The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946–1973

6. Japanese Films of the 1950s

6 Japanese Films of the 1950s Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, was described by Time in its cover story as “a cinematic thunderbolt that violently ripped open the dark heart of man to prove that the truth was not in it. In technique the picture was traumatically original; in spirit it was big, strong, male. It was obviously the work of a genius, and that genius was Akira Kurosawa, the earliest herald of the new era in cinema .”1 A dark horse, according to Jane Cianfarra it was “slipped into the festival unheralded” by the festival director to make “the representation as wide as possible.” Members of the jury knew nothing about the picture or the director, but they “were sure, they said, that the ‘masterful handling of the Pirandelloesque twists of mood and action, its exciting photography and the superb performances of its seven actors, struck a fresher, more novel and poetic note than the Venice festival had seen in years.”2 Rashomon opened the newly rebuilt Little Carnegie on December 26, 1951. RKO, the distributor, was another surprise.3 Under the helm of Howard Hughes, RKO had fallen on hard times during the postwar recession and had shuttered its studio. In need of films for its distribution arm, it went on the hunt for independent products. Taking on a subtitled Japanese film was a gamble, but it paid off. Rashomon, which stars Toshiro Mifune and Machiko Kyo, is set in twelfthcentury Japan and presents as flashbacks four contradictory accounts of a rape and murder as related by a bandit, a noblewoman, the ghost of her slain husband , and a woodcutter. Crowther advised his readers to abandon normal expectations of plot development: “[T]he wonderful thing about this picture—the 118 thing which sets it up as art—is the manifest skill and intelligence with which it has been made by Director Akira Kurosawa, who moves to the top ranks with this job. Everyone seeing the picture will immediately be struck by the beauty and grace of the photography, by the deft use of forest light and shade to achieve a variety of powerful and delicate pictorial effects. Others, more attentive , will delight in the careful use of music (or absence of music) to accompany the points of view. But only the most observant—and most sensitive—will fully perceive the clever details and devices by which the director reveals his character , and, in this revelation, suggests the dark perversities of man.”4 In a later piece for the New York Times, Tokyo-based Ray Falk described Kurosawa as “Japan’s Top Director” and an “artist to the core,” a master of the most popular Japanese film genres of his era, the jidai-geki (a costume-action film involving medieval samurai) and the gendai-geki (a more realistic, often domestic drama rooted in contemporary Japanese life). Falk noted that the Japanese themselves failed to comprehend Rashomon’s theme, which asked: “Is there a truth? Can this truth be grasped by man’s mind? If there is a truth, will not man’s egotism make it difficult to grasp this truth? Up to this point the novelist Japanese Films of the 1950s 119
Toshiro Mifune and Machiko Kyo in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1951) 120 Part Two: Import Trends
and scenarist agree. But Mr. Kurosawa went a step further,” said Falk. “As a solution to the dilemma he wants us to believe in man’s good will, and begs us to have faith in goodness. That is why he added the last scene in which the woodchopper adopts the orphan child, a chapter not in the original book.”5 Arthur Knight admired the film as a humanist document: “Its greatest novelty is its story which is non-narrational, timeless, and universal. More, it is a story about men and women—about sex—and it results, unless I am very much mistaken, in one of the two or three films ever made for grown-ups, instead of for kiddies six to sixty.”6 Time was impressed with Mifune’s flamboyant performance as the bandit, “an unforgettable animal figure, grunting, sweating , swatting at flies that constantly light on his half-naked body, exploding in hyena-like laughter of scorn and triumph.”7 Other critics admired Rashomon’s exotic qualities and compared the film to Japanese fretwork, an Oriental...