Akira Kurosawa is Japanese movies for most Westerners and his films inspired many directors - from Sergio Leone to George Lucas. On the fourth anniversary of his death, Michael Dwyer assesses the legacy of the film-maker who was more popular abroad than at home
Japanese cinema was virtually unknown in the western world until 1951, when the Venice Film Festival had the foresight to screen Akira Kurosawa's accomplished drama, Rashomon. Set in ninth-century Kyoto, the film observed a murder and a rape from four different points of view to present an intriguing meditation on the relativity of truth.
It opened the eyes of the world to a director whose work was to prove highly influential, and to a unique national cinema with a rich history to explore, principally in the works of Ozu and Mizoguchi. The irony is that Kurosawa went on to achieve far greater respect abroad than he did at home, and in the later part of his career he had to raise money internationally to finance such acclaimed productions as his epics, Kagemusha and Ran.
Kurosawa - who was 88 when he died of a stroke in Tokyo four years ago today - is the subject of a welcome 12-film retrospective now running at the IFC in Dublin and six of the films have been released on DVD recently by the British Film Institute. The IFC season spans the fertile period between 1948 and 1965, from Drunken Angel, the urban drama which marked the beginning of Kurosawa's fruitful collaborations with his leading actor, Toshiro Mifune, to Red Beard, their last film together.
Having trained as a painter, Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry as an assistant director in 1936, when he was 26, and he directed several films before making Drunken Angel, which he regarded as his proper first film because, unlike its predecessors, it was made without official interference.
He followed it with the 1949 taut and stylish thriller, Stray Dog, starring Mifune as a young police officer who obsessively tracks down the thief who stole his gun.
After making his international breakthrough with his next film, Rashomon, Kurosawa directed two outstanding films which copper-fastened his growing reputation around the world - the 1952 Ikuru (To Live), his most personal picture, a tender and thoughtful humanist study of an elderly civil servant dying of cancer, and two years later, Seven Samurai, his exhilarating action epic in which a motley group of warriors come to the rescue of a small village beset by bandits.
Over the following 10 years, Kurosawa went on to produce a striking diversity of films - I Live in Fear (1955), a nuclear paranoia picture set in Tokyo during a heatwave and the fear generated by the Cold War; Throne of Blood (1957), a powerful transposition of Macbeth which drew on the Noh conventions of acting and staging; The Hidden Fortress (1958), a light romantic comedyadventure following the pursuit of a feisty young princess; The Bad Sleep Well (1960), which transposed Hamlet to a contemporary business milieu; Yojimbo (1961), featuring Mifune as a samurai who cunningly plays rival gangs against each other; Sanjuro (1962), in which Mifune's samurai comes to the rescue of naïve, younger warriors; and Red Beard, a hospital drama featuring Mifune in one of his greatest performances, as a socially concerned doctor.
While European and American critics discovered and promoted Kurosawa's work during this intensely creative period, the anomaly is that the mass audience on both sides of the Atlantic became far more familiar with the western remakes of Kurosawa's films than with the superior originals.
The Italian director, Sergio Leone, turned Yojimbo into A Fistful of Dollars, spearheading the new vogue for so-called spaghetti westerns and making a star out of Clint Eastwood, who played the stubbly, laconic Man With No Name in three hit films for Leone. The concept was later given a space-age treatment in Battle Beyond the Stars, which was scripted by John Sayles and directed by Jimmy Murakami.
Later, the US director, Don Siegel, drew on Kurosawa's Stray Dog as the inspiration for the tough, violent thriller, Dirty Harry, which again starred Eastwood and spawned several sequels.
Rashomon was recycled by Martin Ritt as The Outrage, a western starring Paul Newman. Brian De Palma modelled the closing sequence of Scarface on Throne of Blood. And George Lucas, an avid admirer of Kurosawa, cited The Hidden Fortress as a key inspiration for Star Wars. Imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, but Kurosawa proved entirely unimpressed by all those homages and remakes when I interviewed him in London in 1986, around the time Ran was released.
"They lack any freshness," he told me through his interpreter. "Those films I made evolved through a process rather like birth. If you just take an idea and stick it in another country or another culture, it loses everything that gives it its vitality. It becomes an empty imitation.
"You can't always transpose the cultural situation. For example, the samurai in Seven Samurai were turned into gunslingers in The Magnificent Seven. That's not a samurai, nor his code of ethics, his morals or his feelings, so you've lost everything that was relevant in the original."
It was the most animated response during the course of an interview in which Kurosawa proved courteous and charming but mostly inscrutable. He was 76 at the time and kept his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, and had just returned contented from a shopping expedition at Harrod's, where he had stocked up on shoes. In Japan, they didn't make shoes big enough to fit him, he explained.
For all his castigation of those who reworked his own films, Kurosawa himself never had any qualms about taking Western plays and novels as sources for his films - drawing on Shakespeare for Throne of Blood (Macbeth), The Bad Sleep Well (Hamlet) and King Lear (Ran), and on the books of Dosteovsky, Gorky, Ed McBain and Evan Hunter.
He was equally passionate in defending his own approbation. "In every case, the western originals are a vehicle for an idea that's already there," he explained. "With Macbeth, after I read the play, I began to see a character I wanted to make a film about anyway, so I used the story to make that film.
"With Ran, I started with the idea of making a film about a Japanese character who has three good, loyal sons and to put them in a situation where they become disloyal and rebellious. While I was developing a fiction on this theme I began to realise the comparisons with King Lear. So, with a new idea in mind, I re-read Lear and then started working on the similarities with a new appraisal of Lear in mind."
One can detect similarities in Ran between the beleaguered father and Kurosawa himself. Despite the quality of his work in the 1948-1965 period covered by the current IFC season, Kurosawa found it exceedingly difficult to raise money in Japan to finance his later projects. In 1971, after experiencing his first financial failure - with the slum drama, Dodes'ka Den, his first colour film - he attempted suicide by slashing his wrists.
He did not work again until 1975, when he accepted an offer from the Soviet Union to film a project of his choice on Russian soil, and he made Derzu Uzala, which earned him the Oscar for best foreign-language film. His American admirers, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, came to the rescue when he failed to raise the complete budget for his next film, Kagemusha, and he finally realised his long-felt ambition to film Ran through the intervention of Luis Buñuel's regular producer, Serge Silberman, a Pole living in Paris.
Kurosawa received his only Oscar nomination as best director for Ran in 1985. Four years later, Spielberg and Lucas presented him with an honorary Academy Award "for accomplishments that have inspired, delighted, enriched and entertained audiences and influenced film-makers throughout the world".
The Kurosawa films released on DVD by the British Film Institute are Stray Dog, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, TheHidden Fortress and Yojimbo. They are available by mail order from video.films@bfi.org.uk The season continues at the IFC
