Top Ranked Films of Akira Kurosawa

These are all the films of Japanese master Akira Kurosawa that made the top 1000 in our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls. He is tied for 5th with 11 ranked titles, and is 4th overall in total points, after Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Scorsese. He also has 3 titles in the top 100, and many cinephiles would argue that Ikiru is perhaps his finest film and also very close

Top Ranked Films from Japan

© William L. Sinclair
The top ranked films from Japan, based on our survey of internet polls. A total of 38 made the top 1000, up from 34 in 2009.


1. Seven Samurai, The [Kurosawa, Akira; 1954] #7 [photo top]
2. Rashomon (1950) Kurosawa, Akira #29 Japan
3. Ran (1985) Kurosawa, Akira #39 Japan-France
4. Tokyo Story (1953) Ozu, Yasujiro #76 Japan
5. Spirited Away (2001) Miyazaki, Hayao #78

Scandal (1950)

***
Country: Japan
Director: Akira Kurosawa

While clearing off my DVR last week, I watched this early film by Kurosawa, which I had recorded last spring. I wasn't exactly sure what to expect, knowing little beyond the fact that it stars two of Kurosawa's greatest actors, Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, each of whom made many movies with the director, and is about an artist who sues a gossip magazine for libel. It turned out to be not only one of the most unusual films by Kurosawa I've ever seen, but—and this was purely by accident, since I wasn't aware of it in advance—perhaps the oddest Christmas-themed movie I've ever come across.

The film stars the young Mifune as a pipe-smoking, motorcycle-riding artist. While out painting in the mountains, he encounters a concert singer (played by Yoshiko Yamaguchi, who was billed as Shirley Yamaguchi when she made House of Bamboo for Samuel Fuller a few years later) who has missed her bus and offers her a ride on his motorcycle to a nearby country inn. The two spend a chaste night at the inn in separate rooms. But two paparazzi who work for a scandal magazine called Amour spot the famous singer and sneak a picture of her and Mifune relaxing on the balcony of her room in their kimonos. The magazine publishes the photo and a wholly concocted story about the pair being caught spending a dirty weekend. Motivated partly by gallantry and partly by sheer stubbornness, the outraged artist is persuaded to sue the magazine after being visited by a shabby lawyer played by Takashi Shimura.

The second part of the film shifts the focus to Shimura, who pulls out all the stops in his extravagant performance as the lawyer. This is a man who at first appears to be a charmingly comic eccentric but is soon revealed to be a deeply flawed person, a man who gambles compulsively, drinks too much, is considered a washed-up failure and object of ridicule by others, and is consumed with self-loathing. Egged on in his gambling by the sleazy editor of Amour, he accumulates large debts then accepts money from the editor to pay his debts, in effect being bribed to lose the case. The lawyer also has a long-suffering wife and a teenaged daughter gravely ill with tuberculosis. The painter and singer become involved with the family and give the daughter a Christmas to remember while she dispenses optimistic platitudes like a bedridden Tiny Tim. You haven't lived until you've seen Mifune riding through the slums of postwar Tokyo with a fully decorated Christmas tree on the back of his motorcycle as "Jingle Bells" plays on the soundtrack. This sequence also contains Yamaguchi singing "Silent Night" to the daughter with Mifune accompanying her on a pump organ. Later that same night Mifune and Shimura visit a squalid dive called The Red Cat, where the two proceed to get rip-roaring drunk while the house combo plays "Buttons and Bows" and the drunken Shimura ends up leading the entire club in a maudlin rendition of "Auld Lang Syne."

The third part of the movie deals with the libel trial. Suborned by the editor of the magazine, Shimura is torn between the hold the editor has over him and his duty to his clients. Things look pretty bleak for Mifune and Yamaguchi, and the question becomes whether the lawyer will go through with his plans to lead the case to defeat or have a last-minute change of heart and reveal his unethical behavior to the court and ruin what is left of his reputation and career. To appreciate the ramifications of this dilemma fully—for both the lawyer and his clients—it's necessary to keep in mind the importance traditional Japanese culture places on saving face and the complete shame associated with dishonor.

