we love akira kurosawa
Probably some spoilers will be in here!
Hello. A couple years ago, I watched Rashomon. Then several months later, I watched Ikiru. Then I watched all the rest of the movies directed by Akira Kurosawa. Suffice to say, I like his movies! Here's some brief thoughts on all of them, ranked from least favorite to favorite:
Unranked) Those Who Make Tomorrow This is Kurosawa's fifth film. It's unavailable and was basically disavowed by the director. Lost media. Bummer.
31) Sanshiro Sugata 2
I don't remember this one that well. Kurosawa's fourth film is a sequel to his first. It's a movie about judo practicioner Sanshiro Sugata. He fights an American, and some other guys. Mostly forgettable.
30) The Most Beautiful
The Most Beautiful is pro-Japan World War II propaganda. It follows female factory workers dedicated to the war cause trying to meet a demanding quota. It's kind of neat to see WWII factory equipment, but this is more of a curiosity than anything.
29) No Regrets For Our Youth
Kurosawa's fifth film. This is about a young woman deciding how she wants to live her life in a post World War II Japan. Her progressive father is arrested for his views, and the main character falls for another anti-imperialist man. This feels to me like where Kurosawa starts getting the freedom to tell the stories he wants to tell, or maybe where he's grown enough to have started to solidify his views a little more. You get a sense for his politics and feelings on war. Kind of a boring movie for me though.
28) The Quiet Duel
This is Kurosawa's seventh film and second collabration with the great actor Toshiro Mifune. Mifune plays a doctor recently returned from WWII who discovers he was infected with syphilis during an operation. It's got a cool poster with Mifune in doctor clothes, bloody gloved hand held up, cigarette in mouth.
27) Song of the Horse
An hour long documentary about horses. Mostly just shows you horse footage, doesn't really teach you anything. The narration is framed as a "father" talking to his "son" which is cute, and also interesting considering the "father" and "son" were also in his previous film as homeless beggars where the father's neglect leads to the son's death. Anyway, there's a bunch of cool horse footage here. Including a horse giving birth, and the baby horse walking for the first time, learning to awkwardly walk then run. It's cool!
26) Sanshiro Sugata
Kurosawa's first film. Sanshiro Sugata is going around wanting to learn martial arts, and discovers the budding new martial art of "judo". He trains under a master and fights some guys. Pretty solid first film!
25) One Wonderful Sunday
This one came out in 1947, it's another one where World War II looms large. A young couple meet up in Tokyo on a Sunday. They have no money, so the man mostly wants to mope around about how hard life is in post-war Japan, but his girlfriend who is too good for him gets them to go around town and try to have a good time. At the end there's a magical moment where they find an empty ampitheater and are pretend-performing for an imaginary crowd. She asks the invisible crowd, or essentially asks you the viewer, to cheer for this young couple, to cheer for young love everywhere, to make it through this rough life.
24) The Men Who Tread On The Tiger's Tail
TMWTTTT was made during the war, in about a week as I understand it. It's a period piece where a lord and his retainers disguise themselves as monks to sneak through an enemy border control point. A comedian of the time plays their servant of sorts, and he gets to be extremely expressive among all these serious soldier/court-types. Kind of inessential, but it's short (1 hour) and fun enough.
23) Scandal
There's a great moment in this movie when Toshiro Mifune's character walks over to his motorcycle and then revs the engine for like 20 seconds and then says "I was losing confidence. I needed to hear that sound." Wow, he's so cool! Mifune plays an artist who meets an actress at a hotel. Some tabloid photographers take a photo of them and run a false story about their scandalous relationship, so the two sue the reporters. Mostly the movie is just fine, but that motorcycle moment is great and it's also fun for having Takashi Shimura play a sleazy lawyer. Shimura appears in more Kurosawa movies than any other actor, but in general he's playing a solemn and noble type, or a miserable wretch, and he does end up a miserable wretch here but it's fun to see him in sleazy lawyer mode for a while.
