The Big Picture - 100 Years of Genius: The Toshiro Mifune Hall of Fame | The Big Picture

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

The Japanese superstar would have turned 100 years old this week, so for our 250th episode, Mifune's centenary is as good a time as we're ever going to get to celebrate his extraordinary career as a film actor. Sean is joined by Chris Ryan to walk through Mifune's life and work, including his iconic collaborations with director Akira Kurosawa, and analyze his mind-blowing physical and emotional power. They choose the actor's 10 essential performances and recommend the best hidden gems in his filmography. Hosts: Sean Fennessey Guest: Chris Ryan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It expires May 31st, 2020. Just redeem it at dcuniverse.com slash join. Join for a free seven-day trial. Again, visit dcuniverse.com slash join. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about the greatest movie actor of his generation. I'm not talking about Marlon Brando, and I'm not talking about James Dean or Montgomery Clift, not Sidney Poitier, not Marcello Mastroianni or Peter Sellers, not Max von Sydow or Jason Robards. I'm talking, of course, about the great Toshiro Mifune. The Japanese superstar would have turned 100 years old this week, and so for our 250th episode of The Big Picture, Mifune's centenary is as good a time as we're ever going to get

to celebrate his extraordinary career as a film actor. There may not be a more influential performer on America's cinematic superstars of the last half century than Mifune. He was stealth in crime dramas, exhilarating in action movies, explosive as the young thug, and harrowing as the tortured father. He played samurai and businessmen, kings and peasants, monsters and heroes. He was truly a one of one. Last week on The Big Picture, Amanda and I talked about a new generation of actors we're excited about. But here now to join me in talking about Mifune and to help construct a shrine to the man's titanic career is the old master, Chris Ryan. Hi, Chris. Hey, Sean. What's going on, man?

Chris, have you been spending your quarantine watching samurai movies like me? I have been, and I think it's fair to say that these will be among the greatest movies we will ever discuss on this podcast. I'm so happy to be talking with you about Mifune. I think you might have been one of the people who first nudged me on Throne of Blood, which is a movie that we're going to talk about here. And we're going to talk about Mifune's whole career and all the great films he made, especially his collaborations with Akira Kurosawa.

What made him such a fascinating figure, an amazing person to watch, an incredibly varied and talented guy, and also what he means now to movies, which I think is more than you might expect. You hear a name that is maybe not familiar to you like Mifune, if you're a regular listener to the show, you might be like, oh, these are old movies. These are black and white movies. Why do I have to watch this?

Why is this important i think people will be absolutely blown away to see how impactful and influential he is on what we see right now but when i say to shirma fune chris what do you what do you think of what do you what do you see in your mind modern male movie acting uh in a nutshell i mean is it as as important as brando and dean in a lot of ways in terms of the influence he's had. And if you have watched a movie in the last 70 years, you've seen his influence on male movie stars in almost any genre of movie from comedy to action to sci-fi fantasy to crime. And just to piggyback on something you just said there, Sean, I think sometimes these things, like if we were doing a different kind of podcast or if we were talking about somebody else, it might feel like homework. It might feel like we were taking you on a guided museum tour.

This is not homework. This is not archaeology. These are vibrant movies that are honestly like a monument to... When you sit through those academy award montages about the power of cinema and the language of movies this is what they're talking about these movies especially the ones he made with akira kurosawa the the 16 he made with them um are are as vibrant and relevant and exciting today as anything you will see on your screen what is the what's the signature performance in your mind? When you think of him, what is the movie that you first think of? So I think as a younger person, and I think that, you know, the one-on-one level of this

is definitely his samurai performances. And for me specifically Yojimbo, because I think that that combined the menace and the action with the comic uh the comic element which is is a huge part of his acting you know he was so influential on a lot of the 60s and 70s nameless uh tough guy actors like uh bronson and eastwood nameless in terms of some of the characters they played obviously they were iconic figures their own right but um one thing that i think mifune had that some of his acolytes didn't was this incredible sense of humor and incredible sense of physical comedy, where I would go as far to say that he's influential on Jim Carrey. He's influential on Robin Williams.

He's influential on Jim Belushi and John Candy and people who are more known for their physical comedy. It really never stops when you start talking about what kind of things he's shaped over the years. Yeah, that's something that jumped out to me too, revisiting these movies. Because as you said, you might look at them when you're a young cinephile and think that these are homework. And you might also be cowed by the idea of a movie like Seven Samurai, which we know is important. We've been told a million times it's one of the most important movies ever made. But we don't really even think about what that means. And if you think about a movie like The Magnificent Seven, which is more or less a remake

of Kurosawa's movie, it's not a very funny movie. And Seven Samurai isn't necessarily funny, but Mifune's performance is pretty hilarious and is almost like a Charlie Chaplin kind of performance. So physical, so expressive, so bound by glee in a very weird and perverse way. And obviously, a lot of these movies are very violent. And some of them are very sophisticated thematically about the complications of Japan in the post-war era in the late 40s and early 50s. And some of them are Shakespearean adaptations and iterations. But he is like a he's a hilarious figure. You know, he's dashing, but he's got such this incredible skill for physical comedy that it makes these movies a lot more fun to watch than you would originally think. Yeah. And also, I think we'll probably get into some other casually mentioned

some other great actor director pairings. But the thing that's so exciting about the Mifune-Kurosawa collaborations is these are two people sharpening and inventing and investigating a modern film language together. So at the same time where Mifune is kind of developing this new paradigm of masculine action film acting, Kurosawa is developing his own film language that would be so, so important for the rest of film history to come. Yeah. One of the best parts about these movies is what you get to go do after you've seen one,

what you get to go read, what analysis you get to go watch. There is an entire industry of YouTube video essay oriented around the films of Akira Kurosawa. There's so much there to dive into and to understand that the work that those two guys did together is like James Joyce at this point. You know, the level of interpretation and the level of kind of postdoctoral work that you can do on everything that they've made also makes it stand out in a unique way. And then some of that work is very humorless, but most of it really kind of understands what's so meaningful about these guys before we go any further i feel like i want to just set the stage a little bit for who mifune was and how he and kurosawa came together as is often the case with some of the great movie stars of our era i think of harrison ford a lot

when i think of mifune and what harrison ford Mifune. But very similarly with the way that Harrison Ford was a very young, handsome guy who was working as a carpenter. Mifune was a young guy who really wanted to be a photographer, who served in the Imperial Army in Japan during World War II as an aerial photographer. And after he got out of the war, got a gig as a photographer's assistant and on a lark, went to a talent search and was cast out of a talent search he's a very handsome guy obviously very physical very um strapping very imposing in a way but also very slick and dashing and kurosawa spotted him out of this talent search and two within two years after the war he started appearing in his films and they made 16 films together can i interrupt really quickly about that talent search? My favorite detail from that,

and there's so many great books you can check out. Emperor and the Wolf by Stuart Galbraith, I think the name is the great Kurosawa Mifune book. But one of the great tidbits about that was that at that talent spotting thing, the thing that Mifune did that was so notable is he scared the shit out of everybody in the room. He did this big raging kind of scene and then just dead ass stared at everyone who was supposedly judging this competition.

So I love that he was always himself even before he was himself. Yeah. And that explosiveness is essentially what becomes his trademark, even if it isn't the only card in his deck. It's funny, though, like when you look at these early films that they did together, and we'll talk about a couple of them in depth, but it's basically all there right away. He obviously becomes a more sophisticated actor over time.

And by the time you get to a movie like Yojimbo, you can see him doing all the shades and high and low and red beard and films like that in the 60s. But in the late 40s, in these films, he has that explosiveness. He has that charm. He has that sense of humor. He has that explosiveness. He has that charm. He has that sense of humor.

