The Big Screen (49 page)

There were not too many other films in that era that dealt with the Japanese as other than authority figures driven by a code of violence that seemed shocking and “unfair.” One of the biggest films of the 1950s ($17 million in rentals on a $3 million budget) was David Lean's
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957), set in a prison camp in the Burmese jungle. It had a fascinating cast: William Holden was there again (to ensure U.S. box office), being Holden, charming, a ne'er-do-well, but resolute finally. Alec Guinness was Colonel Nicholson, a noble English idiot, yet curiously dangerous, someone who believes in building a bridge for the enemy. And Sessue Hayakawa (who had played a Burmese in Cecil B. DeMille's
The Cheat
in 1915 and had a notable silent career) was brought out of retirement to be the Japanese camp commandant.

The film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture. Guinness won Best Actor, and Hayakawa was nominated as Best Supporting Actor. He lost to Red Buttons in a film called
Sayonara
, a Marlon Brando picture in which American servicemen in Japan fall in love with Japanese women. (Miyoshi Umeki won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar playing Buttons's girlfriend.) I believe that film provided the first Japanese women the boy had seen—though the man has to admit that he felt then the cinematic problem that “all Japanese people looked alike,” except in
The Teahouse of the August Moon
(1956), in which Brando played an Okinawan. Still,
Sayonara
was a breakthrough picture in allowing ordinary Japanese characters an emotional life beyond the anger and violence of captors and commanders.

There was little more, though the ingenious Sam Fuller did make
House of Bamboo
(1955), a film about American crime set and shot in Japan. As late as 1961, in a film often rhapsodized over for its charm,
Breakfast at Tiffany's
, Mickey Rooney was allowed to deliver a toxically racist performance as the Japanese man, Mr. Yunioshi, who lives upstairs from Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn). Some people on that picture—the screenwriter George Axelrod, notably—fought with Blake Edwards, the director, about the characterization, but Edwards paid no heed. There were many complaints, polite complaints, but it was still part of Western attitudes toward Japan, I suppose, that people who look alike (call them a huddled mass) have to be polite.

But something else was happening. In September 1951 the Venice Film Festival awarded its top prize, the Golden Lion, to a film from Japan: it was called
Rashomon
, and it was directed by Akira Kurosawa.

Kurosawa was born in Tokyo in 1910. Having failed in a career as a commercial artist, he went into movies as an assistant director and then a screenwriter. He began to direct in the last years of the war—a disastrous period, of course, but he had done several films before
Rashomon
. Still, this was his breakthrough, a period piece in dappled black and white in which an incident of robbery and rape is described in turn by four different characters, with variations. The word
Rashomon
by now has passed into English-speaking wisdom to indicate any situation in which the witnesses' testimony doesn't fit.

The fame of
Rashomon
spread. It opened in New York in 1951, and in March 1952 it received the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. (This was still an occasional, honorary award, initiated in 1948 with
Shoeshine
.) The Japanese consul accepted the prize for
Rashomon
, thanked the producer, but never mentioned Kurosawa.

Perhaps he hadn't been home in a while, or didn't know his own history. In America, a Japanese film had never won an Oscar, and it is hard to track down any prior Japanese picture that had had a commercial opening. But Edison and Lumière programs had been shown in Japan in the late 1890s, and their impact had been as complete as anywhere else, with this proviso: Whereas in the United States flicks were seen as lower class, film was treated in Japan as fit for everyone, especially the educated classes. By 1940, Japan was producing 500 feature films a year, for internal consumption in a country with a population of 73 million. The figure for American productions in 1940 was 363, for a population of 132 million.

To this day, despite the efforts of Japanese film promoters; of scholars and writers such as Donald Richie, Audie Bock, Mark LeFanu, and Tony Rayns; and enthusiasts such as Susan Sontag, we know too few of those films to be sure about them.
Rashomon
inspired further discoveries in the 1950s, but I fear many readers will scarcely know the name of another “unearthed” figure, Kenji Mizoguchi. Born in Tokyo in 1898, Mizoguchi would die of leukemia in 1956. He made more than eighty films, and just before his death he was “discovered,” above all in France, with the release of
The Life of Oharu
(1952) and
Ugetsu Monogatari
(1953).

It is a silly game making lists of the best films ever made, but anything I can do to draw
Ugetsu
to your attention will benefit you. There are two men, Genjurô and Tôbei, the one a potter, the other ambitious to be a samurai. In the sixteenth century, in a time of great strife, they leave their village and their wives as Genjurô travels to sell his pottery. Tôbei stumbles into the role of a warlord, and then one day finds that his abandoned wife is now a prostitute. Genjurô is waylaid by a strange princess, the Lady Wakasa. He goes to live with her, but she is a ghost. He escapes and hurries home to what seems like desolation, but then the camera moves and we find a hearth, a home, and the wife. But she is a ghost, too—murdered, as we have suspected. Next morning Genjurô is alone with his child.

