The Idiot (Hakuchi) (1951)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Shochiku Company
As a nearly lifelong fan of director Akira Kurosawa, The Idiot is a difficult film to review. Watching it was an incredibly frustrating experience, since major portions of the film have been lost, and it’s doubtful they will ever be found.
Kurosawa’s original cut of The Idiot ran about four and a half hours, and was intended to be released in two parts. However, the Shochiku studio bosses trimmed it down to a little less than three hours, which is the only existing version.
The Idiot (a.k.a. Hakuchi) is an adaptation of the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Kurosawa followed the plot of the novel fairly closely, but changed the setting from 19th-century Russia to postwar Japan.
Appropriately, the film takes place in Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands. The snowy landscapes give the film the look and feel of a Russian novel. Kurosawa was always preoccupied with weather (especially torrential rainstorms), and The Idiot is a beautiful portrait of a frigid and hostile environment.
The main problem with The Idiot is that it appears to have been trimmed down in a completely arbitrary fashion. The constant wipes (a technique which usually conveys a sense of excitement and forward movement in Kurosawa’s films) seem to always signify an elision in The Idiot. Characters will move from one place to another with no explanation, or the setting will change without warning. Watching The Idiot in its current form is sort of like reading a novel and skipping various chapters at random.
The Idiot is not a film I can properly review, but I will say this — if you have never seen a Kurosawa film before, make sure it’s not this one; however, if you are a Kurosawa fan, it is a film you must see at least once. It’s a gorgeous piece of work, with wonderful performances by the radiant Setsuko Hara, who also appeared in Kurosawa’s No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), and Masayuki Mori, who gives a haunting performance as the “idiot” of the title, a man deeply traumatized by war.
Kurosawa mainstays Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura have less to do, but turn in dependably good work. I wrote in my review of The Quiet Duel (1949) that it might be Shimura and Mifune’s least interesting pairing for Kurosawa, but this one definitely is, mostly because they don’t really interact much.
Los Olvidados (1950)
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Ultramar Films
Most serious film nerds know about Luis Buñuel, even if they’ve never seen any of his movies.
And even if they’ve never seen Buñuel’s first film — the influential surrealist short Un Chien Andalou (1929) — they’ve probably heard about its shocking, disjointed images, like ants crawling out of a hole in a man’s hand or a woman’s eyeball being sliced open by a straight razor. (If you’ve never seen Un Chien Andalou, go ahead and watch it right now. It’s only 16 minutes long.)
Buñuel made a big splash with Un Chien Andalou (1929) and his next film, L’Age d’Or (1930), but his career and life went in strange and interesting places between 1930 and 1950, taking him from his native Spain to working in Paris, Hollywood, New York, and eventually Mexico, where he settled in 1946.
I last reviewed Buñuel’s work-for-hire Jorge Negrete musical, Gran Casino (1947), which was neither an artistic nor a financial success, but I missed his more successful follow-up, El Gran Calavera (The Great Madcap) (1949).
Los Olvidados, however, is the film that really put him on the map, and if you’re only going to see one Buñuel film, I think it should be this one. (Of course, if you’re a serious film nerd, why would you only see one Buñuel film?)
At its November 9, 1950, premiere in Mexico City, the film scandalized and enraged audience members. Los Olvidados dared to not only show the worst side of life in Mexico City — the desperate poverty and parentless children of the slums — but also dared to depict those children not as sentimental objects of noble suffering, but as vicious, angry, and hopeless.
I first saw Los Olvidados at Film Forum in New York, and I was blown away by not only the film’s unflinching depictions of poverty and violence, but also by its incredible beauty.
A workaday writer or director handed the scenario of Los Olvidados would find hope by giving one of its main characters a happy ending and allowing the audience to nestle comfortably in the lie that good is rewarded and evil punished. (Incidentally, this is exactly what happens in the alternate ending that Buñuel — or someone — was forced to shoot, and which was rediscovered in 1996. After the screening I saw at Film Forum, the alternate ending was introduced and shown via video projection as a historical curiosity, and was received with incredulous laughter from the audience.)