He has a pretty wide range for a fairly untrained actor. And, you know, this is obviously a Bill Simmons gimmick, but he really does remind me of like a Zion Williamson-esque figure who the first time you saw him, you were like, who is that? Why is he the only person that's able to play the sport that way? And it almost makes me wonder why more people can't be good at film acting because he has this completely ineffable quality that is so supercharged. I'm fascinated by him coming out of the shoot as an acting genius. Yeah. I mean, one of the weird things about a project like the one that you've laid out for us here is usually when

we're talking about actors uh we we spend a lot of time talking about the chronology of their filmography which obviously we will hear but one of the cool things i i experienced going through his work was a little bit of a chronological uh you know sense sense of like i don't really you know sometimes i'll watch high and low and then i'll watch High and Low, and then I'll go back to Stray Dog, and then I'll go ahead into something, a samurai movie from the mid-60s. And watching him in that way is really fascinating because you don't necessarily watch, oh, he's reacting to this previous role he did. In a lot of ways, he was this bridge from a contract studio worker to a sort of thespian uh you know art artiste and he did just a ton and ton and ton of work and you can find something interesting to

watch in almost every single performance yeah and one of the best things about looking at his career is you can use that a chronological style you're talking about because it's never really clear how old Mifune is. You know, starting in 1950 in the films in the late 40s, he's he's very he often plays a very slick young guy, very handsome guy. He's got this big swoop of black hair. You know, he's a ladies man usually. But as soon as we get past Stray Dog and we get into Rashomon in those films, he's either playing somebody who's 25 or 35 or even in some cases 55 and 65 he's always playing either above or below his age and you know some of that is makeup effects but some of it is just this incredible physical bearing that he has where he's able to you know in a movie like i live in fear oh yeah transform at the age

of like 36 into a 65 year old man. I hadn't watched I Live in Fear and it took me about 45 minutes before I was like, well, when's Mifune coming on? And I was like, that's the old guy. Oh my God. It's truly amazing what he's able to do in that way. And we like, I think you mentioned those kind of those montages we see at the Oscars. And we think about how the Oscars rewards performances. And it's always like, you know, the Daniel Day-Lewis style physical transformation, maybe a person with a disability, a person with a complex real life, and also somebody who can transform, somebody who can put on makeup and iconographic, he still is a person who can disappear inside of the biggest movie of the year that is made in Japan at that time. So let's just talk a little bit more about Kurosawa and Mifune. They made 16 movies, as we said, almost all of them for Toho Studios, which is sort of the

Warner Brothers of Japan in the 40s and 50s and 60s. And that's the same studio that made Godzilla and a number of other notable Japanese films. And they of set a template they're not the first two guys to decide we're going to make a lot of movies together and you know you're going to be my avatar in a way in all of these films you're going to be my chaos agent but without them I don't know if you get Alfred Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart in the same way. I don't know if you get Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Paul Belmondo. I don't know if you get Scorsese and De Niro or

Spike and Denzel. I think a lot of these guys, Spike and Denzel especially jumps out to me because Denzel seems to have a lot of Mifune in the palm of his hands. I would not be surprised to learn if he studied him. But you and I are always talking about these avatar figures, these host characters that filmmakers choose early on in their career. We've recently talked about what Soderbergh and Damon do

on the Contagion Pod and the way that he makes him his everyman every time. What do you think about the way that he just kind of put his finger on this guy at a very early age and said, you're in all my movies now? I'm by no means like a Toho scholar or a Japanese cinema historian in any way. But one thing that's jumped out at me in researching over the last week since we decided we were going to do this was in the same way that Mifune was a bridge from studio player to kind of iconoclastic and iconic star. Kawa like had a tremendous amount of pull at toho for a long time and i was reading you know you read things about like building entire villages at the foot of mount fuji and then just being like now the roofs aren't right and so tearing it down and

the people at toho being like yeah whatever you say so he had a certain amount of control within this studio system. And I think that, um, I think Mifune was in some ways like, uh, an extension of that control. Mifune said something about, um, Kurosawa that is pretty meaningful.

Um, you know, near to the end of his life after they had to kind of split apart. Uh, he said, I, I know I have never as an actor done anything that i am proud of other than with him which is a a big statement for somebody who appeared in some incredible movies with other japanese filmmakers and even some

american and english filmmakers you know he worked with um asako kobayashi and ken kenji mizuguchi and um konichi kawa and john frankenheimer Steven Spielberg. I mean, he really did work with some of the absolute masters of his generation. And the fact that these are the movies and the reason that the most of the movies we'll talk about here are these movies that they made together is for that reason. You can see that there is like a symbiosis between them. In Kurosawa's autobiography, he also said something that I feel like is really powerful about Mifune. I'll read that right now. Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world. It was above all the speed with which he expressed himself

that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need 10 feet of film to get across an impression. Mifune needed only three. The speed of his movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three movements to express. He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor. Now, it's funny when you go back and you listen to people talk about this. Martin Scorsese has talked about this. Mifune does something where it seems like the camera is on hyperspeed or 2x speed whenever he's on screen because of the way that he moves. He moves so much more quickly than a lot of the actors around him. And I think in some cases, you might think this is like scenery chewing or trying to blow somebody off the screen. And the

truth is, I think that's what it is. I think that like, I think I really love that. You know, like when I think of Denzel, I think of the same thing. Denzel being fearless about blowing Ethan Hawk off the screen in training day is what makes him an icon. It's not necessarily what makes him a generous scene partner per se, but what you want is somebody to captivate you. And he does it in part by, especially if you look at movies like Rashomon and Hidden Fortress, where he's moving a lot. He does it with that kind of quick twitch movement. It's one of my favorite things about him. The acting style of Mufuni and the Japanese actors is quite different from the English-speaking, European styles of acting.

It served me, the woman particularly, I thought was good. The Mufuni character, I might have felt, was a little exaggerated, but that's the music of that culture. A Japanese person will never see the film the same as a non-japanese person there's a reason why we don't have an underacting award on the rewatchables it's not that you and i don't like underacting it's just that we remember al pacino screaming give me all you got you we remember when somebody says look look here, look at me. And I know this is really ridiculous, but I remember very distinctly a story that Tina Fey told about watching Rachel McAdams

acting in Mean Girls and how McAdams would do stuff with her eyes where she would just flick her eyes at the camera. And Tina Fey was like, you just knew instantaneously that this person had movie acting chops, that they were going to be a movie star. And obviously, I'm not comparing Rachel McAdams' filmography to Tashira Mifune's, but there is a difference between acting on stage and acting for screen.

And there is a difference between understanding how to play to a camera or how to play to an audience that's in the dark watching you on a screen rather than watching you on a stage. And I think Mifune really, really had that. Yeah. So if we're talking about what made him such a special actor, the things I've noted here are, of course, that iconography and being a part of those major films in the first place gives you a leg up. If you're working with Kurosawa, you have a leg up. Plus, he's got this physical presence. He's got this body. He's got this ability to move his body he can slump down he can be stiff-backed he's got incredible physical training his sword play in these movies is incredible to watch and obviously

invents you know Star Wars and the Matrix and all of these things that we've gotten so obsessed with over the last 30 years as as film consumers his line readings are really clever. And really smart and so in control in a unique way. I love to hear him read dialogue and especially when you're

revisiting a movie like this and you're not as worried about following the story and you can just zero in on the way that he's interacting with other actors i find incredible and then it's that thing that you just said it's it's that face um if you listen to something like if you listen to wtf with mark maron when mark maron was going on his journey to figure out how to be a good actor when he was cast in j and in the aftermath of Glow. When he was working with Bob? Yes,

when he was working with Bob, he would talk all that. Whenever he interviewed an actor, he would say, what do you do with your face? How do you control your face? And all of them talk about that movie acting thing that you're talking about that differentiates it from screen acting. And whether it's Robert De Niro or somebody like Ethan Hawke or Paul Dano on that you're talking about that differentiates it from from screen acting and whether it's robert de niro or somebody like ethan hawke or paul dano on that show talk about how that is really the essence of film acting and when you look at these clips of mifune the sort of like the highlight reels you know him cackling maniacally in rashomon or him uh grimacing silently in yojimbo it's all face acting you know what i mean it's all the expressiveness and that's really his power. And that's part of the reason why he doesn't, he'll, he's not going to expire. You know, I think about, I like, I love subtle actors too, but I think I'm, I'm most attracted

to this, this kind of a person. Yeah. And you know, you're talking about his face. We should also talk about, and you mentioned his sword play, but we should mention his body. We should mention the way, even in his domestic dramas, even in his film noirs, even in his more subtle kind of work, he understood how to move his body within a frame, probably because he worked very often with one of the great filmmakers who's ever stepped behind a camera. But when you watch Bad Sleep Well or High and Low, and you see him kind of dominating rooms and understanding just blocking, you can watch it on that technical level and you can marvel at the way Gondo kind of moves up and down stairs

and goes across to a drink cart and then glowers at these three other executives that are just sort of peons to him. And that kind of understanding, it's the same thing he does in Yojimbo or Throne of Blood or Hidden Fortress, where he knows how to dominate a field of battle. Yeah, I made a Zion Williamson comparison. I think it's also similar to kind of Shaq in the late 90s, where it was like, what are you going to do? Like, you can't guard this person. You just have to let him dunk on you. If you watch High and Low, the movie is designed for the first hour for him to just dunk on everybody. He's so in the center of the frame and so commanding that you can't take your eyes off of him. You know, his influence, you mentioned it earlier

with that kind of that gruff stoicism that he brought to some of those parts. And you talked about Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson. And I think Steve McQueen kind of falls into that category, too. And I think that's where people's mind automatically goes in terms of his influence, because the man with no name and the Sergio Leone trilogy with Eastwood is obviously very closely modeled on the Yojimbo character. Yeah. But I feel like there are all of these other actors with all of these other signature attributes who would be lost without him.

