THE LAST SAMURAI

...For ten years at the peak of his fame—between the money-losing 1965 Red Beard and the Soviet-backed 1975 Dersu Uzala—he could find investors for only one film, the 1970 tale of Tokyo slum dwellers, Dodesukaden, and when it proved a critical and financial failure, he fell into a massive depression that culminated in an attempted suicide in December 1971...

...But he never penetrated to understanding why they failed, and the greatest gap in his films between artistic will and artistic success lies in the Shakespearean movies he believed among his greatest triumphs: his retellings of Macbeth in the 1957 Throne of Blood and King Lear in the 1985 Ran...

...And the eternal sorrow at the changes happening in the world, which Kurosawa can evoke by having all the slain samurai swordsmen killed by the bandits’ gunfire, cannot find a counterpart in an American western...

...The self-created punishments of over-powering ambition and the supernatural elements of Macbeth all seem to translate well into the early mediaeval Japanese setting...

...Oddly and awkwardly for a retelling of King Lear, Ran is Kurosawa’s least dialogue-driven film: Shakespeare stripped of language...

...Lear is a play primarily about fathers and daughters...

...But at last, even its cinematography fails to make the film represent anything more than the kind of moral imprecision that comes from the sheer, unfocused desire to deliver moral pronouncements— an imprecision that is far, far worse than simple error...

...But perhaps the clearest proof of the failure of translation—the impossibility of separating the truths that stories tell from the settings in which they tell them—comes in Kurosawa’s own attempts to recast in Japan the mythopoetry of European stories...

...The other social films from this period do not, for the most part, survive their moment...

...In 1948, he made Drunken Angel, a story of an alcoholic doctor and a neighborhood gangster that proved to be his breakthrough from journeyman director to fullfledged film-maker...

...There is an actual hidden fortress in the Japanese film, a hiding place from which a samurai general sneaks his feudal princess, together with her family’s treasury...

...Indeed, there is something forced in Sturges’s western that the viewer never feels in Kurosawa’s Japanese tale...

...Among these social commentaries, only Ikiru (1952) stands out...

...His modern crime stories, in particular, reveal the influence of American film noir...

...But the other hidden fortress in the film is something far earthier and far more human than George Lucas felt free to put in Star Wars Even as the young princess learns the cost of being a ruler, both how to sacrifice herself and how to accept the sacrifices others make for her, the general is conveying to safe territory their only true hidden fortress: the virgin womb of the last royal daughter, the one hope for the clan’s survival...

...The universe in King Lear is deranged because Lear is deranged, and it is unbearable that Cordelia dies after he returns to sanity— that his sufferings should prove unredemptive...

...Scandal (1950) is a screed against the postwar emergence of sensationalist tabloids and scandal sheets...

...But in the resetting of the story from Japan to Mexico, other changes are forced as well, and with them is lost what makes The Seven Samurai one of the greatest movies ever made: a general and universal insight into human nature that is displayed only in the story’s specific and particular setting...

...And it is simultaneously a deeply depressing account of the failure of that man’s death to teach anyone else what he has learned in dying...

...after he was denied absolute artistic control, his description of World War II as primarily a personal inconvenience in his 1982 book Something Like an Autobiography, the three years and $10 million he spent creating accurate samurai costumes for the 1985 epic Ran...

...One Wonderful Sunday (1947), a tale of a poor couple wandering through the poverty-stricken cityscape of American-occupied Japan, rejects emerging Japanese capitalism...

...But when he set himself to creating great art, he succeeded only in making films—some of them interesting (like his Japanese setting of Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths in 1957) and some of them dull (like his 1955 Record of Living Being, an indecipherable tale of a Japanese father who wants to move his family to Brazil out of fear of radioactive fallout), but none of them capable of standing beside his own best work...

...But it derives even more from Kurosawa’s inability to convey holiness convincingly...

...With his 1991 censure of America in the anti-atomic-bomb story Rhapsody in August, for example, he posed instead as the great, Olympian moral pronouncer...

...Throne of Blood is Kurosawa’s most play-like film, most stylized and most driven by dialogue rather than visual effects...

...And in 1963, he made High and Low, one of his best and most underrated films...

...Painting the last days of a modern, soulless bureaucrat diagnosed with cancer, the film is a profoundly uplifting account of the power of imminent death to transform for good what remains of a dying man’s life...

...Kurosawa cannot convey the outrage of the universe at usurpation, the rule of a murderous and unrightful king, because he does not believe in it...

...Those who are not Christian are obviously able to appreciate Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare, but Kurosawa was a non- Christian in a way impossible for anyone reared outside Japan: He lacked the expectation of redemption that is, thanks to the inescapable conditioning of Christianity even for non- Christians, the structure that underlies all Western stories...

...There is no rightful ruler in Kurosawa’s universe, and thus no end to the succession of murders down through the ages...

...The Magnificent Seven is a nice film, but it doesn’t have nearly the stature of The Seven Samurai...