22) Stray Dog
I kind of forget this movie, sorry. I liked it though. It's something to do with a cop who loses his gun and tries to figure out who stole it.
21) Sanjuro
Sanjuro is a sequel to Yojimbo. They took an original story and put the lead from Yojimbo into it because of that movie's popularity. Yojimbo stars Toshiro Mifune as a samurai who wanders into town and ends up helping with the problems and corruption going on. Sanjuro just takes Mifune's character and has him wander into a different town. This time he has a bunch of young acolytes who are kind of funny/clueless helping him out. Kind of a retread of Yojimbo, but a little bit lighter. Pretty fun!
20) The Lower Depths
The Lower Depths is an adaptation of the Russian play of the same name by Maxim Gorky. Kurosawa often thrived making Japanese adaptations of foreign works. This is maybe one of his most complicated and underrated works. It's a bleak, pessimistic story about class divide featuring a group of destitute people who live in a rundown, dirty, trash-filled building. I had a hard time really getting into it, but it's a cool movie.
19) Rhapsody in August
This is Kurosawa's second to last movie. It's about different generations' relationships to World War II, to America, and to the atomic bombs. The elderly grandma who lived through the war and lost family in the explosion has had a complicated lifelong relationship with the war. Her adult kids don't really seem to have much interest in the war or the bomb. Then the grandchildren are just learning about the bomb and trying to understand it from a innocent child's perspective. Interesting! Also Richard Gere has a small part in this one and that's kind of funny to me.
18) I Live In Fear
I Live In Fear is also about the atom bomb. This is about a wealthy, elderly head of house trying to sell his assets and get his family to move to Brazil with him because he's scared of another atomic war. It was made much earlier than Rhapsody in August, closer to when the bombs were dropped in Japan. Pretty dour, but also an interesting look at post war Japan attitudes on nuclear attacks and the debilitating nature of fear. Also funny that Toshiro Mifune plays like a 70 year old man in this when he was 35 at the time. He's good at it, too!
17) Madadayo
The final film Kurosawa made before death. This is a biopic about Japanese author Hyakken Uchida. Just a nice movie about a quirky, well loved old man.
16) The Idiot
There was a 265 minute cut of The Idiot, but sadly it is lost. We're left with a paltry 166 minute version. You can feel that this was forced and the cuts were unwanted. The flow of this movie is awkward. Still there are some great moments and performances in here. Maybe I'll have to read the Dostoyevsky novel this was based on.
15) Kagemusha
Kagemusha is a samurai movie that tells the story of a thief who is spared the death penalty because of his uncanny resemblance to an elderly warlord. When the warlord passes, the thief takes his place to fool their enemies and deter attacks. Kagemusha is exciting in its use of color, with bright costumes and painted skies forming really striking images. I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to get out of the story, but it's a cool movie.
14) Dodes'ka-den
Dodes'ka-den harkens back to The Lower Depths in that it's about a lower class community. But while that movie feels claustrophobic and hopeless, Dodes'ka-den is less bound to one tiny space, and offers more of a mix of joy and sorrow, hope and suffering.
13) Drunken Angel
I'm going to use this Drunken Angel slot to talk about Toshiro Mifune. This was Kurosawa's first movie starring Toshiro Mifune, who would go on to be the lead (or just a major character in a couple) in 16 of the next 17 movies Kurosawa made (including Drunken Angel). It's also immediately a great showcase of what makes Mifune so compelling. Here he plays a cocky hotheaded yakuza who is treated by a doctor with an alcohol problem. The doctor tries to convince him to turn his life around, to go straight. Mifune has an incredible physical presence and extremely powerful, intense emotions. In the bible, John the Baptist is described as a wild man who has a raiment of camel's hair and who eats locusts and wild honey. I'm not religious anymore, but this description has stuck with me as one of the more evocative from the bible. The image and emotion this evokes is similar to Mifune's image to me. Whether he's playing a noble samurai, or a hotheaded yakuza, or a dirty bandit, he always has an air of wildness about him, as well as of power and nobility. Drunken Angel is about good and evil, virtue and vice coexisting, battling within people, within society. And watching Mifune, you feel like you can see mankind's ideas of civilization and savagery coexisting at their epitome inside a single man.