You know, you mentioned Jim Carrey. I feel like that's completely true. I feel like a lot of the comic pratfall actors of their time owe him a lot. I also feel like, obviously, figures like Bruce Lee or early 2000s Russell Crowe

or right now Michael B. Jordan, you know, the people who come on screen and their bodies are as important as the way that they say their lines. Also, I mentioned Denzel, and I feel like the explosiveness that Denzel has, or Sean Penn, or Al Pacino. You know, you know a little bit about

the way that Al Pacino can just blow his top in a hot second. And this is the same thing with Mifune. In the movies, the movie will be rolling along calmly. It'll be a it'll be a period drama and everything will seem normal and then all of a sudden bang he'll just he'll flip and that switch flip is such a skill and then the last thing that I feel like is a little bit underrated about him is the archetype of like the swashbuckling sarcastic asshole

that's probably the number one thing that i don't think he gets enough credit for and that kurosawa doesn't get enough credit for for sort of shaping but that that harrison ford that bruce willis kind of persona that is so pervasive now and has been morphed george clooney yeah george clooney and now has become like the marvel movie archetype is like chris pratt and and bradley cooper Pratt and Bradley Cooper and, you know, that generation of actor, you know, especially Ryan Reynolds, I feel like is doing a lot. Chris Evans, like there is no Chris Evans in Knives Out without Mufuda. You know what I mean? Like the way he's just like he's freebasing the screen right in that movie.

Yes, that's exactly right. And it's amazing to think that somebody could be as influential on Clint Eastwood and Bruce Lee as they are on Bruce Willis and Denzel Washington. And it's probably the signature reason why I wanted to do this. As far as where to watch. So, you know, I've probably I think I revisited 13 of his films this week. He made well over 100 movies. Mifune was incredibly prolific and Toho in the 50s and 60s was incredibly prolific. I would recommend a lot of

movies that he made without Kurosawa. We'll talk about a couple of them here, but the heart of his filmography is pretty much on the Criterion channel right now. For his 100th birthday, they put together a package. Many of those films are in their long-term collection. I believe every single film that he made with Kurosawa is in there right now,

including some of the lesser known stuff. Like I mentioned, I live in fear and scandal and films like that, the lower depths. Some stuff we won't talk about as much here. But if you're looking to have a film festival this weekend, if you're looking to kill time, like I don't know if there is a single collection of movies that I would recommend over this.

Like I don't, I'm trying to put my finger on if there is like a, if you want to understand Star Wars, if you want to understand Indiana Jones, if you want to understand Clint Eastwood, if you want to understand Marvel, watch these movies. Can I go a step further and say, if you want to understand Clint Eastwood, if you want to understand Marvel, watch these movies. Can I go a step further and say, if you want to understand Ridley Scott or

Uncut Gems, if you watch Stray Dog and you don't see Uncut Gems in there, if you watch Throne of Blood and don't see Ridley Scott and Denis Villeneuve in there, the level of influence extends way beyond Spaghetti Westerns and star Wars is, and in some, in most cases, I would say go toe to toe with the best version of whatever the movie is they're doing. So you watch high and low, I'll put high and low up against any urban noir you got.

You know what I mean? I'll put, I'll, I'll put throne of blood up against any, um, Baroque, you know, visually sumptuous action movie that you got. It's unbelievable. I'm looking forward to talking about those movies more in depth with you, Chris.

But first, let's take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor. Today's episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Masterclass. Masterclass lets you learn from the best with exclusive access to online classes taught by masters of their craft. For example, while quarantined, you can listen to how to make films by watching Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee. Or if you're like me and you are obsessed with poker, you can check out, you know, kid poker Daniel Negreanu's tips for the game. With over 80 different instructors across tons of categories, there is literally something for everyone. The Masterclass app is accessible on your phone, web, Apple TV, or Amazon Fire TV. Each class is broken out into individual lessons and downloadable materials, all of which you can explore at your own pace. Lessons are about 10

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I want to choose the 10 movies that are most essential to understanding Mifune. Now, I've seen all these movies. I'm going to recommend, I think we have a hard five, a soft five, and then a softest five.

So it's ultimately going to be like a 15. There's got to be an outer ring in this Hall of Fame. Then there's got to be an outer ring in this Hall of Fame. Then there's got to be an inner ring. Yeah. Do you want to go from the center of the earth out or the center of the earth in? Well, we're going to go chronologically.

So going chronologically, we'll get a chance to say, is this on the inner ring, the outer ring, or is it just, you know, is it not quite at 75% in the voting? You know, is it stuck in that unfortunate, I don't know, who's on the outside looking in in the voting. You know, as it's stuck in that unfortunate, I don't know, who's on the outside looking in in the Baseball Hall of Fame right now that just can't get that number up? Sammy Sosa?

Well, mostly guys who are doing PEDs. It's very sad. Very, very sad. Let's start with where Kurosawa and Mifune come together. It's Drunken Angel, 1948. Fascinating movie. A movie that's considered the first post-war modern Yakuza movie. It's fascinating also that their career did not

start in the samurai format. It started in a crime movie. And if you look at a lot of the 70s movies that came in the aftermath of something like this, you can see a heavy, heavy influence. Sort of like comboing those Humphrey Bogart noir films and gangster films with this movie um you know one story about the make the the casting the film while looking for an actor to play Matsunaga Kurosawa was told by one of the casting directors about Mifune who was auditioning for another movie where he had to play an angry character Kurosawa watched Mifune do this audition and was so amazed by Mifune that he cast him as Matsunaga. Kurosawa was impressed by the athletic agility and quote cat-like moves of Mifune which also had bearing in his casting which is kind of fascinating because he does burst into this movie like a hot flame while also

playing basically a sickly drunken tuberculosis ridden guy who's at the end of his rope. It's a really interesting introduction to him which is I think this is where most people first saw him um it also features the first team up with takashi shimura who is a veteran japanese actor who appeared in 21 of kurosawa's movies he's the guy with the sort of the long face and the wide mouth that you'll see in a lot of films often playing a kind of sage-like figure he plays a sage-likelike doctor to Mifune's angry young gangster. Mifune and Shimura also starred together in 20 films together. And let's just get a little bit of audio

on what it's like to hear these two interacting for the first time in this movie. So Chris, when you think of Drunken Angel, what do you think of? I start to think about one of the coolest things about Mifune and Kurosawa's movies, which is the dialogue that they are having with Western art and with the sort of history of literature and culture and the way in which they're interpreting pulpy 30s detective fiction, the way that they're interpreting Warner Brothers muscular 30s and 40s gangster movies and translating them into the Japanese idiom. Yeah, it's a really fascinating aspect of the relationship that Kurosawa and Mifune have to the Western world. One of the reasons why Western actors and filmmakers respond to these

movies so much is because it's obvious that Kurosawa is watching a lot of American films. You can feel the influence and this cause and effect relationship between them. The way that watching, you know, something like The Petrified Forest for Kurosawa and the way that he interprets a movie like The Petrified Forest into his work. And then the way that somebody like George Lucas sees Kurosawa films,

the way that he interprets them. And then the way that somebody sees Star Wars and interprets, you know, Lucas's vision of Kurosawa is this incredible daisy chain of influence through movie history that is so fascinating. And there are a lot of the Japanese filmmakers that were contemporaneous to Kurosawa, you know, Mizuguchi. And I mentioned Kobayashi and Ichikawa and a number of these filmmakers have a very different tonal and temporal pace to their movies. Yeah, in some ways, I think Japanese cinema can be... You have to basically, if you're coming at it from a distinctly Western and even more

specifically like a Hollywood or even American independent cinema background, it can take a couple of at-bats before you get used to the picture's speed when it comes to Japanese cinema from this era. Yeah, it'd be interesting. I'd be curious to hear from listeners what more recommendations they want after we go through some of this stuff because there are really two avenues that you can take, especially when you think about a movie

like Drunken Angel or Stray Dog, which are these more modernized stories. On the one hand, you can obviously go to some of the samurai movies that Mifune made, which we'll talk about here without Kurosawa. But also, if you wanted to get into Ozu, I would say that you should probably reorient your brain and reset your expectations for the kind of movie experience you're going to have, which is much more meditative, which is much more domesticated, which is more obsessed with the interpersonal relationships of families that are much more class conscious, I would say, than a lot of

the movies that these two guys made together. Very observational. Absolutely. They're not plot driven at all. A lot of these movies are hugely plot driven or they are these like orgiastic explosions of action. And, you know, Stray Dog is really interesting. Like, I feel like Drunken Angel to me is on the outer ring and Stray Dog to me goes on the inner ring.

