Rashomon (1950)

 "It's not as thougfh men are reasonable."

I call it the Citizen Kane factor. A film can be pretty much sublime yet the hype is such that it cannot be lived up to. Incredibly, this is not the case here, much as the treatment of rape and misogyny is ambiguous... but even there we have wiggle room.

We have three contrasting narratives surrounding a rape and murder, confusing and philosophically troubling our two main narrators, stunned and downcast by their experiences as the rain splashes symbolically. The direction, this being Kurosawa, is excellent. Suspense, unease and uncertainty are constantly with us, somewhat but not quite akin to the grammar of a horror film in the cinematography, camera movements and, not to be underemphasised, the music.

All three narrative arise from trestimonies to unseen judges, and we see all from a judge's point of view, explicitly made to judge for ourselves. All contradict. All, bizarrely, confess openly to the killing. The rape is, well, not really treated by mediaeval society as something that matters, although the film sort of accepts its effect, although the treatment is extremelt troubling. In one, the husband hates his wife, rejects her and calls her a whore after the rape, making him no better than the rapist and a total piece of ****. The male narrators talk of women "leading them on" and display troubling attitudes- and most of the inconsistent narratives give a troubling account of the woman accepting her rapist and insisting on "manly" fighting to the death between the two men. This is, to say the least, uncomfortable.

Yet this can, I suppose, be seen as the attitudes of unreliable and misigynistic narrators. But perhaps I do the film too much credit. This is Japan in 1950, in turn recreating a mediaeval Japan.

I can't deny, though, that this extraordinary exploration of the sliupperiness of truth, of human dishonesty and self-deception rings very true today, as the deluded and incredibly stupid supporters of would-be tyrant Trump continue to lie and lie and lie.

King Ghidorah the Three Headed Monster (1964)

"Is Jupiter in Africa?"

 This film is, of course, completely bonkers- the mere fact that it ends with Godzilla, Rodan and Mothra teaming up to defeat three headed alien beast King Ghidorah tells you that. But it never ceases to be entertaining, the model work is if anything better than ever and Ishiro Honda's usual cast of actors do a sterling job as ever.

The plot ain't half bizarre, though. They squeeze in a sub-plot about a princess from a fictional country chased by agent of the new tyrannical government (possible influence on Star Wars...?!), only for said princess to survive an exploding plane and have her body temporarily inhabited by the consciousness of one of the long dead precognitive inhabitants of Jupiter who were wiped out five millennia ago by the terrifying King Ghidorah. As you do.

Oh, and loads of meteorites land, one of which later hatches King Ghidorah himself. Was Quatermass II (presumably the film) an influence here?

We also have more stuff with Infant Island, more (thankfully no longer blacked up) "natives and those little fairy women, except that this culture that was so proud of its religion and culture in Mothra is now happy to be used to provide content for a Japanese light entertainment programme. Well then.

Arguably, perhaps, the four(!) monsters we have here don't get enough screen time, but the monster set pieces we do see are utterly splendid, and King Ghidorah himself is, relatively speaking, a triumph of both design and execution. This film is utterly, utterly B movie but, provided you're in the mood, it's fast moving and enormous fun.

Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

"You bastard. Have you already limited yourself to a woman's level of drinking?"

Time for a second film after last night's devastation, methinks. Brexit will happen, Dominic Cummings will be let loose on the Civil Service, and a dangerously revolutionary and post-truth sect of not-very-conservative "Tories"who have left Edmund Burke far behind are free to break as much stuff as they want for up to five years. We;re all going to die, so what would be more appropriate than Godzilla and an ankylosaurus fighting each other to death, by means of the awesome power of stop motion, and decimating Osaka in the process?

There are air raid shelters this time, and aeroplanes scrambling, but the echo of the War feels not quite so intense. The echoes of King Kong are, of course, just as strong.The magnificent scenes of stop motion action as Godzilla and the ankylosaurus destroy Osaka are just as awesome as anything in the last fim, although the plot is somewhat different, spending a surprising amount of time developing actual characters in what turns out to be a rather tragic love triangle.

It's all about Godzilla, though, even if this isn't literally the same individual; any number of nukes can, it seems, create any number of monsters. We even get a cameo from the first film's Professor, who again gets listened to respectfully as he speculates absurdly about things he couldn't possibly know.

The ankylosaurus may ultimately be disposed of rather early to avoid upstaging Godzilla, but this is another hugely enjoyable film.

Godzilla (1954)

"It's getting even closer, It looks like our doom!"

I'd never seen a Godzilla film in my forty-two years until now. Yes, I know: the shame. But all is remedied; our friend Becca has now ensured, for Christmas, that all but the most recent Godzilla and related films will be blogged over the coming months. That isn't to say I won't be blogging any other movies, of course, but expect Tokyo to suffer a lot in future blogs.

I don’t usually blog films on a school night, which is usually reserved for telly. But tonight I get to procrastinate and put off for another day the need to see the final episode of War of the Worlds.

So, Godzilla. It would spawn the most epic film franchise of all time but, in 1954, was just one film, obviously based on King Kong. It’s more than just that though. For one thing, this is a film of the Atomic Age, both thematically and when it was made- and nowhere was more Atomic Age than Japan, the only country ever to have been nuked in war. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see Godzilla, supposedly an old island mythical beast, having been changed and made invulnerable by radioactivity- which, by the rules of Atomic Age science fiction cinema, is magic and can do anything.

This is clearly a post-war society, though; when Godzilla rampages through Tokyo to utterly destroy it in those wonderful set pieces in the centre of the film, we get a reference to characters having to go to shelters “again”, and we also get a widow telling her children that they will soon join their father, the implication being that he died in the war. This is awkward, because on the one hand Imperial Japan was a deeply inhumane place guided by a truly evil ideology which has touched many of us- my Grandad Gordon fought in Burma and told me only the most child-friendly of the atrocities he saw, and it was obvious there were others. Let’s just say he never bought a Japanese car.