...Lost in Ran is the unique breaking of the audience’s expectation that comes with the death of the beloved youngest child...

...But movie-making is fundamentally and originally a Western form of art, and Kurosawa always admitted his debt to American and European directors, often naming in interviews John Ford and Frank Capra and showing, in his color epics Dersu Uzala and Ran, what he learned from David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia: the use of motion pictures to paint still lifes and panoramic landscapes...

...The disaster of Kurosawa’s version of The Idiot, set on the half-Russianized northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, derives first from the film’s dropping of Dostoyevsky’s vision of an effete and corrupt national capital seen through the eyes of an innocent from the provinces...

...When he complained that the actor Minoru Chiaki received too much for starring in The Seven Samurai, Chiaki replied, “It’s not that I’m too expensive...

...Among Kurosawa’s films with modern settings, only Ikiru and High and Low seem likely to keep a general audience...

...The social divisions between bandits, peasants, and samurai make little sense in the New World setting...

...The film is full of surprisingly comic moments...

...Born in 1910, the sickly son of a physicaleducation instructor, Kurosawa took his first job at a Japanese film studio in 1936 only after failing the entrance examination for art school, and throughout his directing career he allowed himself to be underpaid...

...It is the works, for more than the life, that teach a lesson not in the triumphs of artistic arrogance but in the benefits of artistic modesty...

...There is a second lesson in artistic modesty to be learned as well from the Emperor Kurosawa’s work, beyond even the lesson that art lives only in the disciplined limitations of a specific artistic form...

...In Kurosawa’s version, the headman of a poor village decides to hire warriors to help protect the barley harvest from a gang of armed and mounted bandits...

...But then there are his works—the thirty films Kurosawa made from the 1943 nationalistic story of the birth of jujitsu, Sugata Sanshiro, to the 1993 tale of an aging teacher, No, Not Yet...

...And yet, in The Magnificent Seven, the mythopoetic characters start to blur and lose their fine definition...

...Two figures from Kurosawa’s film, the boy-samurai learning the code of Bushido and the farmer’s son pretending to be a samurai, are awkwardly joined into a single young gunfighter in Sturges’s translation...

...The American version follows this precise plot-line, as a Mexican village sends out for gunfighters to defend it against a gang of pistoleros...

...No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), based on the true story of a prewar professor imprisoned by the military government for leftist views, seems mostly to be a denunciation of all anti-communism as militaristic...

...It is a lesson about the particularity of stories— about the impossibility of translating even the most general truth from one location to another without destroying it...

...But grim as Shakespeare’s vision is in Macbeth, Kurosawa’s even grimmer vision at last overwhelms the Shakespearean source...

...Widely mocked for its absurd casting of Richard Gere as a Japanese-American, the film deserved sterner criticism for its picture of present-day Nagasaki as a shrine to the peaceful Japanese Buddhists pointlessly martyred by the bloody American military...

...The director himself acknowledged the artistic failure of his versions of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Gorky’s The Lower Depths...

...Even at their worst, however, these films remain tightly focused ventings of Kurosawa’s sometimes misdirected moral outrage—their force deriving not from a belief that the Artist must pronounce on the great moral issues of the day, but from an artist’s taking up the cudgels against what strikes him as an immediate and specific abuse...

...When one of the villagers objects that samurai won’t fight merely for the food that is all they have to offer in pay, the headman explains, “Find hungry samurai...

...There were signs that a corresponding modesty, even insecurity, matched his fabled arrogance...

...He picked his favorite actor, Toshiro Mifune, out of a 1946 audition for amateurs when he recognized in the would-be actor’s rude glares a fellow shy man’s overcompensation...

...Shakespeare wrote other plays and deliberately used other settings (notably Henry IV) to speak of the transfer of power from fathers to sons...

...Even the visually stunning Ran, which some think Kurosawa’s finest film, at last breaks on the director’s inability to explain why the story should seem so especially tragic...

...Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin is a hero marked by God as a holy fool precisely because of his sufferings...

...Rashomon was Kurosawa’s (and Japan’s) first film to receive international recognition, winning the “Golden Lion” at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, as well as the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1952...

...Yojimbo, Kurosawa’s 1961 tale about a samurai who tries to play both sides in a small town divided between two warring families, was refilmed in 1964 by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars, a spaghetti western starring Clint Eastwood, and again in 1996 as Last Man Standing, a 1920s gangster movie starring Bruce Willis...

...Kurosawa’s protagonist is hero in spite of his sufferings...

...The perfection of such grand historical romances as The Seven Samurai and even such little comic gems as Sanjuro (1962) prove the success of Kurosawa the artist...

...Following hints given by the director himself, film critics have traced the influence of traditional Japanese theater on Kurosawa’s work...

...In Ran, Kurosawa so rapidly destroys the audience’s expectation of redemptive suffering that the tragedy of the king’s beloved child’s death bears no extra weight...

...emotion and narrative expressed only in windswept landscapes and tear-stained faces...