Would you agree with that? Stray Dog is a fucking incredible movie. Yeah. First of all, one of the great all-time summer movies. And Curse Hall actually hits summer a few times. I think A Living Fear is set during the summer. But the way

in which he... You can watch a black and white movie. When was Stray Dog? 49 or was it in the 50s? 49. So 49. You can watch a movie from Japan in 1949 and it feels like it's up there with Do the Right Thing, Dazed and confused

like some great great summer films where you know a guy stepping on a packed dirt lot and the plumes of dust that come up and you're like oh god I bet it's so fucking hot there and like everybody's just always sweating

they're trapped on buses and it's just got one of those absolutely firecracker held in a closed fist plots of cop gets his gun stolen and it's just off to the races from there. It's an amazing setup. It's very Freudian. A young rookie cop loses his gun. It's easy to draw some conclusions there. Also, in many ways, and this has been cited over and over again, if you read about Stray

Dog, but this movie basically invents the older cop, younger cop team up movie, which is such an American formulation. You know, if you look at movies like Lethal Weapon, like that is the whole that is the entire construction of the cop movie in the in the late 80s and early 90s. This is the first time that a movie like this really settled on that and and and modernized it and formalized it. You mentioned The Heat in Japan. It's one of the most sophisticated movies about what happened to Japan, especially urban areas in Japan after the war and the way that there is an enormous amount of poverty, the way that the police force interacts with the civilians in the country, the way that crime proliferated, but also the way that crime was battled at that time.

And also the way that people sought to pursue their careers. Like if you look at what Mifune is doing in this movie, it's very, very different from almost any other performance. He has no power and he is completely denuded. Like he is so desperate throughout this movie. And it's very unlike anything else that you'll see him do. Maybe with the rare exception of Throne of Blood, even though he is a kind of a regal warrior in that movie but the the desperation and the sadness and the fear that drives him throughout this movie and again he's teamed up with takashi shimura who plays that older cop and the interplay that they have is incredible i would recommend this movie to anybody who likes movies that have cops in them it's it's based on an ed mcbain novel uh andain novel, and it won't be the last time

that American crime fiction has a huge influence on Kurosawa. I would also say that what Sean's saying about post-war Japan, not unlike... Kurosawa puts those themes forward in a very subtle way. They're backgrounded.

There was a great moment early in the film where Mifune's character is kind of apologizing to his superior and the superior's like, we're not in the army. You don't have to call me sir. It's left at that but you get so much about what was happening in Japan at the time and the

same thing goes for the way that Mifune acts because he's not... I don't know. Everything for him, it's like this calibration of what am I going to put forward in this calibration of what am I going to put forward in the foreground and what am I going to leave in the background for people to watch in depth. So we get these early noir-ish crime movies to start out between Kurosawa and Mifune. And then an interesting transition happens. Basically, they decide to make morality plays together.

And Kurosawa gets a little bit more interested in Japanese history, in Edo Japan, in looking at the samurai culture, and looking at, again, the way that crime intersects with moral choice and ethical choice. And you get a movie called Scandal, which is a solid film. And then you get Rashomon, which is probably one of the 10 films they show you in your film 101 literacy class. It's basically become a verb. Yes. It is like totally idiomatic. Now, whenever you see Rashomon, you know that that means a story is being told from three or four or five perspectives. And there are little subtle details that change the outcome in each of those

perspectives. And, you know, I think the thing that with Rashomon that we see now is we think that there is an objective truth at the end of a Rashomonic story. But what's so good about this movie is that there is not. There is no, there's nothing objective. There is nothing finalized in the way that the story is told. If anybody hasn't seen Rashomon, it is absolutely going to be in the inner ring. It's one of the most important movies ever made. It's fascinating. It's not of the most important movies ever made. It's fascinating. It's not necessarily the most fun movie ever made. It essentially concerns the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife.

And the way that that story is told is fascinating. The contradicting perspectives are useful. To me, what's important to this conversation is all of that cat-like description that you get from Mifune is at large here. The work with the actors and the visual power go hand in hand because they feed each other. Kurosawa's relationships with his actors in general, and with Mifune in particular, were really at the core of what was so special about Rashomon. Mifune's performance is layered and complex. I understand, of course, that he studied the movements of lions in the wild when he was preparing for the picture, and he's like a caged

animal. This is like Mifune as caged lion, as Scorsese says. You know, he's literally studied the way that panthers and mountain lions would move to figure out how to play this bandit that he appears in as in this movie and again he's he's captivating he's super over the top it almost feels like um you know it's a it's more of a like a dark fable than it is any kind of realistic iteration of what might have happened at this time but yeah it's a it's a movie that like you kind of can't get away from if you're looking at movie history oh absolutely i mean like that that's the thing about the kurosawa um masterpieces is um i don't know i'm trying not to like disparage like nathaniel hawthorne or something this isn't like i have to read scarlet

letter to understand symbolism it's you will you will be blown away by these movies if you haven't seen them they are absolutely like so vital i completely agree so they they continue to make a couple of films like this um these morality plays are often adaptations you know or in the early 50s they do a version of dostoevsky's the idiot together um later in the 50s they do a version of maxim gorky's the lower depths which is kind of an interesting double feature if you are interested in Gorky's work and the genre noir version of The Lower Depths. I wouldn't say it's – The Lower Depths to me is probably the most well-known, least successful Kurosawa Mifune movie. And then they make Red Beard, which is the last film that they do together, which maybe we'll talk about as we get towards the end of that. And that kind of summarizes the the morality play version of this that being said i think all these movies in their own way use the the tentpole of morals

to figure out how to feel about the world yeah i think that um we've gone through this really interesting transition over the last 10 years uh since like 2008 which we've debated it and talked about so much about the sort of transition from superhero stories going from underground culture to mainstream culture, for lack of a better term. I mean, going from like sort of this sort of like, that's what nerds read. And then now it's become like the central text and the central mythology and the way we sort of interact with a lot of pop culture. It's really great and interesting to watch these samurai films because it's the perfect balance between a lot of care taken in telling the actual story that they're interested in,

and there's a lot of really amazing detail and a lot of really amazing attention paid to how to orchestrate these fights. But the philosophies and the subtext are very obvious to give you a lot of enjoyment, even if you're not maybe a quote unquote samurai guy. Would you, of these early films, the sort of first four or five years of them together, where would you tell people to start? I think I would probably start with Stray Dog and Rashomon because I think Stray Dog will feel the most modern to people. It will feel urban and recognizable if you live in a city. And if you've ever had a bad day in

that city, it'll just immediately jump. And if you like the Safdies, if you like Sidney Lumet, if you like early Scorsese, you'll see it and you'll just be like, wait a second, that's the camera move from Mean Streets. He did that in 1949? Yeah, it's very true. And I think we could do a whole other pot about Kurosawa and the way that he moves the camera, or as you mentioned, the heat in Stray Dog and the way that you can feel it and the way that nature is such a part of these stories. Robert Altman talks about the way that Kurosawa is the first filmmaker to ever shoot, turn a camera directly into the sun. Yeah.

There's this incredible sun dappled feeling that you get watching Rashomon where, you know, the film essentially takes place all in one forest and in a temple in the rain. And in the forest sequences, it's very sunny out. But because the trees are so high, they're covering so much of the landscape. You can only see these kind of glints of sunshine. And it's a purposeful metaphorical choice to say that we can only see so much of the light. We can only see so much of the truth.

