Kurosawa Recommendations (and No Warnings)

This week’s listings can be summed up in two words: Kurosawa and Castro. Outside of the many excellent films showing in first run, that’s pretty much what’s worth catching.

Odd Reels Night, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 7:30. Now this sounds like fun. YBCA curator Joel Shepard will screen a collection of reels from incomplete 35mm prints in his collection. Among the titles that may be included are Snuff, Love Camp 7, and Sexy Proibitissimo. “I have no idea if this is going to work,” Shepard admits, “so we’re reducing the admission price to an el cheapo $5.”

Double Feature: Yojimbo & Sanjuro, Castro, Friday. One of the great revival house double bills. Yojimbo begins with a masterless samurai wandering into a small town torn apart by two gangs fighting a brutal turf war. Disgusted by everyone, our hero (who else but Toshiro Mifune) uses his wits and amazing swordsmanship to play the sides against each other. In the hands of Akira Kurosawa, the result is an entertaining action flick, a parody of westerns, and a nihilistic black comedy all rolled into one. In the sequel (Sanjuro). Mifune’s masterless swordsman reluctantly helps a group of naïve young samurai clean up their clan. This action comedy ties with The Hidden Fortress as Kurosawa’s lightest entertainment. The climax involves one of the greatest, and most unique, swordfights in movie history. And that’s how the Castro is kicking off its five-day Kurosawa-Mifune series.

The Seven Samurai, Castro, Saturday. If you think all action movies are mindless escapism, you need to set aside 3½ hours and watch Kurosawa’s epic masterpiece. The basic story–a poor village hires warriors to defend them against bandits–has been retold many times since, but Kurosawa told it first and told it best. This is an action film with almost no action in the first two hours. But when the fighting finally arrives, you’re ready for it, knowing every detail of the people involved, the terrain that will be fought over, and the class differences between the peasants and their hired swords. One of the greatest movies ever made.

Double Feature: Throne of Blood & The Hidden Fortress, Castro, Sunday. Kurosawa stands Shakespeare on his head with Throne of Bood, his haunting, noh- and kabuki-inspired loose adaptation of Macbeth. Toshiro Mifune gives an over-the-top but still effective performance as the military officer tempted by his wife (Isuzu Yamada) into murdering his lord. The finale–which is far more democratic than anything Shakespeare ever dared–is one of the great action sequences ever. While Throne of Blood is stylized Shakespeare, The Hidden Fortress is just plain fun–a rousing, suspenseful, and entertaining romp. It was also his first widescreen film, and contains two comic peasants (Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara) who were the inspiration for R2D2 and C3PO.

Rashomon, Castro, Tuesday. I know that I’ve reviewed Kurosawa’s first masterpiece–the film that opened Japanese cinema to the world. But according to a search of my site, I’ve never reviewed it. How could I remember it one way, but the WordPress search engine remembers it differently? I could check Google, but what if its memory contracts both? If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, you haven’t seen Rashomon, and that’s a real shame. On a double bill with Stray Dog, which I haven’t seen in 20 years and therefore won’t review.

Double Feature: The Bad Sleep Well & High and Low, Castro, Wednesday. The Castro ends its Kurosawa-Mifune series with his only two contemporary crime dramas shot in Cinemascope (okay, Tohoscope). They’re both excellent, but High and Low is the masterpiece–one of the best crime thrillers of the 1960’s. Mifune stars as a successful businessman who thinks he’s off the hook when a kidnapper snatches the wrong boy, leaving the his own son safe. But the kidnapper still insists that the ransom (large enough to destroy Mifune’s tenuous hold on his company) be paid, forcing the man into a moral dilemma. In The Bad Sleep Well, Mifune plays a young executive who leaps up the corporate ladder by marrying the boss’s crippled daughter. But the company has a suspicious past, including a possible murder, and this new hotshot may have an agenda of his own.