Director's Spotlight: Akira Kurosawa

In a new series I plan on doing here on the blog, I will be talking about some of my favorite filmmakers. I will give you my ratings for their movies (that I've seen), maybe a little background info, and share some favorite moments or shots or something about them. I'm starting off the series here with my favorite filmmaker, Japan's Akira Kurosawa.

My ratings of his movies:

1. Throne of Blood (1957) – 10/10
2. Seven Samurai (1954) – 10/10
3. Red Beard (1965) – 10/10
4. Ikiru (1952) – 10/10
5. High and Low (1963) – 10/10
6. Ran (1985) – 10/10
7. Stray Dog (1949) – 9/10
8. Kagemusha (1980) – 9/10
9. Rashomon (1950) – 8/10
10. The Bad Sleep Well (1960) – 8/10
11. Yojimbo (1961) – 8/10
12. Sanjuro (1962) – 8/10
13. Drunken Angel (1948) – 7/10
14. Sanshiro Sugata (1943) - 7/10
15. Dreams (1990) – 6/10
16. The Hidden Fortress (1958) – 5/10

Akira Kurosawa's career ran from his first feature, 1943's Sanshiro Sugata until 1993's Madadayo. In his 50 year career, he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Director for 1985's Ran, while his movies were nominated four times for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (winning twice), and was granted a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 1990.

Kurosawa's international breakout came with 1950's Rashomon (winner of one of those Foreign Language Film Oscars), the story of a bandit raping a woman and murdering her husband, told from the shifting perspectives of each person involved. Rashomon is a fascinating movie to talk about, and I actually think it's more fun to talk about than it is to watch, necessarily. To see the subtle changes in the story as the bandit tells his side, the wife tells hers, through a spiritual medium the husband tells his side, and a woodcutter who saw it happen tells his side. Each person's story makes themselves look better than the others in the story, showing our subtle narcissism when recounting our memories. For example, it's not rape in the bandit's story, it's the wife being overcome with lust at seeing his masculinity in defeating her husband in a sword duel, and so giving herself to him. It's then shown as an incredible, daring sword fight in both the stories of the husband and bandit, while it's a stumbling, unchoreographed, almost comedic battle of the men barely hitting each other and slipping and falling and all kinds of messiness when the wife recounts her story. It's a shifting perspective approach that has been used in countless pieces of drama since then, but it was revolutionary at the time.


He also loved Shakespeare, though called him "too wordy", and adapted the Bard's work into movies like Throne of Blood (an adaptation of MacBeth), The Bad Sleep Well (a very loose version of Hamlet), and Ran (his take on King Lear). All are some of the best takes on Shakespeare's work that the movies have ever given us, and I'd even argue that Throne of Blood is the best Shakespeare movie period. In both Ran and Throne of Blood, Kurosawa shifted the action to his favorite time period, feudal Japan, the time of the samurai. Ran has some of the most beautiful battle scenes ever filmed, while Throne of Blood keeps the creepy foreboding spirits from MacBeth, both movies seamlessly transitioning into the change of setting.

Most of all, I think I love Kurosawa’s mastery of narrative. Even in a 3.5 hour movie like Seven Samurai, he’s paced it in such a way that there’s not a wasted moment, and it all builds towards the climax of the picture. Either through building the characters or advancing the story, Kurosawa is always telling us something. Sometimes he intrigues us simply with the plot, such as in High and Low, where a powerful young executive is told his son has been kidnapped and he must pay the ransom (which will essentially bankrupt him and have him lose everything he's worked his whole life for), only to find out that the kidnappers didn't take his son, but the son of his driver. There's an amazingly powerful shot of the eyes of both fathers meeting, unsure of how this changes things. Is the driver's son worth less than his own? Are our lives worth the same? What does the executive do? It's probably Kurosawa's most emotionally and morally complex movie, and also a terrific crime drama. It was not adapted from Shakespeare or even Dostoyevsky (whose The Idiot Kurosawa adapted as well), but from pulp American crime writer Ed McBain. Kurosawa took influence from everywhere all over the world.