But Buñuel knew that in the world of Los Olvidados, happy endings are a bourgeois lie. At the same time, Los Olvidados is not a hopeless film. It is an exhilarating masterwork, in which a sense of reality is undermined by moments like the one in which the young actor Alfonso Mejía throws an egg at the camera. Ironically, this breaking of the fourth wall undermines reality while at the same time creating a heightened sense of reality, when Mejía stares into the camera with disdain as the egg drips down the lens.
Scandal (1950)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Shochiku Company
I’ve been a fan of Akira Kurosawa’s films since I saw Ran (1985) on the big screen when I was 12 years old. Like most fans of Kurosawa, I came to his period samurai films first and slowly branched out into his contemporary dramas (like Ikiru) and his crime movies (like High and Low and Stray Dog).
One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about my OCD Viewing project is that it’s given me an excuse to finally sit down and watch some of Kurosawa’s lesser-known films that I might never have gotten around to watching otherwise, like No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) and The Quiet Duel (1949). Neither of those ranks among my favorite Kurosawa films, but I’m happy I saw them, and they gave me a better understanding of his body of work.
Scandal (Shûbun) is another one that didn’t appeal to me very much on paper, but really affected me when I watched it.
Scandal stars Toshirô Mifune as a painter named Ichirô Aoye who strikes up an innocent friendship with a famous classical singer, Miyako Saijo (Shirley Yamaguchi), and suddenly finds his name and face splashed all over the tabloid press. His senses of righteousness and decency are both deeply aggrieved, and he proceeds to wage a quixotic war against Asai (Shin’ichi Himori), the sleazy editor of a periodical called Amour.
I love watching Mifune in just about anything, but the real surprise for me in Scandal was the performance of another Kurosawa mainstay, Takashi Shimura, as Hiruta, the lawyer Mifune employs to clear his name.
Hiruta is the most interesting character in the film, and he comes to dominate the film’s second half. Hiruta is a morally compromised character, but this is exactly what makes his story so good. Mifune’s anger is righteous and his character is admirable, but it’s Shimura’s complicated and bittersweet journey that makes Scandal such an affecting film.
The year 1950 also saw the release of Rashômon, Kurosawa’s enduring masterpiece about the slippery nature of the truth. It premiered internationally at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, and introduced the world to Kurosawa’s greatness. So in a way, Scandal marks the end of Kurosawa’s early period. I don’t rate it as highly as Drunken Angel (1948) or Stray Dog (1949), but it’s still an excellent film.
Even an average film from Kurosawa is head and shoulders above most directors’ best work. Despite an overabundance of sentimentality and a reliance on a few too many shopworn melodramatic moments, Scandal is a satisfying film full of surprisingly beautiful moments, like an elegiac New Year’s Eve celebration or an average man’s final walk through a city street as just another anonymous human, despite everything we have just seen him go through.
Orpheus (1950)
Directed by Jean Cocteau
André Paulvé Film / DisCina
Back in 2004, I visited the exhibit Jean Cocteau: Enfant terrible at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It was a wonderful show, and introduced me to Cocteau’s drawings, none of which I’d seen before, and many of which were pornographic enough to be squirreled away in a special section of the exhibit with dim red lights and a warning to parents outside. The show also featured some original costumes from Cocteau’s masterpiece, La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) (1946), which I’ve loved since I first saw it in high school.
The exhibit also introduced me to Cocteau’s hour-long film The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d’un poète) (1932). It’s a beautiful and surreal little work of art, with lots of in-camera special effects that Cocteau would use again in La Belle et la Bête and in Orpheus (Orphée) (1950), which is a follow-up of sorts to The Blood of a Poet. (Together with Cocteau’s 1959 film Testament of Orpheus, the three films comprise what is commonly referred to as “The Orphic Trilogy.”)
Orpheus stars Cocteau’s longtime lover Jean Marais, and is loosely based on the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus, the musician who traveled to the underworld to save his wife, Eurydice.
Marais plays a poet named Orphée (the French version of the name “Orpheus”), who travels between different realms of reality — first against his will and later quite purposefully. As I said, Cocteau’s Orpheus is only loosely based on the myth of Orpheus. For Cocteau, that tale is just a jumping-off point for his visual poetry, and his musings on life, death, dreams, art, and love.
