SANSHO THE BAILIFF Movie Review

The Bailiff
Sansho Dayu

In 11th-century Japan, a woman (Kinuyo Tanaka) decides to go searching for her husband, a former official who was banished from his province years ago. She takes her two children with her on her quest, but soon the family is broken up and sold—the mother into prostitution, the children into slavery in the service of the cruel and ruthless Sansho (Eitaro Shindo). As a decade passes, the mother and her children maintain their hope of being united, despite the cruelty and violence of the system under which they live. Kenji Mizoguchi's adaptation of Ogai Mori's popular novel could have been—in lesser hands—a protracted soap opera. It is, instead, among the most moving and poetic portraits of human courage and suffering the cinema has yet given us. In its narrative structure, visual magnificence, and overwhelmingly poignant cumulative power, Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff is one of the world's great cinematic folk legends, and an achievement of absolutely timeless beauty. (Though the film had its American premiere at the First New York Film Festival in 1963, its commercial debut in the U.S. wasn't until 1969, which is when I saw it—if I'm not mistaken—on a staggering double feature with the restored Lola Montès at Manhattan's now long-defunct Bleecker Street Cinema.)

NEXT STOP … Life of Oharu, Ugetsu, Princess Yang Kwei Fei

1954 132m/B JP Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa, Eitaro Shindo, Ichiro Sugai; D: Kenji Mizoguchi; W: Yoshikata Yoda; M: Fumio Hayasaka. VHS, LV HMV