Is Toshiro Mifune the Greatest Movie Star of All Time?Unlike, apparently, many people, I am not by nature an aficiondo of Japanese samurai films. Such taste for it as I have developed has been acquired with an especially dull and stubborn diligence. My first exposure to the genre was undoubtedly in college, a film club showing of Ran or one of the big Kurosawa epics. Whatever it was I was completely lost in it, even at the level of discriminating characters from each other, which were on the same side, which were enemies and what were the gripes and competing virtues of the various camps. It was with great delight that I saw the field of battle at last fade out and the screen occupied by the sparse Japanese characters the subtitles translated as "The End", at which I burst out of the auditorium and like a crazed beast followed the movements of people and the hum of sound until the soothing scent of beer rose to my nostrils. Samurai movies must have shown infrequently there as a general rule, as I do not recall actively avoiding any that may have come up after that, though I am certain I never saw any other ones in that setting either.

As I grew older and had children, being increasingly limited in the opportunity to watch movies of any kind (about two a month being the maximum now), it no longer did for me to go about rummaging through the shelves of the video store hoping to come across something amusing, as it is easy enough to go months without finding anything that is not actually an embarrassment to the artistic tradition of the human race, and such as makes me really wonder what contemporary people think art and artists are (I mean, good God, presumably intelligent people praised the Miranda July movie!). I decided I needed a system of choosing that ensured a certain level of quality and/or historical importance, which would over time be broadly educational, exposing me to such things as silent movies, Laurel and Hardy pictures and, of course, Japanese samurai films, which I would never be inclined to endure otherwise. After a good bit of tinkering I finally decided to make a list of movies that had been rated five stars by reasonably knowledgeable critics who had five star rating systems, which require a much stronger commitment than four-star rating systems, or merited effusive notice in some august publication such as The Oxford Guide to Film. With this I do not work down a list in alphabetical or chronological order but drop in at odd places in the alphabet depending on what my secret word or phrase of the week is, which is usually taken from my current literary reading.

The point of all this is that when you make a point of watching only five-star movies, you see a lot of Japanese samurai films. The critics love Japanese samurai films, more, apparently, than they love anything else, Chaplin, Fellini, Bergman, John Ford, you name it. My wife has a running joke whenever I have a movie to ask if it is about Japanese people fighting before she will commit to watch it with me (Mrs S has bailed on the genre, though she retains a fondness for many of its most indelible images, especially the custom the warriors have of laying their heads on blocks of wood rather than pillows when they sleep, and the timeworn question of why it often happens in these films that angry speeches of fifty or so syllables will be translated as `No` or some other such laconic construction). Toshiro Mifune, and I cannot think of an exception offhand, is the star of all of these movies. Based on my system, he has starred in more five star movies than anybody else by a wide margin. If I had to guess I would say Marcello Mastroianni was (a very distant second). Charles Dickens and Jane Austen get honorable mention as sort of ghost stars hovering over numerous acclaimed projects, sometimes for different versions of the same story (Similarly The Hunchback of Notre Dame has spawned 2 or 3 five-star adaptations all by itself). For newcomers to the genre it is helpful that Mifune is in all the films, because after a while even the most hopelessly unworldly student begins to recognize him among all the other seemingly identically dressed Japanese people enacting historical periods and places and families and people that may or may not be real in various degrees, of all of which I think it is safe to say the vast majority of even clever Western audiences has little no idea. His usual persona--the manliest, strongest, most competent and impeccably self-mastered warrior in medieval Japan--thus provides the bearing around which I suspect most Western understandings of these films ultimately pivot.


As I indicated above, I forget offhand how many of these films of I have now seen, all of which rate supposedly among the all-time classics of their art. Rashomon, of course, but being one of the first I sat through, no deep emotional impression or connection with any character was made upon me. Same for Yojimbo--I inwardly experienced nothing. Recently there was a story in the New Yorker magazine where a character goes to see this film, supposedly in total innocence of the genre, and is completely blown away by it immediately. I don t doubt it could happen but nothing in the story persuaded me of it. It had the stench of a reach, which is always bad form in fiction writing. I watched Kwaidan, and was generally lost. There must have been a few more whose titles I forget, but then all of a sudden the films finally began to be somewhat intelligble and more satisfy as a whole experience, and not just a camera shot here and there.

The first of these was The Hidden Fortress, from which it is widely known, and confessed that Star Wars is a direct ripoff. I have never--and I must be about the only boy my age with good mathematical test scores who can say this--been able to make it through any of the Stars Wars movies, even the first one. I find them incredibly boring. I don t know why. Even Joseph Campbell, who apparently everybody thinks is a moron compared to themselves nowadays, though I still consider him a wise and admirable person, starts to lose me when he begins talking about Star Wars. With regard to The Hidden Fortress, it is not as if great insights began to rain down upon me: it was more that I was able to remain engaged with the plot for the duration of the film and begin to form questions, such as: Why were these stories and settings such popular themes/what purpose did they serve in their time? and Why is Toshiro Mifune the star of every single movie? I should also observe that death in these movies tends to be more cruel, violent and personal than it is in Hollywood movies, and the camera will find and linger not merely on fresh but not disfigured corpses but on bludgeoned skulls and skeletons being picked over by vultures long after we are supposed to have moved on in a Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone-type film, which tends to be extremely unsettling as one can imagine.

Another positive step was taken with Throne of Blood, Kurosawa s 1957 take on Macbeth employing the familiar setting of the samurai era. Obviously familiarity with the general outline of the story is of great assistance here in allowing for a greater attention to and appreciation of the considerable beauties of the production. Mifune, in the Macbeth role, departs from his usual persona as the good and necessary hero, which is actually a little unsettling. The strength of this movie is in its grasp and depictions of the idea of supernatural forces that is essential to most classical stories, which have rarely been executed so convincingly.

My favorite work in this genre to date is undoubtedly the Samurai trilogy (1954, 1955, 1956), directed by Hiroshi Inagaki, about whom I however know nothing else. This movie is frequently touted as the best introduction to the genre for the uninitiated, and has been heavily extolled and borrowed from by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and his ilk, so I am hardly breaking any new ground here, and if anything represent a weakening of the successful ties these movies managed to forge with people in this country. Each of the films has a fairly difficult to remember title featuring Japanese proper names and are usually packaged in our country under the more helpful appellations of Samurai I, Samurai II and Samurai III. As someone who tends to like long books and has begun to appreciate the advantages of longer BBC-type adaptations of literature, the epic dimension of the story, where we know when we begin that, like life itself, we will be ending somewhere more or less unrecognizable and very far away, appeals to me. Whether it is the nature of the terrain of that country or the Japanese people, or the interaction of the two in the artistic mind, Japanese filmmakers are the masters of creating tranquility, or at least the impression of it, in scenes set outdoors, even if a head is momentarily to be chopped off in the midst of it, and this film is especially reassuring and beautiful in that regard. The most interesting part of the film is that Mifune s great rival (he is the Samurai of course), played by the enigmatic and very appealing actor Koji Tsuruta, who was also apparently a famous singer, is a worthy man in every way who has great admiration for the Samurai, who accepts and understands that his superior abilities require him to seek out and engage in what seem to lesser men unnecessarily dangerous and brutal contests with his peers if he is to attain fullness as a man. This is a difficult concept and attitude to convey if it is not somehow embodied in one s own person; this ethos however is one of the more important currents running through all these films, that I can see.

Here is the Wikipedia article on Toshiro Mifune. I had no idea he was in so many American productions in his later years.