Orpheus is a beautiful film, but it’s also a very funny one. Cocteau’s arch, camp sensibility is fully on display here, and the most heartbreaking part of the original myth of Orpheus — the doom that awaits if he turns around and looks at his beloved when they exit the underworld — is played mostly for laughs in Cocteau’s Orpheus, and becomes just one more domestic annoyance that the great poet must deal with.
I loved Orpheus, although it’s definitely not a film for everyone. This is a movie in which Death takes the form of a beautiful woman (María Casares) who travels in a Rolls Royce and is attended by two motorcyclists whose leather get-ups look like something out of a Tom of Finland cartoon or a film by Kenneth Anger.
Stray Dog (1949)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Toho Company
Akira Kurosawa’s ninth film is one of my personal favorites. I love a good police procedural, and Stray Dog is one of the best.
Kurosawa originally wrote Stray Dog as a novel. He was influenced by the Inspector Maigret novels by French writer Georges Simenon. In the 1960s, in an interview with Donald Richie, Kurosawa expressed his disappointment about the film. “I wanted to make a film in the manner of Simenon, but I failed,” he said. “Everybody likes the picture, but I don’t.”
I think it’s good for artists to be their own harshest critics, but in this case I think the public is right. Kurosawa may have failed to make the film he wanted, but he succeeded in making a great film nevertheless. For my money, Stray Dog and Drunken Angel (1948) are Kurosawa’s two earliest masterpieces.
Like The Naked City (1948), which was one of the first police procedural movies, Stray Dog pairs an older, seasoned detective with a younger, inexperienced detective. They’re played by Kurosawa regulars Takashi Shimura and Toshirô Mifune.
If you’ve seen Seven Samurai (1954), you know Shimura as the de facto leader of the samurai (he’s the one with the shaved head) and you know Mifune as the wild and unpredictable odd man out.
Shimura and Mifune played variations on this relationship in numerous Kurosawa films. In Drunken Angel Shimura was an alcoholic physician who struggled to convince the swaggering young gangster played by Mifune that he had to treat his tuberculosis. In The Quiet Duel (1949), Mifune played a young surgeon desperate to keep his syphilis infection a secret, and Shimura played his father and the head of their medical practice.
In Stray Dog, Shimura plays Detective Sato and Mifune plays Detective Murakami. Their relationship has elements from their previous two collaborations with Kurosawa, but there’s a playfulness and sense of humor that was absent from both Drunken Angel and The Quiet Duel.
The film begins when Murakami’s service weapon is stolen, and Murakami’s shame is more than he can bear. The little .25 caliber Colt Model 1908 Vest Pocket was lifted by a pickpocket on a crowded bus. Its magazine was loaded with all seven rounds. After the weapon is used in a mugging, Murakami writes a resignation letter, but his lieutenant rips up the letter and advises him that catching the thief would be a better form of penance.
Stray Dog presents a panoramic view of postwar Japan. Unlike the huge cesspool in Drunken Angel that functioned as a grim and fairly obvious metaphor for life during the American occupation, Stray Dog presents a world that has changed forever, in ways both good and bad.
After Murakami makes a positive identification of a female suspect, another detective who is familiar with the woman is surprised to learn that she was wearing a dress, since she always wore a kimono in the past. Murakami assures the older detective that she was wearing a Western-style dress, and that she had a perm and stank of perfume. The older detective shakes his head and observes that times have certainly changed.
When Murakami goes undercover to track the passage of the stolen pistol through the black market, we see one destitute person after another in a series of dissolves. Life is not easy for most people after the war.
But there’s also the sense of life returning to normal. Sato and Murakami track a suspect to a baseball game and keep him under observation in the stands. This tense sequence features seamlessly integrated 16mm footage of an actual game between the Nankai Hawks and the Yomiuri Giants. The players all have numbers on their uniforms, which was forbidden as “too individualistic” during World War II.
I think that Stray Dog presents a more realistic view of police psychology than The Naked City. After Murakami and Sato narrow down their search to a single suspect, Murakami feels sympathy for the man. Like Murakami, the criminal is also a returning serviceman, and Murakami thinks that he could have easily become a criminal if he hadn’t become a cop. As his stolen Colt is used in a series of increasingly brutal crimes, he feels responsible for each one. Sato tells him to leave the psychoanalysis to detective novels and just focus on arresting the bad guys. Sato says that Murakami will never forget his first arrest, but after each subsequent collar he will grow less and less sentimental.