Those are very small, subtle choices, but they're so intentional. It's one of the reasons why it's so fun to revisit these movies. Let's talk about the samurai movies. I think that there's there's five big important canonical historical samurai movies that these guys made together they're all different in their way we'll start with seven samurai seven samurai probably the most famous movie that they

made together probably the most celebrated samurai film of all time was released in 1954 it's also the movie upon which I would say every team-up movie ever made is drawing from it's extraordinary I think obviously I mentioned the Magnificent Seven and everybody knows that story but watch one sports movie watch the Mighty Ducks and tell me that it's not influenced by Seven Samurai. You know, watch it, watch a Robert Altman ensemble drama and tell me that it's not influenced by Seven Samurai. You know, I saw this movie a long time ago. It was probably the first film of theirs that I saw in a film class, maybe that or Rashomon. And I remember being a little

let down by it because it's very long. It is a little bit narratively obtuse. You know, there's just like there's a there's a mission, which is these guys come to this town that is over. It is under threat of bandits and they need protection. And it takes a long time to get us to where we need to go. It's only upon, you know, more reflection that I've seen the way that this movie basically invented an entire type of film. And I'm more and more impressed by it. But I will say, as I was doing my rewatch, I didn't rewatch Seven Samurai. I felt like I knew it better and I didn't need it as much. I don't know if you have as much of a similar relationship to it. I feel very similarly

for as influential as Kurosawa and Mifune's movies are, this is the one that I feel like has been copied almost to the point of the original fading a little bit for me. And while I enjoy it, it is, like you mentioned, it is quite long. And it's like you're waiting for things that you are so familiar with that it almost feels like, I would love to tell you this is like I waited all day to see the Mona Lisa and then saw a different part of the smile that no one's ever noticed before. But in kind of skimming through Seven Samurai for this, I wasn't captivated the way I was by a couple of the other Samurai films and a couple of the other films by these two. Yeah. As far as Mifune in particular in the movie, he plays-

We're in such jerk offs. We're just like, here's the thing about it. Is Seven Samurai overrated? I mean, that's also something that can happen when you have almost 70 years time between movies is you can discard the classics if you want to. If you wanted, you know, the movie that we're going to talk about right after this is the one that I think you and I

are probably the most obsessed with. And while it was considered an incredible achievement at the time, no one would have said even 40 years ago or 30 years ago that it's the more important movie than Seven Samurai. But these things change. You know, they evolve. Our perception of them does change. As far as Mifune, you know, he plays Kikuchiyo, which is, again, one of the most important figures in movie history. I think Han Solo is like right out of the Cuccio playbook in particular, the way that he is. It's unclear if he's, is he a samurai or is he a bandit? Is he a

peasant or is he a rebel? Where does he fit, you know, in the class system, in the historical Japanese order of authority and power? You know, why is he such such a seem like such a trickster why is he laughing all the time why is he why is he so clownish there's so much um complexity and confusion even though he is really the the centerpiece of the movie that he he introduces that like that chaos agent thing that we're talking about or you don't really know what he's going to do we don't even really fully understand why he's there but he's so important so if you're going to watch the movie and you're going to devote the three and a half hours to it that it deserves, keep a close eye on what Cucuccio means for movies in the future. Next movie we're

going to talk about is very important. It's called, it was by far my favorite rewatch. I probably haven't seen it in 10 years. It's called Throne of Blood. It was made in 1957. And it's functionally Macbeth. It's more or less an adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy with probably more spiritual influence than I would say ghostly influence. Obviously, Macbeth is very ghostly. And there's something about integrating that story into, you know, 16th century Japan that feels somehow different. The way that we understand the mythology and the religion of that nation versus the way that Shakespeare is writing about Scotland. But otherwise, the reason to watch this movie is manifold, I guess. But the things that jump out to me upon rewatching it are just the most incredible makeup, costuming, production design, and the way it's shot,

the way it's staged out of any of these films. You have these incredible battle sequences. You have these extraordinary temples. You have these amazing small interiors. You have this almost like geometric shooting style where every time a character's in the frame, they're often in the center of these shapes.

And the shapes that surround them are these kind of ominous figures that indicate what's happening with the characters. Mifune obviously plays the Macbeth style figure who kills his king and assumes the crown and is deeply influenced by his perhaps possessed. My wife, his evil wife, his evil wife. Um, Chris, why do you love throne of blood?

Um, I think this is one of the great films ever made. If you watch this movie, if you have not seen this, I, I almost, uh, I don't even think you're ready for it.

It is this incredible combination of almost German expressionism level extremity in its imagery. The acting, while very specific and obviously drawing a lot from

Japanese traditions, there are points of it that feel like you're watching Daniel Plainview when you're watching Mifune, when he's losing it, when he's truly going mad. It feels so raw and so angry. And honestly, it brings Shakespeare to life. I mean, to see someone who, and obviously Kurosawa made Ron, he worked, you know, he worked on Shakespeare to some extent. I think Bad Sleep Well

is based on Hamlet. It is. He sees things in between the lines of Shakespeare that bring it to life in a way that I've never seen anyone do otherwise. The imagery that he is seeing

on the margins of the text is mind blowing. I wish I had a better vocabulary for this movie, but I think that it's actually a testament to how unique and singular this film is that it's so hard to describe how amazing it is. I don't think there's any way to spoil Macbeth. If you went to school and got a high school degree you probably encountered Macbeth but I can't overstate how astonishing the end of this movie is I think it's my favorite movie ending of all time and the way that it's staged and the performance that Mifune gives is mind-boggling to me let's hear just a little bit of the the desperate wails of Toshiro Mifune at the end of Throne of Blood right now.

So that is a man being fired upon by hundreds of arrows, real arrows. And so Kurosawa, in the staging of the ending of this movie, when the Macbethian character at the center of it is officially turned against by his soldiers, is under assault from hundreds of arrows. And it's one of the craziest, most exhilarating, most terrifying things I've ever seen in a movie. We have not used the word horror movie yet to describe any of these films.

But this is as close as they get to a horror movie. It's so staggering. And the other thing that goes into this, and we've talked so much about Mifune's physicality, is he was kind of the original I do all my own stunts guy. You know, the fact that he is so clearly in the frame as the arrow, these tipped arrows are being fired at him. It's just amazing the way that he's able to simultaneously maintain his composure in the performance while also giving a performance in which it feels like his eyes are going to burst out of his head. It's shocking and terrifying.

And it gives me a chill the way that some of the best, you know, the best movie sequences that we talk about in this movie do. The way that the best of Pulp Fiction, the way that the best of Goodfellas, the way that some of the best movie sequences that we talk about in this movie do, the way that the best of Pulp Fiction, the way that the best of Goodfellas, the way that the best of our personal classics do. You talk about the final moments, I would just say that you're not going to have to wait long for this one to click. Because if you watch the opening frames of the fog rising on this sort of plains outside of a fortress, you're just going to be like, oh, that's where David Lynch got it. That's where the opening of There Will Be Blood comes from. This kind of understanding of a relationship between character and landscape, of landscape reflecting the interiority of

characters, and being able to squeeze this much drama in such an extreme way. Yeah, it's a film that will absolutely haunt you. I personally think it's in a class of two among his best works. Let's talk about The Hidden Fortress quickly. So The Hidden Fortress comes one year later after Throne of Blood, 1958. And it's a classic adventure movie. It's a Japanese jidai geki. It's a Japanese jidai gecki. It's got intrigue. It's got gold. It's got post-war battlefield sequences. It's got this confusing sense of who's on the side of right and who's on the side of wrong. It feels a lot like Treasure of the Sierra Madre meets Gunga Din to me. It has these big battles, but it also has these small characters. It's really, really important to movie history because if you know anything about Star Wars,

you know that this is the movie that George Lucas really closely modeled his film after, especially this idea that the movie should essentially be told through the eyes of the lowest characters on the chain. And the lowest characters in The Hidden Fortress are essentially these two peasants who want to join one of the armies,

but essentially arrive too late. And by the the time they arrive they're functionally captured because they're perceived to be the on the on the losing side of the war and from there they go on this adventure they discover some gold and then they encounter a guy a guy in the mountains and this guy is is is it's unclear what he is or what he's doing he's wearing like a a powerful unitard he looks like a professional wrestler you know he's got this massive build and he's got these cross straps across his chest and he's so imposing and so authoritarian and he is able to compel them to do exactly what he wants but we don't know who he is or what he's doing and it takes a long time for the film to kind of reveal itself and what it's about.