The people in Godzilla remember and refer to the war, though, and that’s interesting. Post-war Japan seems so very disconnected from its ugly predecessor but these people lived through it, and accepted the need to abandon aggressive nationalism and cruelty. Certainly, the society we see here is a civilised one- give or take the odd professor acting as an old fashioned patriarch with his daughter’s fiancé.

All this, and the very ‘50s angst about the abuse of nuclear science (with Serizawa’s oxygen destroyer weapon an obvious metaphor for other weapons of mass destruction- note that, before using it, he burns his notes, and his death is a suicide so the knowledge dies with him; I think the film’s stance on nukes is clear) make this feel like more than the straightforward ‘50s monster movie that it is at heart. That’s an interesting combination; a subtext with a film like this.

Fundamentally, though, never mind all that: it’s Godzilla, and he’s destroying Tokyo in awesome set piece scenes with truly excellent model work. The film is brilliantly structured to hold back suspense- Godzilla doesn’t appear until we’re 21 minutes in and he’s been truly built up as a threat. And there’s just enough character melodrama to get us to like the characters without trying to rival the monster as a source of drama.

Films in this genre don’t get much better than this. There’s a reason why this is a classic. But will the follow-ups be as good...?

The Hidden Fortress (1958)

"What you make of another's kindness is up to you."

Let's get the obvious comments about this being a blatant influence on Star Wars out of the way quickly, shall we? The directorial style, with the wipes; there's a princess, who gives out a medal at the end; Tahei and Matakishi are C-3PO and R2-D2, and their squabbling at the start of the film is awfully similar, as are all their early scenes. That's enough to be blatant, and I suspect the great Toshiro Mifune's General Matakishi is a big influence on Obi-Wan. Will that do?

But as an Akira Kurasawa film, shockingly only the second I've blogged although I saw a fair few in my pre-blogging days? Well, it's not his best; perhaps it lacks the thematic or aesthetic depths of his best work. But it is nevertheless awesomely made even if the script is odd; shorn of anything more than superficial themes of honour and vague spirituality, it contains Mifune being Mifune, an awesome duelling scene with lances on foot(!), and of course a comic chorus in the form of Tahei and Matakishi, who are rather interestingly foregrounded from the very start, the film being more or less their POV. They also, however, highlight the oddity of a film which is classily directed and made in a modern manner, with a new script, but set entirely within an early modern value system of feudalism, where peasants are simply rude mechanicals, crude and greedy as opposed to the noble behaviour of the posher characters.

It's a brilliant film for all the usual Kurosawa reasons, though, even if it probably would have ended up as one of his lesser-known works if not for George Lucas.

Throne of Blood (1957)

"Without ambition, a man is not a man."

I've been wanting to do a Kurosawa for ages. The only reason I haven't done one yet is because the DVDs are at a hard-to-get-at part of the cupboard. I'm going to make a concerted effort to start watching some of those back-of-the cupboard DVDs in the next few weeks, instead of just plonking them straight from the front pile. Honestly, the things I do for you, my readers…

This is a fairly straight remake of Macbeth with the obvious cultural adjustments, although of course we should remember that a film is a fully completed work, whereas a play script is just a script, so it's not a like-for-like comparison. This would have been just as extraordinarily, and would have had Akira Kurosawa's imprint stamped all over it, even if it had been a straight version of Shakespeare's script. But it isn't. It's very different. The characters are absolutely the same psychologically, but the means by which this is expressed is fascinatingly different.

Shakespeare's work is fundamentally about language, about expressing philosophicasl musings, psychological depths, humour and pretty much the whole world through the medium of words. What's fascinating about what Kurosawa has done here is that we have the opposite situation entirely; this film is to a large extent about the absence of language. There are many, many scenes which consist of long silences, characters communicating only (but very effectively) by facial expression. Characters are generally terse and inarticulate, and struggle to communicate with each other. The scene in which Washizu and Miki struggle to speak coherently about the prophecy they have just heard is highly revealing. The film even begins with a garbled series of reports by messengers, which is highly appropriate.

The scene where Miki welcomes Washizu into Cobweb Castle after his murder of Lord Tsuzuki  is fascinating: the two of them walk in silence, with Miki speaking only to briefly say that he will support Washizu because he will be able to defend the castle. It's left ambiguous whether he realises what Washizu has done but is supporting him for pragmatic reasons. The point is what's not said, the absence of language.

The exception to all this, of course, is the highly articulate, scheming Asaji, the only major female character. Making the Lady Macbeth figure the only articulate figure in the entire film (except, perhaps, for several examples of Kurosawa's signature use of peasants as a kind of Greek chorus) makes articulacy appear to be devious and feminine, whilst inarticulacy is made to look weak and masculine.

Asaji induces a sense of paranoia in Washizu, constantly persuading to act by insisting that others are conspiring against him, which is something of a change of emphasis from the source material. This is further entrenched by the many, many instances of bad omens, which intensify the sense of foreboding. There's a constant sense that something is going bto happen and this is deepened, I think, by Kuropsawa's decisions to keep the dramatic events- the battles and murders- firmly off-screen. For Shakespeare, keeping these scenes off-stage was a rather prosaic, practical necessity but for Kurosawea, I think, it's a way of delaying the pay-off until the end.  And Washizu's death scene, with the hail of arrows and some incredible facial acting from the legendary Toshiro Mifune, is the best thing ever.

As we'd expect, everything looks great, with lots of murky fog, a suitably labyrinthine forest and gnarled trees, and Kurasawa's trademark wipes that George Lucas loves so much. I enjoyed that a lot.