A Japanese Apocalypse

Yojimbo. In the movies, where every man is a genius until proven otherwise, only one director of recent years has not been proven otherwise: Japan's Akira Kurosawa. In Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood he displayed formidable powers as a moralist, an ironist, a calligraphist of violence. In Ikiru, one of cinema's rare great works of art. he revealed a rugged realism, an exquisite humanity, a sense for what is sublime in being human. Now. in a movie that is both a wow of a show and a masterpiece of misanthropy, Kurosawa emerges as a bone-cracking satirist who with red-toothed glee chews out his century as no dramatist has done since Bertolt Brecht.

The satire is blithely disguised. Contemporary civilization is reduced to a microcosm: a small Japanese town of the last century. And the story is presented as a phlebotomously funny parody of a Hollywood western. When the film begins, the town is divided, just as the modern world is divided, into two armed camps. In each of them, like a land-grabbing cattleman surrounded by gunmen, sits a vicious little warlord surrounded by swordsmen. Enter the hero (Toshiro Mifune), a strong, silent, shabby samurai whose sword is for hire and no questions asked. He looks the situation over: sheriff bullied, citizens cowed, streets full of corpses, business at a standstill. Grimly he reflects: "Better if all these men were dead."

Well, why not? With grisly delight the samurai sells his sword to the first warlord, promptly betrays him to the second. Three men dead. Then he betrays the second to the first. Nine men dead. Then he provokes both sides to a pitched battle. Twenty or 30 men dead and the town in ruins. By hook or crook, trick or treat, the samurai assists the slaughter until, hilariously or horribly, everybody has eliminated everybody. With a grunt of solid satisfaction, the hero survevs the vacant village and declares: "Now we'll have a little quiet in this town." At this point, many customers will be wondering whether to laugh or scream. On second thoughts, most of them will decide to scream. Taken entire, Yojimbo is an appalling assault on the human animal and all his works. Of the scores of characters in the film, only five can pretend to be human beings. What's more, three of the five are stupid and cowardly, and the best of them, the noblest instance of mankind that Kurosawa can discover, is the mercenary samurai--a professional killer. Everybody else in the picture is lecherous, treacherous, venal or criminally insane.

Moral: Humanity, drop dead! Humanity may not take Kurosawa's advice, but anybody who sees this picture will be shaken by it. Rage like a gale, action like an avalanche roar out of the screen, leveling all resistance. The scenes are short, the story swift, the cutting terse. Like a giant cauldron the screen boils with life, and Kurosawa's telescopic lenses, spooning deep, lift the depths to the surface and hurl the whole mess at the spectator's face. All the players play with succussive intensity, but Mifune, a magnificent athlete-actor, dominates the scene.

Looped in a soggy kimono, crusted with stubble and sweat, gliding like a tiger, scratching like an ape. he presents a ferocious and ironical portrait of a military monk, a Galahad with lice. Behind Mifune stands a script that develops with the intricate symbolic logic and violent inevitability of a folk epic, and behind the script, behind the actors, behind the camera stands a major talent and a massive moral force: Kurosawa.

To look at him. nobody would believe it. Tall, lithe, springy, togged in a sports shirt and a battered sailor cap turned inside out. Kurosawa at 52 looks more like a golf pro than a genius. But underneath the sailor cap stands a quiet, intense and stubbornly determined man who for a quarter century has labored unremittingly at his art. Trained as a painter. Kurosawa got into the movie business almost by mistake. At 26 he casually entered an essay contest sponsored by a Japanese film studio, composed a shrewd polemic against the industry, was hired as an assistant director.

By 1950 Kurosawa had made ten pictures of his own--most of them crude, none of them weak. Then came Rashomon and with it prestige. Suddenly the slightly disreputable, startlingly productive Japanese film industry--which last year churned out 535 pictures while Hollywood was making 254--had an international reputation on its hands. "Emperor Kurosawa," they called him. and the emperor made ruthless use of his authority.

He demanded complete artistic freedom, stretched his shooting schedules, bloated his budgets. The bankers screamed, but when they threatened to cut one of his films Kurosawa icily recommended: "Cut it lengthwise." Free of financial worries. Kurosawa concentrates on creation. He works closely with his scriptwriters, finishes every film in his head before he starts to shoot--usually with three cameras at once. With his crew Kurosawa is curt; with his cast he is patient. He never scolds an actor--though once, when an actor infuriated him, he turned to a horse that was standing near by and bellowed in the poor brute's ear: "Idiot!" He tells his players what he wants in gestures and images--while making Rashomon he took Mifune to see a movie about Africa, and as a lion went gliding across the screen said quietly: "There's your killer." In the cutting room, Kurosawa works every trick of the trade to achieve an effect of compacted intensity and demonic drive. A Kurosawa film is almost always a shattering, exhausting experience. His genius is excessive; he attempts to crowd the whole of life into every frame, and if the spectator cannot take the whole of life he can go take an aspirin. Kurosawa despises the traditional Japanese esthetic of "artless simplicity." His method and his values are more Western, more active, more individual. "You must have respect for everyone, no matter how unimportant he seems to be," says a character in one of his films, "because you cannot tell who he really is, you cannot tell what tremendous importance his little life may have for the whole of humanity." In the individual Kurosawa sees all humanity, and his passion for the individual has made him both an incendiary and a firebringer, a revolutionary not in politics but of morals. "I am interested," he says simply, "in producing a better quality of man." The man he means is a man of large humanity who loves evil as well as good, who sees life drunkenly and sees it whole, who laughs with the grand laughter that accepts and brothers everything that breathes. But men cannot win to such wisdom without suffering, and in his films Kurosawa shows them what to suffer: the world as it is, themselves as they are.

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