With the release of Red Beard, we come to an important turning point in Kurosawa’s career, although not one that he was aware of at the time. From here on in, he would make fewer, and far more somber, motion pictures.
Counting years, his career was less than half over. He had been making movies for 22 years when he completed Red Beard, and it would be another 28 before finishing his last film, Madadayo. But counting films, he was nearing the end. He directed 23 films in those 22 years; he would make only seven in the remaining 28.
He spent the late 1960s working on two Hollywood projects that failed to pan out—at least for Kurosawa. When he was fired from the last of these, Tora, Tora, Tora, he returned to a very different Japanese film industry, one that was reluctant to invest in Kurosawa’s famously huge budgets. From here on in, he would spend more time trying to raise money for films—often from non-Japanese sources–than he spent actually making them.
So its not surprising that his later films are darker, more pessimistic than those of what I consider his “classic” period (Ikiru through Red Beard). Kurosawa’s universe is still cruel and indifferent, but now, charitable acts don’t help.
He also lost collaborators, the most important of which was Toshiro Mifune. No one really knows why Kurosawa stopped casting the actor he had turned into Japan’s biggest movie star.
There are other differences, the most obvious being color. With the exception of two short shots in High and Low, everything he made up until that time had been in black and white. Now he was shooting in color. Sometimes he used it effectively, but all too often he used it garishly. As a whole, his color work lacks the sharp-edged, urgent intimacy of his black and white.
And finally, he lost quality. He made eleven films in the previous 13 years, and these ranged from very good to amongst the greatest ever made. Of his seven later films, only Ran and perhaps Dersu Usala hold up against those eleven.
There’s another change, concerning not Kurosawa or the films, themselves, but how I will view them for this project. In August, the Pacific Film Archive will screen Kurosawa’s last seven films in something close to the order they were made. I’ll therefore be able to see most of them on the big screen.
Bayflicks 