Product Description
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Years before Akira Kurosawa changed the face of cinema with such
iconic works as omon, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo, he made his
start in the Japanese film industry with four popular and
exceptional works, created while World War II was raging. All
gripping dramas, those rare early films—Sanshiro Sugata; The Most
Beautiful; Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two; and The Men Who Tread on
the Tiger’s Tail—are collected here, including a two-part martial
arts saga, a portrait of female volunteers helping the war
effort, and a kabuki-derived tale of deception. These captivating
films are a glorious introduction to a peerless career.
Sanshiro Sugata (Sugata Sanshiro): Kurosawa’s effortless debut is
based on a novel by Tsuneo Tomita about the rivalry between judo
and jujitsu. Starring Susumu Fujita as the title character,
Sanshiro Sugata is a dazzling martial-arts action tale, but it’s
also a moving story of moral education and enlightenment that’s
quintessential Kurosawa.
The Most Beautiful (Ichiban utsukushiku): This portrait of female
volunteer workers at an optics during World War II, on
location at the Nippon Kogaku factory, was created with a
patriotic agenda. Yet thanks to the director’s groundbreaking
semidocumentary approach to the material, The Most Beautiful is a
revealing look at Japanese women of the era that anticipates the
aesthetics of Japanese cinema’s postwar social realism.
Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two (Zoku Sugata Sanshiro): Kurosawa’s
first film was such a success that the studio pressured the
director into making a sequel. The result is a hugely
entertaining adventure, reuniting most of the major players from
the original and featuring a two-part narrative in which Sanshiro
first fights a pair of Americans and then finds himself the
target of a revenge mission undertaken by the brothers of the
original film’s villain.
The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (Tora no o wo fumu
otokotachi): The fourth film from Kurosawa is based on a sacred
twelfth-century incident in which the lord Yoshitsune, with the
help of a group of samurai, crossed enemy territory disguised as
a monk. The story was dramatized for centuries in Noh and kabuki
theater, and here it becomes one of the director’s most riveting
early films.
.com
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Some directing debuts are tentative and unformed, as though
searching for a voice--but other filmmakers have their signature
style from the get-go. Ample proof of the latter is given by The
First Films of Akira Kurosawa, a four-disc Eclipse set that
collects the quartet of movies that kicked off the master's
career. Any fan of Seven Samurai or Yojimbo would need all of 10
minutes' worth of the 1943 Sanshiro Sugata to recognize it as a
Kurosawa picture: the visual attack is already there, the dynamic
movement within the frame, the charged compositions, the feeling
for weather and outdoor locations. Even Kurosawa's ear for
ambient noise (wind or insects, for instance) is in place.
The story is a marvelous martial arts saga about a young
practitioner of judo who challenges the hidebound tradition of
jujitsu, a tale of action and humor. Because it was a big hit,
Kurosawa was forced to make a sequel, Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two.
Susumu Fujita (in retrospect, a sort of prototype for Kurosawa's
discovery of Toshiro Mifune) returns to his starring role from
the first film, and the sequel comes alive in the martial arts
scenes, including an eerie climactic battle in the snow. The
movie is marred by crude anti-American propaganda (Japan was
losing the war at the time) and also has the poorest print
quality of these four titles.
In between those films, Kurosawa was given an out-and-out
propaganda project, The Most Beautiful, which was meant to
promote worker productivity in the doomed war effort. The
setting, an optics factory staffed by young women, inspired
Kurosawa to take a documentary-like approach; seen today, the
film seems even more melancholy and heart than it probably
did at the time (when its message could be taken as a stoic call
to sacrifice). Not one of Kurosawa's important works, it
nevertheless played an important part in his life: he married
actress Yoko Yaguchi shortly after shooting.
As the war ended, Kurosawa The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's
Tail, based on a popular and oft-performed stage classic about a
group of 12th-century samurai trying to sneak through a guarded
ain pass by dressing as monks. Kurosawa expanded the central
situation and added the character of the nervous, talkative
porter (played by the antic comedian Kenichi Enomoto)--changes
that lift the material from a formal exercise into a living,
breathing vision of life. The print quality here is the best in
the set, even if the movie itself is limited by the studio-bound
shooting, thus robbing Kurosawa of his gift for locations. But
all four films were under difficult circumstances, and
Kurosawa still managed to put his eye and his spirit into each,
in unmistakable ways. While not the place to start an
appreciation of this towering figure, First Films is an exciting
revelation for fans. --Robert Horton