...There are lessons in all of this, lessons in artistic modesty taught by a man with the nickname of the “Emperor,” famed and remembered for his artistic arrogance...

...it’s that you let yourself go too cheap...

...There is the lesson about the existence of general art only in its specific forms, and there is the lesson about the existence of universal truths only in specific stories...

...This inability to translate Kurosawa at his most mythopoetic—at the moments in which he has the most to tell us about human nature—shows even more clearly in the transition from The Hidden Fortress to those portions of Star Wars that concern the rescue of the Princess Leia...

...Tora...

...Tora...

...Based on a story by the American mystery writer Ed McBain, but transferred from New York to Tokyo and transformed from a police procedural into a moral study, High and Low is a brilliantly realized tale about whether a rich man should pay the bankrupting ransom demanded when kidnappers mistake his chauffeur’s son for his own...

...Kurosawa would not always stay so disciplined...

...In the decade and a half following the Imperial Army’s surrender in 1945, Kurosawa interspersed his samurai tales with a series of attacks on the postwar society developing in Japan...

...THE LAST SAMURAI Akira Kurosawa, 1910-1998 By J. Bottum They called him the “Emperor,” and when he died on September 6 at the age of eightyeight, the newspaper obituaries were filled with stories of Akira Kurosawa’s imperious—and imperial— arrogance...

...Western directors have often returned the compliment...

...There are further problems with the translation Kurosawa attempts in Ran...

...The painful sincerity of his translation of Dostoyevsky in The Idiot (1951) and the unwatchable pretension of Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) prove the failure of Kurosawa the Artist...

...Steven Spielberg did pause to declare the Japanese film-maker “the pictorial Shakespeare of our time,” and from around the globe came tributes to his stature as the last of the J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...John Sturges smoothly remade The Seven Samurai as the 1960 American western The Magnificent Seven, and George Lucas has often declared Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, the 1958 story of the attempt to smuggle a samurai princess out of enemy territory, to be one of the originals for his own 1977 Star Wars...

...After great effort, the village collects seven samurai to lead its defense, and in some of the best battle scenes put on film, the bandits are all killed—along with four samurai...

...The Bad Sleep Well (1960) viciously attacks modern, corporate Japan as murderously corrupt...

...Forced to use other motives to drive his story, he introduces a new and contradictory subplot in which the oldest son’s wife—the daughter of a lord killed by the old king—is determined to revenge her father by destroying her husband’s clan...

...Together they amount to something any artist would be proud to have taught us...

...This comes partly from the American version’s cutting of an hour and a quarter from Kurosawa’s two-hundred minute script...

...In 1949, he released Stray Dog, a Raymond Chandler- style account of a policeman descending into the criminal underworld to search for the pickpocket who stole his gun...

...And yet, such recasting of Kurosawa’s mythopoetic classics back into the idioms and locations understood by American and European directors already begins to show the impossibility of achieving perfect translation— begins to show why the truths conveyed in a story cannot be separated without damage from that story’s particular setting...

...The strangely mannered walk and inflection of the female characters in Throne of Blood, for instance, derive from conventions found only in Noh plays...

...His Macbeth murders to gain the throne of a lord who had in his time murdered his own lord to gain the throne...

...Telling over and over again with different narrators the story of a rape—concerned, ultimately, with the impossibility of deriving certain knowledge of an incident from witnesses’ accounts—it was remade as a weak 1964 American film, The Outrage, with Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson...

...giants, the director of such world classics as Rashomon (1950), The Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo (1961), and Kagemusha the Shadow Warrior (1980...

...It is rather on the basis of his samurai-era films that his reputation will remain as one of the greatest directors who ever lived: the philosophically disturbing Rashomon, the mythopoetic The Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress, the comic celebration of the samurai in Sanjuro, and Kagemusha, the saddest and most humane of all his movies...

...The failure is caused in part by the absence of Christianity...

...When Kurosawa makes the king’s three children sons instead of daughters, he weakens the play’s display of violated tenderness...

...Rhapsody in August ends with a scene of an old woman with an inverted umbrella running in slow motion against the rain, so beautifully photographed it almost rescues Kurosawa from his attempt to blame all the war’s casualties on the United States...

...But mostly what people seemed to want to remember were the anecdotes of Kurosawa’s lordly pride: his famous disdain for the press, his haughty refusal to take off his sunglasses for photographs, his near bankrupting of the entire Japanese film industry in the early 1960s, his demand that the medieval castle built as a set for the 1957 Throne of Blood be completely rebuilt because the carpenters had used inauthentic (and invisible) steel nails, his stormy resignation from the 1970 American production of Tora...

...To see these movies again all in a row, as video-cassettes now allow, is to recognize something about how art actually works—about how art actually comes into existence through specific artistic forms like the poem, the novel, the symphony, the movie, and never through some abstract and general notion of Art with a capital A. When Kurosawa was trying only to make films, he succeeded in creating great art...