Actually, in Japan, though successful (Seven Samurai was the all-time box office king in Japan for a long time), he was often dismissed as "too western", as John Ford was his favorite filmmaker and he loved the westerns popular in America at the time. Really, when you look at it, Kurosawa's samurai films are not really any different than Ford's (and others') westerns, just samurai instead of cowboys. His movies have even been adapted into westerns. The Magnificent 7? Just a remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai translated from feudal Japan into the American west. Rashomon was also remade into a western called The Outrage, with Paul Newman. And, maybe most famously, Sergio Leone took Kurosawa's Yojimbo and turned it into A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood. Eastwood has even said that he took the role because he loved Kurosawa's movie so much and was then told not to tell anyone that they were remaking Yojimbo because they weren't giving Kurosawa credit and legal issues would ensue.

Kurosawa was long associated with his two favorite actors, Takashi Shimura and (more famously) Toshiro Mifune. Shimura acted in 21 of Kurosawa's movies, more than any other actor, and gives one of the great performances of all time in Ikiru, the story of a man who finds out he has terminal cancer and resolves himself to do something worthwhile with the small time he has left, deciding to help build a playground for children on a hotly contested piece of real estate. Mifune starred in 16 of Kurosawa's movies, always in a lead or co-lead role. It led to Mifune becoming an international icon and the biggest star in Asia at the time. John Belushi created his classic SNL Samurai character based on his love of Mifune's movies. Mifune gave many powerful performances during his time with Kurosawa, the gruff but loving doctor in Red Beard being my favorite. Although if you'd told me that his work in High and Low or Yojimbo or even Seven Samurai was better, I wouldn't argue much. Mifune later said that despite having nearly 200 acting credits on his resume, he wasn't proud of much of the work he'd done, except for everything he did with Kurosawa.

Kurosawa's framing is astounding as well, showing his background as a painter. Unlike other directors who often sketch their storyboards with stick figures, Kurosawa painted his. Here are some examples, alongside their eventual movie counterpart:

There are so many images from Kurosawa movies stamped into the heads of cinema fans, whether it’s the arrow through the neck in Throne of Blood, the remaining samurai looking at the graves of the fallen in Seven Samurai, or, my favorite, the ending shot in Ikiru, of the man on the swing. Even in lesser movies like Dreams (where those last two painting versus real shot examples came from), an anthology film based on Kurosawa's own dreams, I have many images stuck in my head like the dead soldiers coming out of the tunnel, the snow mountain, or the demon on the fiery mountain.

Hugely influential to filmmakers in his own time and now, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese have referred to themselves as "Kurosawa's children", and in the late 70's when Kurosawa was having trouble finding funding for his work, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola added their names as Executive Producers and got the funding secured so that Kurosawa could make 1980's Kagemusha.

Kurosawa died in 1998, at age 88. When writing of his death, famed film critic Roger Ebert said "Of the postwar giants who redefined the art of the cinema, what other director, save perhaps Sweden's Ingmar Bergman, could claim so many masterpieces? The titles are like a roll-call of greatness...He combined two qualities not always found together in filmmakers: He was a visual stylist, and a thoughtful humanist. His films had a daring, exhilarating visual freedom, and a heart of deep human understanding. He often made movies about heroes, but their challenge was not simply to win; it was to make the right ethical choice."

He is a certifiable cinematic legend, my favorite filmmaker, and I hope to have shed some light on him for you whether you're new to his work or a seasoned viewer like myself.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

“May you be in heaven a full half-hour before the devil knows you’re dead.”
-Irish saying