Sato has a much lighter touch than Murakami. When we first see him, he is laughing and sharing popsicles with the female suspect who Murakami got nothing from after leaning on her too hard. Sato’s way with suspects appears more lenient than Murakami’s, but it’s because he has a much better idea of what he’s doing.
Murakami is dogged but fairly incompetent in the early stretches of the film, but as he learns from Sato he becomes more patient and observant. A young person learning from a seasoned veteran is one of the oldest stories in the book, but it’s a damned good one when told well, and Kurosawa told stories extremely well.
In addition to the convincing performances and the involving story, Stray Dog is a triumph of atmosphere. The film takes place in the hottest days of summer, and Kurosawa never lets the viewer forget it. The opening shot is a closeup of a dog lying on the ground and panting. The first words we hear from the narrator are, “It was an unbearably hot day.” In nearly ever scene there is something that conveys the humidity and languor — people fanning themselves, sweat glistening on faces and staining clothing, men mopping themselves with handkerchiefs and rolling up their sleeves. When a chorus of scantily clad showgirls led by the beautiful and petulant Harumi Namaki (Keiko Awaji) traipse off stage and collapse on the floor, their flesh is beaded with perspiration.
At just over two hours, Stray Dog is a long movie, but even in the stretches where not much happens there’s always a sense of forward movement conveyed by well-paced edits, frequent dissolves, and wipes to transition from one scene to another. (Kurosawa loved wipes.)
Fumio Hayasaka’s score conveys tension and excitement, but it’s used judiciously. Kurosawa also makes great use of diegetic music in the film’s two climactic scenes. In the first, the heat has finally broken and there is a tremendous rainstorm as the radio in a hotel lobby plays Sebastián Yradier’s “La Paloma” in the background. In the second climactic scene, Murakami confronts his quarry behind a house where a young woman is playing Friedrich Kuhlau’s Sonatina in C Major, Op. 20 No. 1. The music tinkles out of an open window, its serenity at odds with the violent confrontation that is about to explode.
Stray Dog is one of the best police procedurals of all time, but like a lot of great films it transcends its own genre to tell a universal story.
Starting in 1950 with Rashômon, Kurosawa would gain more and more attention worldwide as he produced one great film after another. Stray Dog was one of the last films Kurosawa made that was pretty much unknown outside of Japan until the 1960s. It’s still not as widely seen as his best-known films, so if you like Japanese cinema and haven’t seen it yet, you have something to look forward to.
The Quiet Duel (1949)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Daiei Motion Picture Company
The Quiet Duel is not one of director Akira Kurosawa’s major works. Most reviewers treat it as a lamentable, melodramatic footnote in his career, but I don’t think that’s fair.
Unlike No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), which I think all but the most dedicated Kurosawa completists can skip, The Quiet Duel is worth seeing at least once if you’re a Kurosawa fan. It also functions as a thematic bridge between two of Kurosawa’s major early works, Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray Dog (1949).
Like both of those films, The Quiet Duel pairs two of the director’s most dependable stars: Toshirô Mifune and Takashi Shimura. It shares with Drunken Angel the theme of a doctor who struggles with his own conscience, and it presages the major theme of Stray Dog — two young men who face the same difficult circumstances but who make very different ethical decisions.
Mifune and Shimura are always interesting to watch when they’re on screen together, and if The Quiet Duel is their least interesting pairing in Kurosawa’s body of work, it’s only because most of their appearances together for Kurosawa were in films that are all-time classics.
The Quiet Duel (or The Silent Duel, as it’s also translated), is based on a play by Kazuo Kikuta. Mifune plays Dr. Kyoji Fujisaki, a young physician who contracts syphilis when he cuts himself while performing surgery in a field hospital during World War II.
After the war, he returns to work with his father, Dr. Konosuke Fujisaki (Shimura). Kyoji rejects his fiancée, Misao (played by Miki Sanjō), without an explanation. He treats himself with Salvarsan in total secrecy. (Salvarsan is the trade name for arsphenamine, the first effective treatment for syphilis.) And he struggles with his sexual desire and romantic longing, both of which he completely stifles so he won’t infect anyone else with his malady.