But you talked about the landscape in the last film. This is another movie, too. You know, if you look at some of the essays about some of the Kurosawa movies, you'll see that all of his movies have different shapes as indicators of story. And in this movie, it's triangles. Everywhere you look, there are triangles because it's a story about being on the bottom and trying to go to the top. And the Hidden Fortress, I think, is not necessarily one of the most successful of their collaborations. It's very well known. And you do get the

inspirations for Obi-Wan Kenobi. You do get the inspiration for Princess Leia. You do get the inspiration for Darth Vader in this movie. If you look at Tata Koro, the general who comes along near the end of the film, there's so much about Tadakoro and Darth Vader and the relationship between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi that is just lifted straight out of this film. It also features, I think, probably my favorite single choreographed action sequence. I don't know if you had a chance to revisit this one, Chris, but when the two peasants essentially escape the um the prison that they've been digging in for gold and there's a sort of race down the stairs as the army races up the stairs and all the peasants in their rebellion come down the stairs as just visually extraordinary

and you got to remember there's a movie that's only made in 1958 and it looks like it looks like they spent 10 million dollars on it it's just amazing but mifune in particular um it's i don't know what it is about those moments. It seems like Kubrick and Mifune specifically were really in a class of two when it came to doing artistic filmmaking with large groups of extras. There's all these famous Kurosawa shots

of him on a platform platform directing, you know, and with a megaphone and everything. And just the understanding of how to move large bodies of people through physical space is pretty incredible. It is. I would recommend The Hidden Fortress to me. It's on that outer ring that we're talking about. It's not quite on that level of Throne of Blood.

I'm interested to know what you think, where you think Yojimbo lives. Very high. Yojimbo, me too. So yojimbo comes three years after the hidden fortress it's probably one of the best known though i don't know if it's one of the most watched of their films the ironic thing about that is that it is the probably the most pop movie that they ever made together it's the movie that is the most fun it's the movie that is the most fun. It's the movie that is the most influential in your sort of like straightforward action movies of the 70s, 80s, and 90s in the United States. And it's got a lot of, it's got zingers.

You know, Mufune is really popping off in this movie. It feels like that John McClane diehard character is very much out of the U.S. Jimbo mold. This movie invents John Carpenter movies. It invents Kurt Russell. It invents Bruce Willis movies it invents kurt russell it invents bruce willis and it is grimy it is an absolute um a living collage of all these different influences the soundtrack is amazing because it's this like hybrid of like western japanese what like western the genre japanese uh sounds and then also like jazz um

while and even in the movie itself there seems to be this strange collision between uh medieval and modern with like the guy with the gun but then there's like the way that everybody's acting is either like very heightened and theatrical or very method and kind of like, hey, what do you want from me? But God, it's probably my second favorite samurai film that he made outside of Throne of Blood. So Inyojimbo, it's essentially a story about a ronin, a samurai who does not have a master or a leader or a mission of his own. And he's wandering the landscape, a true loner figure. And he arrives in this town much in the same way that, you know, a lone gunman would arrive in a small town in the expanding American West. And he doesn't show up to save anybody. He just

shows up to cause trouble. And he is a merchant of anarchy in this movie. And everything that he does is essentially to destroy the two evil clans that are at war in the middle of this town. You know, he has, as I said, a couple of really memorable lines. My favorite by far, I think my favorite line in all of these films is, I'll get paid for killing and this town is full of men who deserve to die. And if that doesn't sound like Charles Bronson to you, I don't know what does. And so when you look back at these sort of like moral terminators that come along, a lot of them are very self-serious. But I do like that in this movie, there is, I don't know, there's a wiliness to the Yojimbo character. It's almost punk rock. It almost like the performance could be like this movie could be, if you told me it was directed in 1983 by Alex Cox,

I'd be like, yeah, it makes sense. It's absolutely true. And I love what you said about the music, Chris. You know, this is another movie. Almost all of these movies have just extraordinary endings. Kurosawa like knows what to do with the last 10 minutes better than any director, I think, of all time. It's just so good. Yojimbo has this very famous you know iconic duel where he's the lone man and he's facing down this final he's final eight uh warriors and the soundtrack is essentially just a kind of skittish hi-hat as you're waiting for them to finally reach each other and you get this incredible moment where um the actor tatsuya nakadai pulls out the gun that you were referring to and it's that this vision of modernity it's like an amazing callback

to stray dog you know this pursuit of this lost gun and then what does the gun mean and what is what does technology mean when you're facing down a ronin who knows how to use a sword better than anybody there's all of these little like incredible thematic and intellectual touches in a movie that you don't need to worry about the thematic or intellectual touches to enjoy it, which is why I think it's probably still like one of the best loved of these films if you've had a chance to see it. Yeah, I would say if you have enjoyed an action movie in your life, you should watch Yojimbo. So Sanjuro comes a year later and it's essentially, it's functionally a sequel. It was a movie that was written

not with the Yojimbo character in mind, but because of the huge success and Yojimbo was a big, big hit. Because of the success of that movie, they functionally made a sequel a year later. It's a cool movie. It's a good movie. It's like 90 minutes.

It's very easy to watch. The thing that is most notable for me about it is that it kind of like invents the wild blood spurt spray that comes to dominate so much. It'll come as no surprise that I noted that as well. There's an amazing sequence that is essentially a face-to-face show before these two samurai do anything. They know they're going to fight. They know that one of them has to die.

But when and how and what the cadence of battle is, we just don't know. And we just sit there on our hands ready to chew our face off waiting for one of them to act and when Mifune finally acts and of course he has the fastest sword he slashes the samurai and this this this rain of blood shoots out of him which is something that you don't see in a lot of movies in the 50s and the 60s you know this is kind of a mind-blowing moment in movie history and like you can imagine what effect it had on sam peckinpah as he's preparing to make his great westerns this is i think right around um ride the high country and right you know five

or six years before he starts to work on The Wild Bunch. Yeah. And Mifune is right at the middle of it. He's right at the middle of, you know, there's no Kill Bill without this moment

in movie history. It's amazing. Yeah. And there's also no Indiana Jones shoots the guy with the sword in Raiders

without this moment where you're building and building and building and you think you're going to get like a 15 minute ballet back and forth and it's like, boom. I love the Insta kill.

I'll always love the Insta kill movie. Hey, it's Bill Simmons. I just wanted to make sure you were listening to podcasts on Spotify. Here's how you do it. First search for your favorite podcasts on Spotify zap. They have a library of over 750,000 pods at this point. So let's say you're searching for the rewatchables

or the Dave Chang show or the ringer NBA show. Once you find them, click on the follow button. That's how you subscribe. Then click on those letters near the top of the app that say podcasts. All the pods you're following will pop up separated by episodes, downloads and shows. Wait, it gets better. Spotify, you can adjust the speed of the pods to seven different speeds. 0.5 times is the slowest. I actually sound drunk at 0.5. You can do 0.8 times, 1.2 times, which is my favorite. Everyone sounds like they just had a good cup of coffee.

And then there's 1.5 times, 2 times. And if you're completely insane, 3 times. Anyway, Spotify's app connects directly to many of the best automobiles in the world. It even has a car play feature. That's pretty cool. Best of all, it's free. Download Spotify on any device and you're good to go. Should you be embarrassed that you're not listening to podcasts on Spotify?

Well, I don't want to app shame you. But the answer, unfortunately, is yes. Make the move. Listen to podcasts on spotify back to yours so those are that's the samurai films i think yojimbo and throne of blood without question are in the inner ring the next subcategory of mifune kurosawa collaborations they're the urban anxiety dramas now i mentioned to live in, which is essentially this terrifying movie about what happens when nuclear anxiety enters your life. And Mifune plays this older patriarch who's trying to move his family to South America

to escape the fear of nuclear destruction while living in Japan after the war. It's an interesting film. It's a very good performance. It, it, it seems like a, really a forebear for the next two that we're going to talk about. You know, I, it's not in that essential list though.

It's a very good performance by Mifune. The next two, particularly the bad sleep. Well, 1960 and then high and low in 1963, the bad sleep. Well, you pointed out as a bit of a Hamlet mashup.