When Philip Seymour Hoffman died four years ago, he was the best actor working in movies and had been for quite a while. He was powerful when he needed to be, charismatic even, funny, but often played creeps and weirdos, or bullies and smarmy assholes. He could play it all. His one team up with the legendary Sidney Lumet for 2007’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead was some of the best work of either’s career, which is saying something considerable. The story of two brothers, Hoffman and Ethan Hawke, who try to rob a jewelry store, only for everything to go wrong is one of the best crime dramas that not enough people have seen. It was to be Lumet’s last movie, as he died four years later at age 86 from lymphoma, but what a swansong this movie was for him.
Directed by the Lumet, 50 years after his directorial debut 12 Angry Men announced him as a bright new talent, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is both a fascinating character study of a disintegrating family, and a terrifically suspenseful crime thriller. Hank (Hawke) is 3 months behind on his child support payments, and his older brother Andy (Hoffman) is in trouble with the IRS for embezzling countless dollars from his employer. Andy's wife Gina (Marisa Tomei) complains that he doesn't open up to her the way he did on their vacation to Rio, and Andy thinks maybe they could start over their life by moving there. Andy comes to Hank one day with a proposition, a mom and pop jewelry store robbery where they'll use toy guns so that there's no chance of anybody getting hurt, the owners will be taken care of by insurance, and the overall haul should be around $600,000, more than enough for both of them to fix their problems. Hank says that it sounds like a victimless crime, so he agrees to pull the job.
I'll stop plot description there because one of the movies many pleasures is the way it slowly reveals the complete happenings of how the robbery goes spectacularly wrong. I will say that it shows remarkable confidence from first time screenwriter Kelly Masterson that the robbery is not the climax of the story, but the catalyst for it.
The casting of Hawke and Hoffman as brothers seems wrong at first, but the movie uses it as an advantage to show the opposing effect that each brother has within the family, Hoffman as the first born, and Hawke as the baby. They also work so well with each other that you feel the sense of history and brotherly connection that Hank and Andy share. Andy has always felt like an outsider, and Hank has always been the good son, the baby. The two men have grown up to be very different people, but the brotherly connection is surprisingly very strong from the actors.
Hawke should be commended for his fine work here as Hank. Most actors would shy away from the role of the obviously weaker brother, but Hawke completely nails Hank as the inadequate scared little boy in over his head. Marisa Tomei, who looks better at 43 than she did at 27, when she burst onto the scene in My Cousin Vinny, does her best work to date as Gina, Andy’s wife, a role that easily could've been played as the standard secondary "wife" character. She and Hoffman actually feel like a married couple having problems, and not like a movie married couple whom the screenwriters have given hurdles to jump over. A lesser actress's performance would've been gobbled up by how powerfully incredible Hoffman is in his role, but Tomei's secret lies in her reactions and subtleties rather than any "big moment" type histrionics. Albert Finney also does superbly subtle work as Andy and Hank's father Charles, who has as much at stake as his boys do. There’s also a small part here from Michael Shannon, as the brother-in-law of the guy Hawke’s Hank hires to help him pull the job. Shannon is electric in the role, and it was the first time I’d seen him in anything. I’m glad that he’s shown us over and over again that it was no fluke.
But Hoffman is the star here. He has two key scenes of great power, one opposite Hawke as they're trying to cover up their tracks at a drug dealers house (the tension is palpable in that sequence), and the other while in the car with Tomei. In that scene, you see Andy's emotional armor come down for a minute and he gives us years of hurt, disappointment, self-pity, and most of all anger before we can see in Hoffman's eyes as Andy's armor goes back up and he drives away (Tomei looking like she's never seen her husband before). It's the best scene in the movie, and probably the best scene that either actor ever played. Andy has been nagged by Gina about his growing coldness, as Andy is preoccupied with trying to cover his tracks for the terrible things he’s done. It all started so that he and Gina could start over in Brazil, get a fresh start, but as the movie goes on it seems like everything is falling apart to the point that Andy and Gina may not be together, if even still alive.
Sidney Lumet had such a great varied career as a filmmaker. He wrote a book, Making Movies, that many filmmakers like George Clooney have said they use to guide them even today. His masterpieces range from the previously mentioned 12 Angry Men, to The Pawnbroker, Serpico, Murder on the Orient Express, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Prince of the City, The Verdict, Running on Empty, and then here with Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. Few directors can claim as many great movies, and that’s even leaving out plenty that other people would classify as greats. He directed 17 Oscar nominated performances, with four wins. He himself was nominated 4 times as Best Director, and was given an honorary Oscar as well, but is rarely mentioned alongside the Hitchcock's and Scorsese's of the movie world. I think it's because as a director, his style was always to serve the story and the actors before anything else; so that's what people remember from his movies. Many people come out of watching Before the Devil Knows You're Dead talking about how great the ensemble of actors is, how ingenious the plotting of the movie is, how tightly wound so much of the suspense is, but don't forget that the master behind the camera was just as deserving of praise for putting those things on the screen as well. Let’s hope his Hidden Gems like this become less hidden as time goes on.