Later in the film, he again crosses paths with the man he operated on during the war. Unlike Kyoji, this man treats his syphilis as a trifling matter, and doesn’t care who else he infects (his wife is pregnant). We’ll see this moral theme again in Kurosawa’s next film, Stray Dog (1949), in which Mifune plays a young police detective whose gun is stolen. The “stray dog” of the title is a young man who suffered the same indignities and deprivations as Mifune following the war. Unlike Mifune, he chose to take his pain out on the world, and goes on a crime spree with Mifune’s gun.
Most of The Quiet Duel is pretty stagey, and the story is melodramatic. But when Mifune finally lets loose, he lets loose as only he could, and it’s something to behold. And while the film isn’t a great showcase for Kurosawa’s directorial talents, there are a few scenes — especially the surgery sequence that opens the film — that rank among the best work he did.
Xiao cheng zhi chun (1948)
Directed by Fei Mu
Wenhua Film Company
Like every good story about a love triangle, Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town is more about desperate longing and the subterranean passions that threaten social order than it is about the tawdry mechanics of infidelity.
Based on a short story by Li Tianji, Spring in a Small Town stars Wei Wei as Zhou Yuwen, a 26-year-old woman living in the ruins of post-war China. Her husband, Dai Liyan (Shi Yu), comes from a family that was once prosperous, but is now penniless. Parts of their home are uninhabitable following the ravages of war, and Liyan is stricken with a vague but consuming ailment. Their marriage is passionless. Yuwen performs her wifely duties — shopping for groceries, giving her husband his medicine — but they barely speak to each other and do not sleep in the same bed. They share their house with the elderly servant Lao Huang (Cui Chaoming) and Liyan’s teenaged sister, Dai Xiu (Zhang Hongmei).
One day, the couple’s childhood friend Zhang Zhichen (Li Wei) appears at their home in a brazen but friendly manner. He has been gone for the past 10 years, and is now a well-traveled doctor. He brings joy to all the members of the household, although Lao Huang, the servant, is mystified by his nontraditional habits (he doesn’t drink tea, and he doesn’t wash before going to bed; not even his face).
But before long, Liyan can’t help noticing that his wife is happier around Zhichen than she has been in years. And Yuwen herself is torn between loyalty to her husband and the happiness and passion that Zhichen could offer her.
After the Chinese Communists declared victory in 1949, this film was rejected because of its apolitical story, but its reputation has grown since the China Film Archive struck a new print in the early 1980s. In 2002, Zhuangzhuang Tian produced a remake, called Springtime in a Small Town, and in 2005, the Hong Kong Film Awards Association named the original Spring in a Small Town the greatest Chinese-language film of all time.
It’s an intimate film without a lot of overt symbolism, but it’s hard not to notice that the members of the Dai household wear more traditional clothing than Zhang Zhichen, who wears a western suit and tie, as well as a wristwatch. He is modernity incarnate, and full of life and promise, while Yuwen’s husband is a moribund symbol of the past.
Spring in a Small Town is a simple but elegant and affecting film. I especially liked Wei Wei’s dreamlike voiceover narration.
Unfortunately, I felt as if I wasn’t able to completely appreciate the film because the print I watched was lousy. The only version of the film currently available in the United States on DVD is from Cinema Epoch, and it’s plagued with problems. (It appears to be the source for the complete version of the film uploaded to YouTube that I’ve linked to below). The picture is softly focused, there are missing frames, there’s a constant background hiss on the soundtrack, some of the cuts seem jumpy, and the subtitles are poorly timed. I was still able to enjoy the film, but when you compare this DVD with the presentation of films from the same period by the great Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu that the Criterion Collection has put out on DVD and Blu-ray, well … there’s no comparison. Spring in a Small Town is a great film, and it deserves a better presentation than this.
Drunken Angel (1948)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Toho Company
Now seems as good a time as any to talk about how Akira Kurosawa changed my life.