In framing and camera movements, in a concurrent simplicity of action and complexity of feeling, Mizoguchi is not just in the class of Jean Renoir. He is a master of narrative cinema, of moral consequence, and especially of stories about women. The wife in
Ugetsu
is played by Kinuyo Tanaka, a great actress, and Wakasa is Machiko Kyô, who played a few years later with Brando and Glenn Ford in
The Teahouse of the August Moon
, one of those daft American views of Japan.

If you want a list of Mizoguchi films to track down—and we are still in the age of introductory lists, though there are good DVDs available—it would include all of these:
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum
(1939; could this be the best film made in Hollywood's great year? Or is it Renoir's
La Règle du Jeu
?),
The 47 Ronin
(1941),
Utamaro and His Five Women
(1946),
Gion Music
(1953),
Sansho the Bailiff
(1954),
Chickamatsu Monogatari
(1954). It makes the 1950s seem rich, doesn't it? No wonder: by the time of Mizoguchi's death, 1956, Japanese film production had recovered from defeat in the war and was back to 500 again. In America by 1956 the number was down to 210.

The story has only just begun. In the year of
Ugetsu
, Yasujirô Ozu made
Tokyo Story
. Born in Tokyo in 1903, Ozu was an unruly kid who got a plum job as an assistant cameraman and began directing in the silent era. He would prove an unmatched observer of that subject often skirted in American pictures: ordinary family life. He developed a withdrawn, quietist camera style, filming in long shot in long takes, from a lower level than is customary, and letting characters move and interact in the frame. Some are tempted to think of it as “very Japanese,” but in truth it is very cinematic and totally devoted to characters, actors, and the mood of interiors.

Tokyo Story
is about parents who travel to Tokyo to see their children. But the children rather ignore or disdain them, not really out of unkindness but just in the natural way of youth and self-centeredness. Only a widowed daughter-in-law (Setsuko Hara) seems interested in them. They go back home. The wife falls ill and dies. That is all—there are no bank robberies, car chases, or chainsaw massacres. Satan does not appear. But such things are rare in life, too. Toward the end, one character admits, “Isn't life disappointing?” and it's like the voice of Chekhov, as well as the dark secret Hollywood never wanted to give away. Ozu is as important as Mizoguchi, as consistent and human, and as great an artist. From
I Was Born But…
(1929) to his last film,
An Autumn Afternoon
(1962, a year before his death), he is to be seen and pursued.

I should not shortchange Kurosawa. No Japanese director made such an impact in the West. But no Japanese director was so familiar with or so stirred by Western classics, especially the films of John Ford. In 1990 he received an honorary Oscar, presented by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who had both learned a great deal from Kurosawa's samurai films. Spielberg called him “the greatest living filmmaker.” The list of his films is long and honorable, but I will stress the early to mid-50s and two films made back to back:
Ikiru
(or
Living
), from 1952, and
Seven Samurai
, from 1954.

The same actor, Takashi Shimura, is in both films. In
Living
he is a minor city official who discovers he is dying of cancer and tries to establish a small playground for children. In
Seven Samurai
he is the leader of the band of warriors who come to the aid of a village threatened by bandits. In
Living
he is humble, crushed, and nearly helpless; in
Seven Samurai
he is robust and triumphant. The one film is a restrained view of suffering; the other is fully engaged with combat and valor. It is hard to believe the same man made both. But it is hard to believe anyone made either. We simply sit back in awe.

In January 1954, in Paris, a film magazine,
Cahiers du Cinéma
, published a lengthy essay, “Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français” by a young critic named François Truffaut, who was opinionated, a very good writer, and determined to make his name and to define a kind of cinema he wanted to occupy as a director. The essay was reworked several times at the suggestion of the
Cahiers
editor, André Bazin, but it never lost its fierce attack on the allegedly sedate, literary nature of recent French cinema.

The essay became part of the
Cahiers
rationale for celebrating American films, and a spur to the gathering of what would be called the “nouvelle vague,” the New Wave. Moreover, it was the kind of attack that might have been launched in other countries—in America even, if it had possessed a serious film magazine or the intellectual respect for film that had existed for decades in France. Such an attack might have been aimed at the mounting irrelevance of, say,
Three Coins in the Fountain
(1954),
Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing
(1955), or
Friendly Persuasion
(1956)—all Best Picture nominees. Still, in France the fuss Truffaut caused could obscure the extraordinary work being done in the 1950s.

One of the greatest of directors was emerging, a man so single-minded and austere in his work that he likely never noticed
Cahiers du Cinéma
or much else going on in the France of the 1950s. Robert Bresson was born in Bromont-Lamothe in the Auvergne in 1901. He had tried to be a painter, and entered movies in a modest way in the 1930s. During the war, he had spent a year in a German prison camp.

So he was in his forties by the time he began what he regarded as his true work:
Les Anges du Péché
(1943), about a community of nuns; and
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
(1945), taken from a Diderot story, scripted by Bresson but with dialogue by Jean Cocteau. Hélène (María Casares) is dropped by her bored lover, Jean (Paul Bernard). In revenge, she sets up a meeting between Paul and Agnes (Elina Labourdette), who is close to being a prostitute. Only when that love has led to marriage does Hélène reveal the truth to Paul, yet he responds far better than the plot expects.