I found that this was a, um, probably one of the most cynical movies I've ever seen in my life. Yeah. I think it's got a lot of... It is a Coen Brothers movie. You know, the movie I thought about the most when I was revisiting it last night was Parasite. Oh, interesting. Like the corporatist, capitalist insurgency can never be defeated like there isn't there's nothing you can

do to get around the fact that this system destroys people and you know it's very cold and i think kurosawa is obviously very interested in people who do terrible things and what that can mean for drama and what that can mean for storytelling this movie in particular which i think can be a tough sit at times and is a little bit confusing. The way it ends is staggering to me. It's just how cold and barren it is. I don't want to give away too much other than just to say that Mifune plays essentially a young guy who marries into a powerful family and marries the disabled daughter of the man he works for. He's essentially a secretary inside of the big public corporation. And he's got a keen eye for the corruption that happens inside the corporation.

And he makes some moves to try to upend that corruption. I think I'm reluctant to give away too much more of it. It's obviously, it feels like if I Live in Fear is a tonal tryout for High and Low, then The Bad Sleep Well is like a visual tryout in a way. And then High and Low is very important. I remember this being a movie that you and I clicked on really early in our friendship. Why is this movie so special to you? Well, so I think I may have misspoken and said that Stray Dog was the Ed McBain novel.

High and Low is the one that's based on an Ed McBain novel. I think because of both the structure of the film, Mifune's performance, and also the... When people talk about morality in movies and making moral choices,

I think it can sometimes feel pretty abstract. And somehow Mifune and Kurosawa present this impossible decision that a man has to make, which is essentially... I mean, should we set up the plot for this movie? Yeah, let's explain high and low so essentially it starts out uh as what seems like a drama about a shoe executive who is making a bid to essentially seize power inside of this shoe company and he we see that he's a man who is very obsessed with um what he perceives to be the right way to live and work he's very moral he's very righteous uh he has a code of honor not unlike some of the samurai figures that he played in the past and he's also pretty um aggressive and desirous of power you know you

can see he's got this complicated relationship to class and what and control and authority and this guy attempts to make a move to take over his company. And we think we're getting one kind of a movie. We think we're getting a bad sleep. Well, kind of a movie. And then very quickly, uh, we learned that there's been a kidnapping and we think originally that the

kidnapping is of his own son come to find out that his own son is safe, but his son's friend, who is the, uh, son of someone who works for him, his chauffeur is the one who was kidnapped. And it puts this man that Mifune plays in a very complex position

where he has to decide if he wants to pay the ransom on behalf of his chauffeur's son to bring this boy back and in doing so, threaten this life that he has built, this extraordinary amount of money that he has compiled,

the way that he has leveraged himself and his family over time to make these radical corporate decisions can all be frittered away if he decides to pay this ransom. The movie takes a lot of twists and turns from there, but it is the height of a moral dilemma film. It is fascinating to watch Mifune, especially through the first hour, think through his decisions. And the intensity and the pacing of the movie is so fascinating. Where to go from there, Chris?

I mean, so much of what Mifune does here is he has to obscure a lot of information from other characters and other actors that he's working with while he's on the screen. He has to go from a point where he thinks he's got the world entirely figured out and that he's on the screen. He has to go from a point where he thinks he's got the world entirely figured out and that he's three steps ahead of everyone and then finds out he's five steps behind where he wants to be. And it reminds me a lot, just to put it in terms of people will very easily understand it, it reminds me a lot of some of the great sort of prestige TV shows that we've come across in the last 10, 15 years where the initial sort of pitch might be mobster talks to therapist or chemistry teacher becomes meth dealer or something like that. But what you do is you take ordinary people and put them extraordinary situations. You put them under extraordinary pressure.

And that's where the drama comes from it's not necessarily will he or won't he pay this ransom as much as what does this scenario do to these characters and how do people who are watching start to see themselves in these characters and i think anybody who thinks of themselves as maybe an arrogant person will watch and just be like the the way in which mifune's character is sort of brought to heal by fate over the course of this movie is stunning um and i just don't think we have enough time to even get into how meticulously this film is directed the way in which it operates in a in it with a sense of geometric poetry of of breaking out rectangles and triangles and squares and the camera movements and a lot of people when they come to these movies they think

oh i think of kurosawa and mifune i think of seven samurai i think of of yojimbo i think of the the action movies this would be like if um i don't know if if how it would be like if hitchcock had also directed rio bravo i can't even understand how these movies all exist under the same artistic tent it's truly amazing i think you you basically can't have them without someone like mifune who has the kind of range that he has that we're talking about here. The fact that he can play this guy who I think he was 43 when he made this movie and maybe 42. And he's meant to be playing a guy who's clearly in his early 50s. And he says he's been working in the shoe business for 30 years. So he's essentially aged up 10 years. He's got a mustache. He doesn't look like he's looked like in any of his other films. You know, just three years earlier in The Bad Sleep Well, he's looked like in any of his other films you know it just three years earlier in the bad sleep well he's basically like a rising secretary inside of a corporate environment

and three years later he's playing the leader of that company basically it's amazing how he's able to transition so quickly in such a short period of time to a role like this and you know if you just read the synopsis of this movie you wouldn't be able to understand what's so powerful about it because it really is just like a people talking in rooms movie for the first 90 minutes. You know, it doesn't really have, it almost, it almost largely takes place in one room.

Yeah. It's like, it's almost like rope without the, the one-ers. I mean, you, you've get that feeling of moving within an apartment, like,

and I, it could be claustrophobic, but, uh, it's an awesome, incredibly observant drama about family and class and power within those two dynamics.

It's, yeah. And just like all these movies, it has an extraordinary final sequence that is confounding and fascinating. And it allows you to make decisions around what we think Kurosawa and the screenwriters and Mifune think about the nature of evil

and class and fate and all these things that are largely out of our control. Really like such a special movie. And I would recommend it to any, really any living human. Yeah, I mean, this one goes in a group of films,

like basically Touch of Evil, driver dog day just the great city dramas that i've ever seen you know and and i obviously i'm always going to kind of lean towards these these movies that bring in elements of crime just because i think when you when you inject crime into it you just heighten things just enough and And not unlike Mifune's performances where he gives that extra five or 6% on his fastball. That just makes you go who threw that? What, what is,

what was that? There was so much action on that pitch. And that's the same thing I feel about high and low where it's like, it is, you know, they've, they've remade this movie. This movie is not a,

a completely unfamiliar plot set up, but the way they do it is unreal. And it feels... If this movie came out tomorrow, you'd be like, wow, that was pretty great. So there's one more film that Mifune and Kurosawa make together.

It's called Red Beard. It comes out in 1965. And it's kind of shocking that it's their final film. It's similarly a kind of morality play. He plays a doctor. It's an interesting place for him to end because Shimura played a doctor in Drunken Angel,

the first film that they made together. And there's a bit of synchronicity in this and a bit of circular logic, which I love about it. It's not one of their most successful films, but it's very well made. And it does something also that I really love that feels like a closed loop, which is that it's really the first time that we see Mifune in a setting like this fighting with his hands and not with a sword. It's almost like he's fully stripped of all of his weapons and he has to make these moral choices.

I would say, you know, Redbeard and movies like The Bad Sleep Well are on that outer ring, high and low, obviously is in the inner ring ring it's one of the greatest films ever made 16 films in 18 years and then they just stop they just don't work together again and you know there's been a lot of writing about this you talked about the galbraith book and um you know they obviously have this kinetic relationship between the two of them it's funny to think about these two guys in the in the context of something like de niro and scorsese i i thought De Niro would never work with Scorsese again. It had been 25 years since he worked with him before the Irishman. And they reunited.

And it was fantastic. And they belong together. And I think one thing that we all lament is just not getting to see that circa 1989 return between Kurosawa and Mifune. Yeah, it's not getting to see Mifune and Ron, I think. Exactly. And, you know, Kurosawa, interestingly, really struggles as soon as he breaks ties with Mifune. He spends a decade basically making some films, but largely in the wind. You know, he attempted suicide, which is just a fascinating and upsetting thing to know.

And then he kind of bounced back 10 years later with Dersu Azala, which is a movie that he made in Russia in 1975. He won an Oscar for that movie. And then that leads to Ron and Kajimusha and his late classics, Dreams. I would recommend all of those movies as well. Also, many of them influenced by Shakespeare. And with a lot of these other figures, with Shimura and with Nakadai and all the other the actors that he worked with on all of his classics Mifune you know he goes in another direction you know he appeared in a film before the end of his relationship with Kurosawa called Grand Prix which is an amazing racing movie was a really cool John Frankenheimer movie set in the world of F1 that I rewatched in anticipation of Ford versus Ferrari. And it's a pretty interesting movie.