When I was 11 or 12 years old, my mom took me to see Ran (1985) on the big screen. I always loved going to the movies, and since we didn’t have a television, we went to the movies a lot. Until I saw Kurosawa’s Ran, however, I don’t think I’d thought much about what actually went into making a movie.
Ran changed all that. Everything about it was vividly present onscreen — bold color choices, meticulously arranged visual compositions, music too quiet and gentle for the bloody violence it accompanies, the overly theatrical makeup for the actors — and I drank it all in.
I’ve read some critics talk about seeing Citizen Kane (1941) for the first time and becoming acutely aware of cinematography, music, camera movements, and so on. That was my experience with Ran, and it began my love affair with Kurosawa. It was a love affair that continued with Seven Samurai (1954) (which I also saw on the big screen in a revival house shortly after seeing Ran), Throne of Blood (1957), Yojimbo (1961), Dreams (1990), Rashômon (1950), Kagemusha (1980), Ikiru (1952), High and Low (1963), The Hidden Fortress (1958), and Stray Dog (1949).
I can’t claim to be a Kurosawa completist, though. He directed a lot of movies that I haven’t seen. I think I’m spacing them out, since in most cases I’m blown away all over again and if there’s a Kurosawa movie out there that I haven’t seen, it’s something to look forward to.
While I wasn’t exactly blown away by the last new-to-me Kurosawa film I watched and reviewed, No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga seishun ni kuinashi) (1946), I was blown away by Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi), which I’d also never seen before.
Drunken Angel was Kurosawa’s seventh film. “At last, my own style has come through in this film,” he once said of the film, and I tend to agree. While it seemed as if something was missing from No Regrets for Our Youth, all the elements I look for in a Kurosawa film were present in Drunken Angel. One of those elements is force-of-nature actor Toshirô Mifune, who plays a cocky young Yakuza. Another element is Takashi Shimura, who plays an alcoholic doctor with good intentions but a terrible bedside manner (the “drunken angel” of the title). (Shimura also appeared in No Regrets for Our Youth, but his role was less central than it is in Drunken Angel.) Shimura and Mifune would eventually appear together in 15 of Kurosawa’s films, but this was the first.*
It’s not just the actors that make Drunken Angel a great film. The ways the visuals help to tell the story, the three-dimensional characters, and the way the film’s themes are clear and straightforward without being heavy-handed … all of these are hallmarks of Kurosawa’s best films.
Dr. Sanada (Shimura) practices medicine in a ramshackle post-war community in which only the clubs, bars, and black market seem to be thriving. It’s an overcrowded warren surrounding an enormous cesspool filled with garbage and teeming with disease. (In a scene early in the film, Sanada angrily chases off a group of boys who are blithely playing in the filth.)
One day a young Yakuza thug named Matsunaga (Mifune) walks into Sanada’s office to have a hand wound treated, but the doctor suspects Matsunaga has a bigger problem — tuberculosis, which was rampant in post-war Japan. With the swagger typical of a young gangster, Matsunaga refuses to submit to treatment or to doctor’s orders, a problem compounded by Sanada’s angry and blunt way of talking to his reluctant patient.
Things are made even more complicated by the reappearance of Matsunaga’s gangster boss, Okada (Reisaburô Yamamoto), who returns from prison in a haunting and memorable scene.
I referred earlier to Mifune as a “force of nature.” Even here, as a young actor, he throws everything he has into the role. Mifune was an actor who used his entire body to tell a story — he could have been a great silent film actor.
The setting of the film is almost a character itself. The cramped, overcrowded little city was designed as a large open-air square by production designer Takashi Matsuyama, who originally built it for These Foolish Times (1947), a comedy about the post-war black market. It was expensive, so instead of demolishing it, the Toho Company wanted Kurosawa to use it for his next film. Kurosawa had about a third of the set torn down to create the enormous cesspool in its center.
During the American occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952 there were multiple censorship boards that forbid things like the use of U.S. military uniforms in Japanese films, so Kurosawa had to find a way to depict the occupation without actually showing it. Images of westernization abound, even though no Americans actually appear in the film, and the visual symbolism of the cesspool is pretty easy to interpret, especially when the city is reflected in the darkness of its bubbling surface.
