UNTIL THE ADVENT of anime, Akira Kurosawa was the West’s main gateway to Japanese film. The Stanford Theatre’s 100th birthday observance brings back the director’s best films, starting with the famed epic Seven Samurai (now playing through Feb. 26). The rest of this week’s offerings consider, directly and indirectly, the problems of postwar Japan subject to an unleashed press, a moribund civil service and the cracking open of a belief in divine authority. Kurosawa addresses these topics with fast cutting, sturdy character acting and William Wellman–style wipes. The best-known film is 1950’s Rashomon (Feb. 27–March 2), Kurosawa’s masterpiece. In war-torn Japan of the 11th century, the body of a samurai is found in a deep forest. His dishonored wife turns up shortly afterward. The crime apparently has three perpetrators and three victims, comprising three people total. During the inquest, the mystery is only deepened, even though the dead man himself testifies, his voice brought back from hell by a female medium. The weather is part of the story—three days of heat followed by an end-of-the-world cloudburst. This weather has to be one reason the accused murderer, played by a ridiculously virile Toshiro Mifune, is studying the skies during his trial in an open courtyard. What’s on trial is actually Man himself: accused of the-serving egoism that is, in Kurosawa’s view, a kind of original sin. Seeing the bombed-out ruin of the monumental Rashomon gate, it can be guessed that Kurosawa had in mind the way ego leads to ruinous war. Among the metaphysics, though, is an almost barbaric sensuousness, staged in the kind of forest primeval not seen since Murnau. Scandal (1950, showing with Rashomon) is also a courtroom drama but a much more mainstream one. A rugged artist (Mifune) is accused by a magazine of an affair with a deeply shy but famous singer. In this Capraesque plot, a shabby, alcoholic lawyer (Takashi Shimura) volunteers his services and is redeemed by his effort.
Any crossword puzzle clue would answer “Kurosawa’s star” with “Mifune.” Mifune was often called Kurosawa’s John Wayne—admittedly, he was a lot broader than Wayne, more given to Peter Panish, theatrical capering. But Shimura was Kurosawa’s Thomas Mitchell: a heavy lifting character actor, portly, humane, thick featured. In Rashomon, he plays the commoner who serves as the sounding board between a jesting scavenger and a suffering priest. Shimura holds his own with Mifune in a Christmastime drunk scene in Scandal. Shimura is the star of 1952’s Ikiru (March 3–5), the astonishing drama of a dying bureaucrat’s chance to live (To Live is the title in Japanese). Old Watanabe spent 30 years presiding over a room of buck-passers and paper-pushers. Then comes a diagnosis of stomach cancer. Having nothing to live for and nothing but ingratitude from the son he never really knew, Watanabe lumbers out in search of purpose. The Tokyo night-town scenes really breathe; the old man’s corpse-faced mooning after a flighty young girl expresses the essence of film noir. The last third relinquishes the film’s urgency, but it’s a lovely strange hybrid that smashes the static mold of terminal-illness movies: a Buddhist message in an MGM frame. It plays with about a young couple made in 1947, One Wonderful Sunday.
THE SEVEN SAMURAI plays through Feb. 26 at 7:30pm. RASHOMON plays Feb. 27–March 2 at 7:30pm (plus 3:55pm Saturday–Sunday) with SCANDAL at 5:35 and 9:10pm. IKIRU plays March 3-5 at 7:30pm with ONE WONDERFUL SUNDAY at 5:30 and 10:05pm. Stanford Theatre, Palo Alto.