David Thomson has written that Kurosawa is the Japanese director "most alert to Western art and American cinema in particular." One can certainly see the influence of American gangster movies and film noir in early Kurosawa films like Stray Dog and later ones like High and Low, and so closely do his well-known samurai movies resemble Westerns (his favorite movie was reportedly Stagecoach) that more than one has been remade as just that. But while watching Scandal I kept thinking of Frank Capra. Mifune's painter is as idealistic and headstrong, and in his way as naive, as Capra's Mr. Deeds and Mr. Smith. As the villain of the movie, the magazine editor is as heartless as Edward Arnold's newspaper publisher in Meet John Doe, or for that matter any of Capra's villains, a man driven by greed and the love of power and indifferent to the human cost of his actions. Kurosawa's view of the media is as negative as Capra's in several of his movies, especially Meet John Doe. The climactic trial is reminiscent of the one in Mr. Deeds, while the Christmas setting brings to mind It's a Wonderful Life. And the slow fall of Shimura as the lawyer is as poignant as George Bailey's descent into despair in It's a Wonderful Life.

While none of these things is unique to Capra, their presence together in one movie makes the similarity of Scandal to Capra's social comedies hard to overlook. It's almost as if Kurosawa sliced and diced several Frank Capra movies and threw in a pinch of A Christmas Carol for good measure. Kurosawa, however, did this with so little restraint that he makes Capra seem almost temperate in comparison. If you find Capra sentimental, you'll find Scandal downright mawkish. If you find Capra lacking in subtlety, you'll find Scandal positively overbearing. If you think Capra's heroes and heroines are conflicted, you'll find Shimura's lawyer a virtual martyr to weakness, self-pity, and hopelessness.

With its every element so overstated, Scandal has clear shortcomings that make it likely to be of greater interest to followers of the director than to the general viewer. Still, it is certainly a fascinating movie and unlike any other Kurosawa film I've seen. Vincent Canby called Scandal "a parody of Hollywood," but while watching the film, it never occurred to me for a moment that Kurosawa's intentions were anything but serious. He directs with confidence and professionalism, providing many imaginative visual touches, and parts of the film are quite affecting even if the level of pathos is often excessive.

No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)

***^½
Country: Japan
Director: Akira Kurosawa

Seeing this early film of Kurosawa recently was for me a revelation. I was immediately struck by how dissimilar it is to most of the later films I'm familiar with. Those later works are almost exclusively male-centered. The women in those movies not only are few in number, but also tend to have secondary roles and to lack the complexity of the male characters. Like his idol John Ford, the subjects that interested Kurosawa—honor, loyalty, betrayal and revenge, shrewdness of thought and strategy, physical prowess and the use of force to ensure that personal might and moral right prevail—are male preoccupations explored through problems faced and resolved by male characters. Yet according to David Thomson, this is not typical of classic Japanese cinema: "Despite the flourish and fame of Kurosawa, the core of Japanese cinema is to be found in family stories, wistful romances, and in attention paid to women as much as to men." What is so surprising about No Regrets for Our Youth is how closely it corresponds to Thomson's description of mainstream Japanese cinema, unlike the bulk of Kurosawa's work.

Like many of the films coming out of China in the last twenty years, No Regrets not only places its story in the context of recent historical events, but actually links its plot to those events, in itself unusual in a Kurosawa movie. The main character is a young woman, Yukie (Sestuko Hara), the daughter of a professor of law at Kyoto University when the movie opens in 1933. Professors and students at the university are embroiled in agitation against the suppression of academic freedom by the minister of education, specifically the suppression of their protests against the war-mongering of the government in the run-up to the invasion of Manchuria—a situation strongly reminiscent of the controversial protest movements at universities in this country in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, such as the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Yukie is torn between two suitors, Itokawa and Noge. Both of these young men begin as student rebels but later follow different paths. Noge drops out of school just before graduating, spends five years in jail because of his political dissent, and after his release becomes an anti-war writer, publisher, and activist. In contrast, Itokawa abandons his rebellion, remains in school, and after graduation becomes a government prosecutor and member of the establishment.

Yukie, raised in a very Westernized household, rejects the traditional, subservient role of Japanese women and spends her life searching for meaning. In a house filled with books and Western furniture, she wears Western clothing, eats with a knife and fork, and plays Russian piano music, expressing her inner turmoil by intense sessions at the piano playing "The Great Gate of Kiev" from Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. At one point she shocks the other young women in her flower arranging class by telling them she hates the arrangement of hers they are admiring because she despises having to follow the rigid rules they are taught, preferring to follow her own inspiration. She then impulsively destroys her arrangement by tearing it from its vase, ripping the flowers off their stalks, and dropping three flowers into a large bowl of water, where they float in beautiful isolation (an unconscious representation of Itokawa, Noge, and herself adrift?) in an image that would not seem out of place in a film by Ozu.

This is just the beginning of Yukie's journey of self-discovery. She rejects Itokawa's marriage proposal, leaves home and supports herself working at a series of menial secretarial jobs in Tokyo, reconnects with Noge, marries him, sees him arrested as a traitor literally on the eve of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, is herself interrogated as a subversive (the arrogant interrogator is played by Takashi Shimura, who worked in at least twenty of Kurosawa's films, becoming one of his main male actors, second only to Toshiro Mifune, and in Kurosawa's 1952 masterpiece Ikiru gave one of the great screen performances of all time), jailed, widowed, estranged from her family, and finally ends up spending the duration of World War II as a permanent uninvited guest of Noge's resentful peasant mother and father.

This is certainly the closest thing Kurosawa ever made to a "women's picture," and the amazing thing is how well he does it. No Regrets was only his sixth movie as director, yet already he seems in full command of both the Western techniques of cinematic storytelling and the brilliant way he had of pursuing theme through character. No Regrets may be about a young woman, but its sensibility is in no way feminine. By concentrating on Yukie's quest for meaning in her life—even the romantic complications of her life are an offshoot of this—Kurosawa avoids the sentimentality that traditionally devalues the genre, elevating the film to a sort of female bildungsroman—the chronicles of the ethical, emotional, and spiritual development of a young woman who defies her culture's veneration of conformity over self-expression.

The picture is beautifully framed by two scenes: an idyllic picnic at the beginning of the movie and a scene near the end where Yukie revisits the site of the picnic and sees a new generation of students doing the same things she and her friends did all those years ago, a poignant reminder of how much her life has changed and how much she has grown in the intervening years. Like Shimura's dying civil servant in Ikiru, Yukie ultimately comes to the realization that the key to finding meaning in her life is to free herself from her own self-concern.

Kurosawa is aided immensely by the casting of Setsuko Hara as Yukie. The intelligence and spirit she brings to the role—what Thomson calls "her outward modesty and inner strength"—make the character come alive. She was only in her mid-twenties when the film was made, yet she was already an expert movie actress. (She had been acting in films for ten years.) The expressiveness of her voice, the subtlety of her facial expressions and body language, the independence of thought and strength of character she projects are tremendously affecting, reminiscent of the controlled intensity of the young Katharine Hepburn but without the exaggerated mannerisms. The way she holds her head perfectly still, looking slightly down and straight ahead as another character speaks to her, and then at just the exactly judged moment lifts her head, turns it, and gazes wistfully at the speaker with those soulful eyes is just hypnotic. She carries the entire movie, and her amazing work here prefigures the great performances for Ozu in Late Spring, Tokyo Story, and Late Autumn.

In No Regrets for Our Youth, as in only a few of his films like the great Ikiru, Kurosawa uncharacteristically downplays his trademark visual grandeur and stylization to concentrate instead on the inner life of a character. The result is a sensitivity and depth of feeling not typically associated with Kurosawa.

Contemporary Kurosawa: The Bad Sleep Well and High and Low

The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) was one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. He first came to international prominence with his eleventh film, Rashomon (1950), which received both the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival and a special Oscar as the most outstanding foreign language film released in the U.S. in 1951. Kurosawa worked steadily in the 1950s and early 1960s; from 1965 on, his output slowed to about one movie every five years. Kurosawa seemed to be drawn to stories that take place in historical times, and when thinking of a typical Kurosawa movie, one most often thinks of a story set in feudal Japan, like The Seven Samurai (1954). He did, however, from time to time make films with contemporary settings and in the early 1960s made a pair of dark and thematically challenging thrillers set in contemporary Japan. Both are visually and dramatically striking works that show Kurosawa successfully applying both the technique and the thematic preoccupations of his historical films to modern plots.

The Bad Sleep Well (1960) concerns a huge construction company that develops real estate projects on land controlled by municipal governments. The company is a hierarchical organization of interlocking fealties not unlike the feudal clans and their samurai of Kurosawa's historical epics. The company acquires the rights to develop the properties by bribing corrupt government officials to manipulate the bidding process in its favor. The movie opens with a wedding—a long, elaborately staged sequence in which the daughter of the second-in-command of the corporation gets married to her father's personal assistant.

Several unexpected and dramatic things happen during the wedding. First, the police delay the beginning of the ceremony when they arrive and arrest a prominent director of the company for bribery and corruption. Then the bride, dressed in a traditional kimono, collapses on the way to the altar, and it is revealed that she is actually lame. Her brother ends up carrying her in her arms the rest of the way as Mendelssohn's Wedding March plays in the background.

At the banquet after the ceremony, an executive of the company makes a bizarre toast to the newlyweds that is actually a statement of his innocence in the developing scandal. The drunken brother of the bride, in his toast, threatens to kill the groom if he ever does anything to cause harm to his sister. When the wedding cake is wheeled out on a trolley, a second mystery cake appears at the same time. This cake is a replica of a large office building constructed by the company, a building that became the object of a scandal when a public official implicated in bribery committed suicide by jumping from the building. The window he jumped from is indicated on the cake by a small black flag. All the while, a large group of reporters, drawn by the arrest and the notoriety of the company, lounge about in the background and act as a chorus, commenting on the action and supplying expository details. Careful viewers will be aware of how skillfully and unobtrusively Kurosawa arrays these large groups of players in the frame and moves back-and-forth and among them.

The part of the bridegroom, Nishi, is played by the great Toshiro Mifune. Gradually it is revealed that the strange goings-on at the wedding are part of an elaborate revenge plot by Nishi, who, unknown to the others, is actually the son of the unjustly accused official who jumped from the window. He has changed his name, insinuated himself into the corporation, and married his boss's daughter as part of this elaborate scheme. Critics have noted that The Bad Sleep Well is based on Hamlet, and although the picture is not a faithful transliteration the way Throne of Blood (1957) is of Macbeth, it clearly uses many elements of Hamlet. Nishi's bride is an innocent pawn much like Ophelia. Nishi even manages to gain control of one of the company executives who is believed to have killed himself and stages eerie "ghost" scenes for another executive in an effort to persecute and unnerve him. And as in Hamlet, Nishi's machinations end up backfiring on him and bring about his downfall.

Although presented as a mystery thriller, the movie actually examines serious ethical issues, in much the same way Kurosawa's samurai action movies do. In The Bad Sleep Well Kurosawa explores the distinction between justice and revenge. He asks the viewer to judge how far one should go to exact retribution, and if a wronged person is justified in harming the innocent (here Nishi's bride, who actually is in love with him) to punish the guilty (her father and his associates). He also shows the conflict Nishi feels between his use of others as cat's paws and his dawning recognition that they too are human beings with feelings. Kurosawa doesn't really answer the questions he poses so much as examine the effect on Nishi and others of his obsessive need to get revenge and to erase the shame he feels has befallen his family.

Kurosawa returned to a contemporary setting in High and Low (1963), based on a novel by Ed McBain. From the moment it begins, it is apparent that this movie is something special. Behind the credits we see a leisurely montage of scenes of a bleak, deserted industrial landscape—factories, rail yards, and docks—while spooky theremin-dominated music that seems to belong in a science fiction film plays. Like The Bad Sleep Well, this movie also opens with an extended tour de force sequence. The entire first hour of the movie takes place in two rooms of what appears to be a penthouse apartment overlooking a harbor and docks. The apartment belongs to Kingo Gondo (again played by Toshiro Mifune), a director of, and major stockholder in, a large company that manufactures shoes. The movie opens with a meeting in Gondo's apartment of several company directors soliciting his support in an effort to gain control of the company from its founder by joining Gondo's shares in the company with theirs, giving the group a controlling interest.

Gondo refuses to cooperate in the scheme, giving the others the impression that one reason is loyalty to "the old man." Already Kurosawa has introduced the element of the struggle for power within a closed organization not unlike the feudal power structures of his samurai movies, as well as the elements of loyalty and conspiracy, again not unlike the subjects of many of his historical films. The other reason Gondo refuses to go along with the scheme is that he despises the group's plans to lower the quality of the company's product in order to increase profits. In one dramatic scene he takes one of the shoddily made shoes they plan to produce and rips it to pieces with his bare hands to show how poorly made it is.

After the others leave, we find that Gondo himself is scheming against them and plans to use all his financial assets to purchase enough stock to give him control of the company. The reasons for this are complex. He began as a worker on the floor of the shoe factory, but when he married well used his wife's dowry to buy stock in the company and engineer his rise to executive status and financial success. Within just a few minutes, Kurosawa has established Gondo as an aggressive and competitive man ("You have to attack or get attacked," he tells his young son, who is playing cowboys and Indians with the chauffeur's son) who nonetheless genuinely cares about the quality of his product, a man motivated equally by ambition and principle.

It is these two things—ambition and principle—that collide when the movie takes two completely unexpected turns just a few minutes after it opens. As Gondo is happily contemplating his business plans, he receives a telephone call telling him that his young son has been kidnapped and demanding a huge ransom that will wipe out his fortune. For Gondo there is no question that he will pay the ransom. Gondo contacts the police, who come to the apartment to await the kidnapper's further instructions. Then the movie takes another unexpected turn when Gondo's son turns up and it becomes clear that the chauffeur's son has been kidnapped by mistake. Gondo is adamant that he will not pay the ransom. His wife, however, does not agree. "Success isn't worth losing your humanity," she had earlier warned him. As he waits for the telephone call from the kidnapper, the stubborn Gondo, frustrated by his helplessness, wrestles with his conscience: Is it worth ruining himself financially to save the life of the son of a servant?

During this section of the movie Kurosawa makes brilliant use of the widescreen format to convey the claustrophobic tension of the situation and Gondo's isolation. The action is confined to the main room of Gondo's house. The police team and Gondo, along with his wife and chauffeur, are often arrayed across the screen in tableau fashion. In these scenes Gondo is shown separated from the others—often positioned apart from them in the foreground or the background, isolated from them on one side of the screen, and facing away from them in the opposite direction.

When Gondo finally makes his decision, it is the ethical one: He will pay the ransom and suffer the financial consequences. At this point, about an hour in, the movie shifts gears and becomes less an exploration of ethical conundrums and more a straightforward police procedural. Yet even these more action-oriented sections are handled brilliantly, with equal emphasis on character, realism, narrative excitement, and visual panache, an exemplary version of a familiar genre. The police briefings are reminiscent of those in Fritz Lang's M. One sequence in which the police follow the kidnapper to Dope Alley, where Tokyo's heroin addicts congregate, is so dreamlike that it wouldn't seem out of place in a Buñuel or David Lynch film. It is also in this section of the movie that we finally see Gondo's residence from the exterior. It is not a penthouse apartment at all, but rather an ultra-modern house standing alone on a high, barren hill overlooking the harbor.

This actually turns out to be key in the kidnapper's explanation of his motivation for his crimes when he is finally captured. (In the meantime he has coldly murdered three people.) The police had speculated from the beginning that because of the exorbitant amount of ransom demanded, this was a crime motivated by personal hatred, not financial gain. The kidnapper has never even met Gondo, though. His motive is pure and simple envy. When Gondo later visits him in jail, he explains how every day he sat in his dismal hovel on the docks and looked up to the great man's house looming on the hill above (the high and low of the title?), until all of his dissatisfaction became obsessively focused on Gondo. If Throne of Blood is Kurosawa's version of Macbeth, and The Bad Sleep Well his version of Hamlet (as 1985's Ran would be his version of King Lear), then perhaps High and Low is his version of Othello: The wealthy, self-made man who married into society becomes the object of the irrational hatred of a person who sets out to destroy him.

This version of Othello, however, has a happier ending. As in most of Kurosawa's movies the villain, driven by overpowering obsessions, ends up badly. But he does not succeed in destroying the victim of his obsessive hatred. The experience causes Gondo to re-examine his values, and instead of pursuing his power grab, which he is once again able to do, he decides to sell his shares, start over again, and found his own shoe factory. In the future he will be free and independent in more ways than one.

In High and Low Kurosawa redirects the conventions of the thriller-police procedural genre to his own preoccupations. The purpose of the movie is not just to solve the mystery, to reveal and clarify the meaning of the mystifying things that have been happening. Its true purpose is less to thrill—although it does this quite well, both narratively and cinematically—than to detail the effects of events on the people involved. In this way, even in modern genre films like this one and The Bad Sleep Well, Kurosawa is working in the tradition of the great humanist filmmakers like Jean Renoir, John Ford, and François Truffaut. For Kurosawa, as for those directors, all of whom were also visual masters and compelling storytellers, it is ultimately the people—the internal and external forces that drive their actions and the results of those actions on themselves and others—that are the most important thing in the movie.

Director Point Totals in Critics Top 1000

I totalled up all the films for each listing in the critics top 1000, and these are the resulting point totals, not that I agree with the results. I decided to go to 120 rather than 100 because of some of those just out of the 100, like Yimou, Cimino, Campion, Reifenstahl, Eastwood.
Photo courtesy of FanPix.com





Director Points
1.Hitchcock, Alfred - US