Drunken Angel wasn’t released in U.S. theaters until December 30, 1959. Kurosawa wasn’t well-known outside of Japan until Rashômon (1950), which was a big hit on the film festival circuit in 1951.
If you’ve never seen any of Kurosawa’s films, Drunken Angel is not a bad place to start. Seven Samurai might be his most exciting, iconic, and accessible picture, but it’s nearly three and a half hours long. If you’re unsure about Kurosawa and don’t want to invest more than two hours of your life finding out if his films are for you, Drunken Angel is about an hour and 40 minutes long, and it’s an excellent movie.
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*Although Drunken Angel was the first time Mifune and Shimura acted together in one of Kurosawa’s films, it was not the first time they acted together. Their previous collaboration was in Senkichi Taniguchi’s Snow Trail (Ginrei no hate) (1947), which was written as well as edited by Kurosawa, and is about a trio of bank robbers hiding out in the mountains with a father and daughter who do not suspect that they are criminals.
After Ingmar Bergman’s last movie, Skepp till India land (A Ship to India) (1947), I was expecting more of the dismal same from this one.
Skepp till India land is a bleak, claustrophobic tale of a miserable family, so when I sat down to watch Musik i mörker (Music in Darkness), which is about a blind musician, I was prepared for something even glummer.
Surprisingly, Musik i mörker is a romantic and even sometimes whimsical film. Birger Malmsten, who played the bitter, hunchbacked son in Skepp till India land, here plays a sweeter, more likable character.
Musik i mörker is based on the novel by Dagmar Edqvist, and she and Bergman collaborated on the screenplay. Malmsten plays Bengt Vyldeke, a young musician who is blinded during his military training (when he attempts to save a little dog that runs out onto a firing range, of all things).
Bergman visually represents Bengt’s initial shock and the blindness that results from his accident in a bizarre dream sequence, shown in the still below:
That’s about as extravagant as Bergman gets in Musik i mörker, but the entire film is pleasingly shot. The lighting is especially good, and beautifully complements the fresh-faced beauty of Mai Zetterling.
Zetterling plays Ingrid, a lower-class servant girl who works for Bengt’s family. She cares for him after he loses his sight, but he is caught in a spiral of self-pity, and eventually he offends her deeply enough to drive her away.
In his second autobiography, Images: My Life in Film (1990), Bergman wrote of making Musik i mörker, “My only memory of the filming is that I kept thinking: Make sure there are no tedious parts. Keep it entertaining. That was my only ambition.”
I think he succeeded. The events of the film are small and intimate, but they move along at a nice clip. Bengt takes a job playing piano in a saloon, he’s cheated by someone he trusts, and he tries to make Ingrid a part of his life again. Meanwhile, Ingrid develops a relationship with a young intellectual named Ebbe (Bengt Eklund) and resists Bengt’s advances when he reenters her life.
Musik i mörker still shows Bergman developing as a director. It’s not a towering cinematic achievement like some of his later films, but it’s a satisfying picture full of gentle romance and bittersweet moments.
Last Easter, I attended services at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. The bishop who delivered the sermon told of how Jesus was resurrected after dying on the cross, and how he appeared to Mary Magdalene. At first she didn’t recognize him, and mistook him for a common laborer. Clearly there was no unearthly glow around his body or blindingly bright halo encircling his head. “Hollywood would not approve,” the bishop said.
I thought about the bishop’s joke when I watched Maurice Cloche’s Monsieur Vincent, a biography of the seventeenth century curé Saint Vincent de Paul.
It’s a great film, and not just because of Pierre Fresnay’s brilliant, totally convincing performance as Vincent de Paul. It’s a great film because it doesn’t engage in the flashy hokum that so many films about religious figures do. There are no heavenly choirs, light streaming through stained glass, or mist-shrouded appearances of Jesus.
Despite the fact that Monsieur Vincent is about a deeply religious man, it depicts his life as one might have observed it at the time. His commitment to caring for the poor isn’t idealized — the people who receive his charity are often filthy, miserable, and ungrateful — but the film is all the more powerful for its realism.
Monsieur Vincent was released in France on November 5, 1947, and in the United States on December 20, 1948. It was awarded the Oscar for best foreign language film in 1949 at the 21st Academy Awards.
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