12) Rashomon
One of Kurosawa's two most famous films! A great Simpsons joke! Rashomon is both of these things, and more.
11) The Bad Sleep Well
In this movie, Toshiro Mifune marries a big company executive's daughter as part of a plan to avenge his father's death. He falls in love with the daughter, and at one point when he feels like he's going soft, Mifune takes out a picture of his father's dead, mangled body and stares intently at it to re-stoke his hatred of the killers, including his father-in-law. Wow, he's so cool!
10) Dersu Uzala
Kurosawa's only film that's not primarily Japanese. This was shot in the USSR and is entirely in Russian. It's a biopic about a Nanai trapper who agrees to help guide a Soviet military survey expedition in the Siberian taiga. It's largely focused on the harsh beauty of the wilds, the changing modernizing world, and the friendship between the Soviet captain and Dersu.
9) Red Beard
Red Beard is Kurosawa's final black and white film, and his final time working with Toshiro Mifune. He was reportedly filming for two years in a little town specifically built for the movie, including back streets that were never filmed. In Red Beard, a young overconfident doctor is sent to do a residency under the strict, curmudgeonly doctor nicknamed "Red Beard". Over the course of the movie we see that Red Beard is a true humanitarian and disdainful of the wealthy who he must rely on to fund his hospital. The young doctor is humbled and in the end decides to stay helping the poor at this hospital rather than accepting wealth and prestige serving the shogun. It's the kind of hopeful but not overly optimistic story that I love. Also the title makes me think about pirates, and I love nothing if not thinking about pirates.
8) Seven Samurai
One of Kurosawa's two most famous films! I should rewatch this, it's the third one of his I ever watched. It's been a couple years now, and I feel like I would get more out of it now that I'm more used to Kurosawa's rhythms. One of the titular seven samurai is recruited after they see him relishing his task of chopping wood. They should of made a whole movie of him chopping wood, I love when he chops that wood.
7) High and Low
Good old fashioned thriller about a shoe executive whose son is the target of a kidnapping. The kidnapper gets the son's poor friend by mistake, but the executive is a man of honor and still feels responsible. A lot of Kurosawa's work is a little on the slower side, and for people who don't really watch older movies maybe this would feel that way too, but I think this is probably his most exciting, gripping movie, with interesting social class commentary.
6) The Hidden Fortress
There's a fire festival scene in this one that's among the coolest scenes in anything. Also Star Wars
5) Yojimbo
Just the most fun movie Kurosawa ever made.
4) Dreams
I saved this movie for last in my watchthrough because it's one of his later works (3rd to last), and because I had heard it's great and I wanted to end on a high note. Guess what it's great! In Dreams, Kurosawa puts eight separate dreams he's had over the years to the screen. It's filled with eerie atmosphere and beautiful visuals start to finish. The highlight for me was the end of the first dream when the boy is carrying the ritual suicide blade with him through the woods to where the foxes live to beg their forgiveness. But all eight were interesting and cool. Martin Scorsese plays Vincent Van Gogh.
3) Ran
Samurai King Lear! So many horses! Wow what a cool movie, filled with so many great shots and sequences.
2) Throne of Blood
Samurai Macbeth! No man of woman born except Kurosawa could ever make a movie this cool. The spirit in the forest. The version of lady Macbeth. The ending with the arrows, where trained archers were shooting torrents of arrows just to the right and left of Mifune. Incredible stuff
1) Ikiru
This is Kurosawa's most inspiring, life-affirming work. It's beautiful and poignant, simple and sad. It makes me want to do good in the world. It makes me want to be a better person. It makes me want to watch more Akira Kurosawa films.