here (like SOUND BARRIER). (We're all in the same boat, just on different oars, for a tortured metaphor.)
"Atlas Shrugged" has been bandied about as a film project for decades. I hadn't heard of AJ's plans -- "ahem", indeed -- but, hey, at least it wouldn't star Bo Derek. Somehow I doubt this one will see the light of celluloid.
Absolutely corral-correct: CLEMENTINE is by far the greatest of the films depicting this historic fight, however fictionalized it all is. With that, no one, including the makers of the other films, would ever take issue. Not if they wanted to avoid being transported to the scene by aliens determined to see them gunned down for their apostasy.
You know Kurosawa's laconic reply when he was asked what he thought of Sturges's westernized version of SEVEN SAMURAI, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN? "Gunslingers are not samurai," is all he had to say. Do I detect an air of disdain in this? It was still the most popular foreign film in Japan when it was released there in 1961, followed by THE GUNS OF NAVARONE and ONE-EYED JACKS, curiously enough.
Ah: THE PRIVATE FILES OF J. EDGAR HOOVER (1977). Yes, I doubt cousin Dan would like to be remembered for that one, but I must say I thought his was the best, most natural performance in that film, which I find enjoyable if dopey. DD played Hoover's #2 in the FBI, Clyde Tolson, presumably J. Edgar's boyfriend, and the heir to all his property; he resigned from the FBI the day after Hoover died and took all the "private files" he could lay his hands on home with him, where they met with an unfortunate fireplace. I agree that Dan should have been given more opportunities to use his dramatic talents, but he was a terrific dancer and more than held his own, I think, with Gene Kelly in IT'S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER, for instance. He had an Oscar nomination for WHEN MY BABY SMILES AT ME (1948), of all things. If you ever see a movie called THE MORTAL STORM (1940), catch it -- Dan, in an early role when he was signed with MGM, plays a Nazi thug who had it in for anti-Nazi lovers James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. He looked pretty menacing, I must say. But he had many good roles. I always found it funny that his 1956 film, MEET ME IN LAS VEGAS, was for some reason retitled in the UK -- a common enough practice, both ways; but most UK titles of that era were rather staid, vs. somewhat more sensational American titles. So what did they rename this one for the British market? VIVA LAS VEGAS! (!!!!) And what were they then forced to retitle the Elvis flick of that same title, eight years later: why, the sexy and sensational LOVE IN LAS VEGAS. Which took no account of the title tune. Anyway, I shall indeed raise a toast to him Thursday, our Thanksgiving Day, and mention this comes from a British admirer as well. My mother, whose cousin he was, will be pleased; she and her brother, who spent a lot of time at his place in California in the late 40s and 50s, always exchange chatter about him -- more than they do about their uncle, who was merely a member of the US Congress for 32 years!
Guess that makes me the family disappointment!
Cheers,
Hob
reply
share
tsavc
16 years ago
Hello again.
Yep, if I had to pick one of Mr Dailey's films, it would be "It's always fair weather", which I have always thought an excellent piece of work, often overlooked in Kelly's canon, and with an unusually serious, almost disspirited mood given it's a musical (perhaps the reason that it doesn't get the attention it deserves).
And yes, I do have a multi-region player - they are pretty much de rigeuer over here in Europe, where we get probably less than half of all American releases, and a lot of those we do get have a similarly small percentage of the extras otherwise available. The Hong Kong disc of "The most beautiful" looks to be exactly the same as the Chinese disc of "No regrets" (some regrets for buying it, yes, but it did at least allow me to see the film; the transfer was fine, visually - it was just the crazed subtitles). I will learn my lesson and wait patiently for someone to bring out this war-time Akira set you mention. At the same time they bring out Fritz' last two American films (!).
On to the meat of the post, though, for twas yesterday when I went to re-watch "Red Beard", and while I was thinking of Shakespearean parallels, it was indeed the name of Dickens which popped into my head just as often. The length, for one thing. I didn't really remember it being three hours, and although I have sat through longer (and many shorter which seemed much longer), there are editorial decisions made in this picture which I would question now. The central story, with Tosh's crusty old stick, always looking to do good for the poor, set against Yuzo Kayama's arrogant young student of "Dutch medicine" (what is that, exactly?), is excellent. Consistently interesting, and with obvious echoes of "The quiet duel" (if you prefer that title), only with Tosh now taking on the Takeshi Shimura role. But I'm less convinced now by all the stuff going on around them: the homicidal nymphomaniac (no hospital should have a back-room without one); the chap dying of liver cancer and the mysteries attendant upon him; the hard-working fellow who suddenly divulges the secret of his One Great Love on his death-bed. It's as if Akira had a whole bunch of ideas for films and then just thought he'd throw them all in to this one. I can now see where my friend gets his "soap opera" analogy from. Plus each story adds a little to what I'm going to call the creeping liberal sentimentalism which casts a kind of pall over the film every time Tosh isn't front and centre. Even Kayama is revealed to have an imperfect past, having been two-timed by his fiancee.
The influence of Dickens is clear, but where Akira seems to me to fail is the way that he doesn't integrate all the story-lines. People criticize Dickens for the neatness with which his plots work out, in which everyone is revealed to be related to everyone else somehow or another (although as you stand between a film star and a Congressman, perhaps it's not so far-fetched after all), but Kurosawa seems to have gone too far the other way, throwing in a mass of subplots simply to demonstrate how darned noble old Tosh is in dealing with each of them.
When he is on screen, being noble or otherwise, however, it's absolutely first-rate: a top-notch example of what we've been talking about, a character who sets himself up above the society in which he finds himself, but, in this case, one whose influence, despite his occasional tantrums, is entirely benevolent. In the way he gradually influences Kayama for the better, the film could be said to betray its sentimentalism, too, but this is the one strand where its length counts entirely in its favour, allowing the director to play out the story in its fullness, without the necessity of a sudden change of heart by the arrogant young man.
I'll stand by the Shakespeare comparison, though. I meant it specifically with the tragedies and Roman plays (Kurosawa doesn't seem to have had very much interest in comedy), all of which provide a contrast between a driven individual and a society against which they find themselves at odds. In some cases, like Hamlet, he's a decent man, honestly trying to do the right thing in a world where politics and Machiavelli are everything (and Shakespeare's conception of the character is much "nicer" than Kurosawa's version of him, in "The bad sleep well"). In other cases, like Macbeth, he's basically a violent man with serious arrogance issues whose case is made worse by his marriage, and here Kurosawa makes his conception of the character slightly more noble than Shakespeare. Both artists seem to see Lear in pretty much the same way, and Kurosawa never attempted a version of "Othello", perhaps due to the racial homogeneity of Japan? But the Shakespeare characters who always put me most in mind of Japan are those from the Roman plays, particularly Coriolanus, who can be played either as a hero or a villain, and who expressly sets himself up as better than all those around him, and to hell with all society.
I don't know if you'd like to develop this argument, or just to refute it completely (there's a good chance I'm talking nonsense, you know), but I think there's some evidence (beyond just people saying that Kurosawa liked to read and watch Shakespeare plays, which, apparently, he did) to support the comparison.
Anyway, "Red Beard" has slipped perhaps half a mark in my estimation, due to a lack of focus (not something you would often accuse peak-period Kurosawa of), but it's still cracking cinema.
Thomas
reply
share