JAPANESE WARS Movie Review

Japanese Wars on Screen

The four films in this section are the work of one man—Akira Kurosawa. It is completely unfair to limit one country's contribution to the genre to so narrow a cross section, but Kurosawa's films are the most widely known and available of the serious Japanese war films. And he always had an international audience in mind, even when it made his life and work difficult at home. In an article for Look Japan magazine, Nishizawa Masafumi outlines the difficulties that Kurosawa had with his own country. Those were largely a result of Kurosawa's refusal to compromise on expensive budgets and stories which studios were reluctant to back. As his career was beginning, the Japanese film industry had created a system that was meant to grind out large numbers of B-movies, not to realize individual artistic visions.

The most obvious example is Seven Samurai. It had a budget of 370 million yen, at a time when the studios were used to spending only two to three million yen per picture. And even though Seven Samurai eventually made a profit, many of Kurosawa's films lost money. Working within that environment, then, his achievement is even more astounding. As the Japanese say of themselves, the nail that stands up is the one that's hammered back down.

Kurosawa, who was born in 1910, uses his country's medieval past as a setting for tales of heroic figures who are often trying to create some order in a time of chaotic violence, where the old social structure has disintegrated. Seven Samurai (1954) can be seen as a variation on the American World War II unit picture. The tough sergeant is transformed into an unemployed warrior who recruits the men to fill out his squad and defeats a much larger enemy force. The Hidden Fortress (1958) is a more light-hearted adolescent adventure about two comic heroes caught in the middle of a three-sided civil war. Just as important as the characters and plot is the exotic fairy-tale landscape where the action takes place—steep mountain slopes, foggy forests, flooded dungeon.

In Yojimbo (1961), the wandering swordsman hero is looking out only for himself in a corrupt town ruled by dueling gangs. Again, the cold autumnal setting cuts across cultural and national lines, and gives the archetypal story universal appeal. (That's why it has been remade so often.) Ran (1985) is Kurosawa's mature masterpiece, an amalgam of King Lear and Macbeth that contains some of his most striking battle scenes.

Opinions will differ on this point, but these four titles are the high points of a great filmmaker's career. If, as Masafumi suggests, Kurosawa was more Western than Japanese, so be it. His films speak for themselves.