Early Kurosawa Review

• 5th Apr 2011

Sanshuro Sugata (1943)/Sanshuro Sugata Part II (1945)/The Most Beautiful (1944)/They Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail (1945)/No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)/One Wonderful Sunday (1947)

By Akira Kurosawa’s own admission, he felt his artistic freedom began with his 1948 film, Drunken Angel. He didn’t gain international recognition until Rashomon (1950) when it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1952. In the West little was known about Japanese cinema up to this point, but in the post war period Japanese cinema had a golden age through the fifties and sixties with the of such directors as Kon Ichikawa, Yasujro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, but it was Akira Kurosawa who led the way and went on to make Seven Samurai in 1957, the film that famously formed the basis for John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960). However, this has meant that his pre-1948 films made between 1943 and Drunken Angel have been dismissed. Six out of his seven pre-1948 films are included on this BFI collection, who once again finely package a rare collection together for what is largely a minority audience. The 1946 film, Those Who Make Tomorrow (Asu O Tsukuru Hitobito) is not presented here, as Kurosawa was a just co-director on this film. Those which are included make for some pleasant surprises, such as his first film, Sanshiro Sugata about a man who enters the martial-art of judo in 1880s Tokyo and is taken on as a reluctant apprentice before he faces off jujitsu opponents. When he accidentally kills a man in a fight he struggles with his conscience. The sequel, Sanshiro Sugato Part II is also included here. This sequel was made in 1945, just after the war ended and with Sanshiro beginning the film by fighting a US naval rating and throwing him into the drink. The production values on this second film are much poorer than the first, given the limitations to filmmaking in post war Japan, but the first film displays much art and poetry and inventiveness, given that that this was Kurosawa’s first film (he began as an artist, before deciding to become a filmmaker), displayed best of all in the finale fight in the sand dunes.

The best known of Kurosawa’s pre-1948 films presented here though is They Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1945), Kurosawa’s first ‘costumer’ or kabuki drama is about a group of soldier’s disguise themselves as monks in order that they can bypass an enemy roadblock in 12^th century Japan. It was lambasted by the American occupiers at the time for promoting feudalism, one of the major obstacles for Japanese filmmakers in the post war climate, but it stars a well known Japanese comedian of the time, Kenichi Enomoto who pokes fun at the po-faced Samurai he is travelling through the forest with. So entrenched were the American authorities with their fear of feudalism and the old order in Japan that they refused a release for the film until 1952 (it was in production when the war ended). Only The Most Beautiful (1944) is the most overt propaganda movie who thrusts its war propaganda message at its audience in a story about women who work as volunteers in a factory making optics for gunsights and binoculars, but it does anticipate the social realist genre of post-war Japanese cinema and Kurosawa, although uses professional actors, he does successfully create a socio-realist drama with some well written, if sexless characters who understand the duty that they must perform. Its message is direct and clear from the opening inter-titles where it professes its viewers to: “Attack and destroy the enemy.”

The other two films in the collection are No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) and One Wonderful Sunday (1947). Ironically given the two films made during the war just mentioned that Kurosawa should flirt with controversy with the aforementioned of the last two films in the collection about a university protest during the times of Japans Imperial expansionism and war. Its been recorded that Kurosawa himself was not happy with the results of this film and, unusually Kurosawa focuses on the struggles of a female protagonist played Setsuko Hara, an actress most associated with the works of Yasujiro Ozu who nearly always focused on female characters in his lower-middle class shomin-geki dramas (although of course the aforementioned propaganda movie, The Most Beautiful focuses on the relationships of women). Speaking of shomin-geki drama, it is also the unusual aspect of the final film in the collection, One Wonderful Sunday about a pair of factory worker women, but this film is too washed in sentimentality and, it has to be said to be too slow moving to have the weight of his later better known films. The bitter-sweet comic aspects of the film, does recall those of Frank Capra’s Hollywood films of the time who Kurosawa is clearly trying to emulate here.

For although Kurosawa became a big influence on many filmmakers from Ingmar Bergman to Francis Ford Coppola, he himself was also influenced by the likes of Capra and John Ford which surprises many, given the very Japanese style of his films. The films presented here, as already mentioned are not his best, but they are an interesting and sometimes even surprising revelation, yet it is perhaps the first film, Sanshuro Sugata that best displays a premonition of what was to come from Kurosawa.