My top five Kurosawa films (you may not have seen)...

This year is Kurosawa's centenary (he posthumously turned 100 back in March). Sight and Sound magazine have celebrated with a really great series of Kurosawa features in their July issue. Really great is the fact that they have re-printed interviews with the man himself, which are amazing to read (at least if your a bit obsessive about his life and work as I am).

I have decided to follow their lead and post clips for a "Top Five Kurosawa Films You Haven't Seen". I was tempted just to do my own "top five" list, but that would be a bit boring as it would include films everyone knows about. The likes of 'Yojimbo', 'Seven Samurai', 'The Hidden Fortress', 'Rashomon', 'Ran' and 'Ikiru' have been excluded from my thinking for this list. Instead, here are five of his films that everyone should seek out if they have the time and the interest:

'High & Low' (1963)
Based on an Ed McBain crime novel, 'High & Low' stars Toshiro Mifune in one of his greatest performances. Here is a really crazy American trailer which tries to sell this slow and talky movie as if it's a piece of Hitchcock:

'Drunken Angel' (1948)
A really overlooked gem. Two years before 'Rashomon' made everyone take notice in Europe, Kurosawa made this amazing film which also marked Kurosawa's first collaboration with Mifune (who steals the show from the equally brilliant Takashi Shimura). A really good, grimy look at post-war Japan and as political as Kurosawa ever got. The final scenes are among the most intense I have ever seen.

'Red Beard' (1965)
This slow, three hour 19th century medical epic was Kurosawa's final film with Mifune. Never a more humanistic movie did Kurosawa make.

'I Live in Fear' (1955)
Again, stars Toshiro Mifune. This time playing a man twice his actual age. The story is great: it concerns a man who dreams of moving his family to Brazil to escape the impending atomic holocaust he fears is coming to Japan. The paranoia and the exasperation of Mifune's old man are priceless. The film also marks the last score by Fumio Hayasaka, as he died of tuberculosis shortly after completing the score. It also has some great alternative titles in the west: 'Record of a Living Being' and 'What the Birds Knew'. Kurosawa would return to this atom bomb paranoia with a short section in 1990's 'Dreams'. I can't find a video clip so here is that mournful score, stained with tragedy:


'Dreams' (1990)
Curiously the only Kurosawa film to be available to stream from X-Box Live, 'Dreams' was part produced by Steven Speilberg (in a similar manner to how Coppola and Lucas helped finance 'Kagemusha' in 1980) and has visual effects from ILM. The film is a series of shorts which represent Kurosawa's own dreams. I'm not going to lie: some of them are a bit rubbish and much of the dialogue is terrible. But the whole film is visually splendid. Below is the entire "Crows" chapter, which stars Martin Scorcese as Vincent Van Gogh. The way Kurosawa turns Van Gogh's paintings into live action is breathtaking.


Also, if you want to get into Kurosawa (or if you are a bit of a fan already) you could do worse than to read his own book Something Like an Autobiography (which tells Kurosawa's life story up to the making of 'Rashomon' in 1950) or Donald Richie's brilliant The Films of Akira Kurosawa. The Richie book is an essential: detailed academic essays on every single one of his films. What a great book!

Finally, if you're hungry for even more Kurosawa then check out a short post I did, back in May, on his films being remade. Also, look out (or listen out) for the next Splendor podcast, which will take the form of a Kurosawa love-in.

KUROSAWA Remakes: they aren't all bad...

The news that Chris Rock is re-writing Akira Kurosawa's 'High and Low' (one of my favourite movies of all-time) for Mike Nichols to direct, has made me think about remakes. Usually, and probably rightly, remakes are dismissed as rubbish before they have even been released. There is this idea that they are terrible movies by default: that no movie should ever be remade at all. I wish to refute that logic here and now, looking specifically at remakes of Kurosawa films, which generally seem to be quite good...

Remade at the hands of John Sturges and starring Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner (among others), Kurosawa's 'The Seven Samurai' (1954) became 'The Magnificent Seven' in 1960.





Kurosawa would again see one of his finest Samurai pictures turned into a western, when 'Yojimbo' (1961) was unofficially (but blatantly) remade by Sergio Leone a few years later as 'A Fistful of Dollars' in 1964. Some scenes are shot-for-shot reproductions of those from the earlier movie, with the long "three coffins" tracking shot through the town virtually identical in both. Clint Eastwood has also admitted that he heavily based his depiction of the "the man with no name" on Toshiro Mifune's.





It is often said that Kurosawa's 'The Hidden Fortress' (1958) was the main source of inspiration for George Lucas' first 'Star Wars' film in 1977. Lucas has said that the two comedy-relief peasants from the Japanese film were the direct inspiration for R2-D2 and C3P0, as he liked the fact the narrative seemed to be told from the point of view of the lowliest characters. There is also a Princess in peril who the band of heroes must rescue and add to that Toshiro Mifune as 'the General', who is very much a model for Han Solo (an antagonistic rouge with a good heart who wins the Princess with whom he argues - although Lucas tried to cast Mifune as Obi-Wan Kenobi). From a technical point of view, Lucas also borrowed Kurosawa's use of screen wipes and the horse chase sequence seems to have been an inspiration for the speeder bike sequence in the later 'Star Wars' sequel: 'Return of the Jedi' (1983). Lucas' love of Kurosawa movies was made even clearer in 1980, when he and Francis Ford Coppola helped the Japanese master fund his epic 'Kagemusha'.





Of course, there have been some less good ones too...

In 1996 'Last Man Standing', starring Bruce Willis, was a direct remake of 'Yojimbo' which fared rather less well than Leone's:



Many films have been inspired by Kurosawa's 1950 film 'Rashomon', with the so-called 'Rashomon effect' being when the same story is told from multiple, changing points of view, shedding new light on an event. However, one film, 1964's 'The Outrage'
(starring Paul Newman as a Mexican bandit, no less)...



Here is how all that should have looked: