Self-Made Men: The Gendai-geki of Kurosawa and Mifune
by Chris Fujiwara
(Originally published by The Criterion Collection)
Early in Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog (1949), a thriller that the director makes into a rich exercise in style, Toshiro Mifune's green cop, Murakami, runs after the man he thinks has stolen his gun. He finds himself at a crossroads, confused, desperate, turning one way, then another. It's an emblematic moment for the actor, who would serve Kurosawa best when miming the anguish of a man who doesn't know which way to turn.
In the gendai-geki (films about contemporary life) they made together, Kurosawa used Mifune to represent individualism in crisis. Through Mifune, Kurosawa challenges individualism as a basis for action.
For Mifune's characters act. Their decisiveness and tenaciousness set them apart from the other characters in the films. In Stray Dog, Murakami is determined to get his gun back no matter what, even though all the other policemen in the film advise him to forget it. In the stunning I Live in Fear (1955), Mifune plays Nakajima, a factory owner who becomes obsessed with the threat of nuclear destruction and resolves to take his family to Brazil to avoid the Bomb. His plan may be short-sighted and incoherent, but at least he, unlike everyone else in the film, refuses simply to submit: he insists on his human prerogative. In The Bad Sleep Well (1960), only Mifune's character (a man named Itakura who poses as a man named Nishi as part of a plan to avenge his father's death) fights against the corruption of a whole political system, a system whose enormous power is, as he says, both the cause and the effect of the fact that "everyone gives up."
Kurosawa thought of his gendai-geki as social criticism, addressing the problems of postwar Japan - a task close to his heart. He hoped that I Live in Fear (known in Japan as Record of a Living Being) would vindicate him before eternity. "As we worked on the script," he said, "we more and more felt that we were really making the kind of picture with which, after it was all over and the last judgment was upon us, we could stand up and account for our past lives by saying proudly: We made Record of a Living Being."
When the film turned out to be his biggest box-office failure, Kurosawa retreated to the past with three jidai-geki (period films) in a row - Throne of Blood (1957), The Lower Depths (1957), and The Hidden Fortress (1958) - a tactic similar to what Hitchcock, in the context of Hollywood, called "running for cover." Only after the financial success of The Hidden Fortress did Kurosawa permit himself to return to the present with The Bad Sleep Well, his first independent production. Kurosawa considered this film "a socially significant act." Some believe that Kurosawa did the largest part of his most personal and most interesting work in his gendai-geki - notably such masterpieces as Ikiru (1952; without Mifune) and High and Low (1963), featuring Mifune in one of his more restrained performances.
From the first of their films together, Drunken Angel (1948), Mifune's stylized aggressiveness defined Kurosawa's cinema. In this social melodrama, Mifune's violent gangster, Matsunaga, has a habit of lunging for the throat of his doctor (the superb Takashi Shimura, with whom Mifune was often teamed) and dreams of chasing after himself. Mifune's fierce stubbornness translates into mannerist patterns of stop-start movement and tense, electric postures. "I found that I could not control Mifune," Kurosawa said about his first experience with the actor. "When I saw this, I let him do as he wanted."
To offset Mifune's animalism, Kurosawa gave him a super-civilized side. Matsunaga is a clotheshorse, a bit of a dandy (never forgetting his daily perque of a fresh carnation for his lapel), a good dancer even drunk. With his white suit and jaunty white cap, Murakami in Stray Dog looks more like a man about town than a cop. His costume is the symbol of a moral fervor that enables him to lift himself out of poverty and despair.
Mifune's Kikuchiyo in Seven Samurai (1954) - a peasant who rises in class only to end up fighting for the peasants - is perhaps the most obvious case of a Kurosawa hero who internalizes social contradictions, but there is no major Kurosawa film that doesn't demand to be seen as a social drama, rather than merely a personal one. In seeking to escape destruction by going to Brazil, the hero of I Live in Fear at first recognizes only an obligation to his family, but he's forced to recognize that he's also responsible for the employees at his factory. Logically, Nakajima would have to go on to see that all people are responsible for one another, but madness spares him this realization.
In The Bad Sleep Well, Nishi/Itakura at first (that is, once we understand who he is and what he is doing - although this doesn't happen until 80 minutes into the film) appears to be acting from the purely personal motive of revenge. But it soon becomes apparent that his interests are universal. "I wanted to punish men who prey on people unable to fight back," he tells his accomplice.
In High and Low, shoe manufacturer Gondo (Mifune) moves from recognizing only his own interests to deciding that he must also act on behalf of his chauffeur, whose son has been kidnapped by mistake in place of his own son. This personal sacrifice makes Gondo a national hero.
Like other Mifune characters, Gondo is a symbolic figure. Kurosawa chooses his heroes for their ability to represent something universal. The tubercular gangster Matsunaga in Drunken Angel is the first of the symbolic figures Mifune created for Kurosawa - trapped between two ways of life, the brutal and the ethical. With Murakami in Stray Dog, the conflict is even more explicit: tempted by crime, he chose instead to become a policeman. But since Murakami remains close to the moral indifference of his origins, since he's still living through the early effects of his choice, and since he knows that he might have chosen differently, he finds the same difficulty in identifying with his social role of policeman that Kikuchiyo, in Seven Samurai, experiences in identifying with the role of samurai.
Such difficulties can be described in still larger terms, at the risk, perhaps, of some loss of clarity (but this is a risk to which Kurosawa's films, with their sweeping gestures, constantly tempt the viewer). Mifune's characters all experience their own humanity - "where they come from," to put it in terms that for Kurosawa could refer to class, genetics, anthropology, or the ethical sphere - as a source of conflict. "Can't afford to be sensitive in Homicide," Murakami is advised by a colleague. In Drunken Angel, Matsunaga's decision to revolt against nature by undergoing treatment for TB is an ethical decision. Improvement in one aspect of life entails improvement in all, and as soon as the gangster admits he's sick, he finds himself on a collision course with his vicious boss.
Similarly, Nishi/Itakura in The Bad Sleep Well would be better off if he were harder. "I'm not tough enough," he admits. "I can't hate enough.... It's hard to be evil." His love for his wife - a love which covers all the human bases, since it's part physical desire, part admiration for her goodness, and part pity for her disability - betrays him. The film I Live in Fear wouldn't exist if Nakajima wanted only to save himself from the H-bomb: his problem is that he cares, against their wishes, for his family. Gondo, too, is undone and redeemed by his consideration for others: forced to choose between completing the crucial business deal of his career and saving a boy's life, he makes the right choice - against his will, but also, Kurosawa makes us feel, inevitably.
Mifune's all-too-human characters are self-created. They claim the right to determine themselves. Matsunaga says he has no parents; his treatment for TB is a kind of rebirth (the doctor tells him to "sleep like a baby"). Mifune's other characters for Kurosawa are also self-made men: Murakami has willed himself into a socially useful life; the resentful Itakura turns into Nishi, an attentive and discreet secretary; Gondo has risen above his proletarian origins to become an executive. None of these characters is essentially good. (The only saint Mifune played for Kurosawa is the doctor in 1965's Red Beard.) As Kurosawa demonstrates again and again, people choose to be what they are.
Because the Mifune characters are so strong, selfish, and sure of themselves, their choice to act ethically always has great force in Kurosawa's films. The pathos of such a choice is sharpest in I Live in Fear when Nakajima, an egocentrist used to unquestioning obedience, is reduced to bowing before his children and his employees. Even for viewers who don't live in a society where bowing rituals are observed, Nakajima's self-abasement is shocking. And in High and Low, Gondo's decision to pay the ransom for his chauffeur's son is signalled simply by his sitting down on the floor to go to work on his briefcase, just a craftsman again. In these moments, it's as if Kurosawa were saying: "Look at this man. If even he acts ethically, then we all should."