It's also very, very long. But the racing sequences are extraordinary. And Mifune essentially, again, playing way up in age, essentially plays Honda, the man who founded Honda Motor Company, and essentially hires James Garner to be his racer in F1. It's a really good performance. It's probably his, I don't know, would you say it's his best known American work? I would guess, right? I mean, I think I was kind of skimming through some of that stuff.

There's some movie where he fights Charles Bronson. That movie is called Red Son. Red Son, that's right. Red Son is included in the Criterion collection of Mifune movies. I would loosely recommend Red Son. What I would recommend you do is just watch the YouTube clips

of him whipping Charles Bronson's ass. Yeah, that's basically what I did. I like dialed up the criterion version. I was like, who am I kidding here? Yeah. I don't know if you need to watch that movie. There are a bunch of other movies that he made in English that I think are worth watching. Probably first among them is Hell in the Pacific, which is a two-hander that he made with Lee

Marvin with John Borman before John Borman made Deliverance. That is essentially about a Japanese soldier and an American soldier who get dragooned together on an island and how they live together. And it's almost like a wordless movie. It's almost like a silent film. And it's an incredible feat of that face and body acting that we're talking about. And Lee Marvin also could do his fair share of face and body acting. He's such an imposing and terrifying and fascinating presence. Hell in the Pacific is really good. It's hard to find. You probably have to pay for it on iTunes to watch it.

It's not streaming anywhere right now, but I would encourage people to check that out. And then he goes on in the late 70s and early 80s into becoming this sort of like, I don't know, he's like a figurine for Japanese history. He's in Shogun. Yeah, he gives a good performance in Shogun, the miniseries in 1980. He appears in 1941, Steven Spielberg's very famously maligned comedy.

Notable that Spielberg never really made a comedy again after 1941. And probably the most notable thing that happens to him in the 1970s is that he turns down the chance to play either Darth Vader or Obi-Wan Kenobi. George Lucas wanted him to play one of those roles and he said no. So would the Darth role have been in the helmet? I don't know. Yeah. Maybe they would have changed it.

Maybe Darth wouldn't have appeared in a helmet. It's unclear. But obviously, you know, his films are so influential and his vision of the samurai warrior is so influential on Lucas that it's an interesting what if. And, you know, just knowing what I know about Mifune in the sort of the latter days of his life and the way that he was forced to run a production company when he left working with Kurosawa and, you know, had to get into television and took on a lot of roles that he didn't want to take on.

I bet he would have appreciated some of those star wars residuals i'm sure in the latter days um i think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk just a little bit about some of the other movies that he made with some of the other filmmakers if people are looking to round out that sort of soft five the most interesting rewatch that i had uh as i was going back through his movies was the life of a haru which i mentioned, which is a Mizuguchi movie. And if you're just interested in Mifune, you can just watch the first 30 minutes of this movie because that's about as long as he lasts.

I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying that, but he plays a noble warrior. It's one of the first noble warriors he plays and he plays a romantic. He plays a man who, who sacrifices himself for love. And that's not really something that we see in any of his other films. Yeah. And also, I think that this is a movie where it's probably got, I'm sure somebody with like a more extensive knowledge can correct me, but I'm fairly sure that this is a film that

is most centric, most female centric, or at least concerned with like a, a woman's story that Bufuni is a very masculine actor, a very imposing actor. And obviously he's not on screen for that long, but if you were looking for an illustration of the sort of difference between, uh, Kurosawa and some of his contemporaries, you could do life of a horror while not like a fun watch is, is definitely a really illustrative of that.

It is a beautiful movie. There's a few other samurai movies that are pretty well known. If you're a fan of the Criterion Collection, you might already be familiar with The Sword of Doom or Samurai Rebellion. Those are both very good movies. The real discovery for me was three movies that I had never seen before, which I had read about for years and just never sat down to actually spend the time on. And that's Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy. Three films, particularly the first film, which I think is the best, Musashi Miyamoto, which is the sort of the titular key figure that Mifune plays in these movies. And you mentioned Ridley Scott earlier, Chris. I think if you're looking at these kind of grand stage stories, these movies are shot in Technicolor.

They're some of the only 50s Mifune performances that are in color. Yeah. When he's at the height of his physical prowess and when he is at this classical moment in his career. And he basically plays a roving warrior, somebody who is looking for a home, who is looking for safety, who is fighting what he perceives to be a good fight. These movies are a huge influence on Kill Bill. And the way that this trilogy is told is very similar to the way that The Bride story is told. They're funny, they're beautiful, they're weird. Looking for ways in which Musashi is going to wriggle out of whatever jam he's gotten himself into is like, it's like Scooby-Doo meets Seven Samurai. They're just

really fun. I think also Indiana Jones, which we've talked about a couple of times now, is clearly lifting a lot of stuff from Samurai Trilogy. I really want to encourage people to check those out if they are rounding out their Mifune syllabus. And you were saying to me, I actually haven't seen these films. Do you think that the kind of performance Mifune gives in these movies differs in a significant way from the ones he does in the Kurosawa films? I think they're just,

they're not very funny. They're very, very serious. They feel actually closer to like Lee Marvin performances in a way. And you can see that he is sort of hardening and stiff back and that wiliness isn't there as much, even though he's getting into a lot of trouble and really struggling. He just seems, he's very angry. And you can see that he is sort of hardening and stiff back and that wiliness isn't there as much,

even though he's getting into a lot of trouble and really struggling. He just seems, he's very angry. You know, he's very, uh, he's fearless. He doesn't have that playful quality that we've seen a lot of the movies,

but he also has just a little bit of, um, this sort of Gary Cooper intestinal fortitude. You know, there's a little bit of high noon and in some of these movies too. So I would encourage people to check those out. You know, uh, Mifune was a, was a playboy in his day and he liked, liked to drink and he liked women and he liked fast cars. And, um, he lived a kind of a fascinating life outside of the movies. But I think the thing that like I take

away obviously is what, what he's left behind. And, uh, you know, I think a lot of people, if they're going to check out the criterion collection might check out uh the film that is about him um the documentary that is made about him it's very short it's only an hour and 20 minutes I would encourage people to check it out if they just want to see him talking if they want to see him on screen if they want to see other people hopefully explaining why he's so great that are not you and I Chris um any any closing closing thoughts on them the mythic figure of toshiro mifune well should we should we give people like just as an exit ramp here like should we go through with the inner outer ring here because i feel like you and i are pretty agree in agreement that high and low and throne of blood are in a a group of

hallowed handle them with like the the white treatment. These are the Fabergé eggs of like world cinema history. So those are in like a group of two. And then for me, I have kind of like a secondary group of like Yojimbo, Bad Sleep Well, Seven Samurai. And actually, I think probably as a testament to what we're kind of all living through, I Live in Fear was pretty resonant when I rewatched it this last week. For you, what's in that second group? What's in that third group? So my first group would be a little bit different. I'll give you my first group.

So I would say chronologically, it goes Stray Dog, Rashomon, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, and High and Low. Those are the five that I think are representative of all of his colors that are some of the best films. Now, that obviously is ridiculous because it doesn't include Seven Samurai, but Seven Samurai wasn't the thing that spoke to me the most during this period. Don't apologize. I know, it's my podcast. I'm not apologizing.

I'm fearless like Mifune. The next five would probably be The Bad Sleep Well, I Live in Fear, The Hidden Fortress, Seven Samurai, and Drunken probably be the bad sleep. Well, I live in fear, the hidden fortress, seven samurai and drunken angel on the corner there. And then, as I said, samurai trilogy, I think people should check that out. I think people should look at the sort of doom and the life of a Haru. You know, if they want to watch 1941, they can, I can't say I'd recommend it. A lot, a lot of not funny Belushi, not ideal, but you know, this is like, this is truly

one of the extraordinary film careers that we're ever going to see. More influential, more fun, more fascinating, richer, deeper, weirder, more unpredictable than I think anybody that we've got right now, sad to say. And so

diverse in its offerings because if you are not a feudal Japanese samurai person like there's there's three or four other movies for you to check out that are equally um rewarding uh when you when you do check them out and uh obviously like we said before all these movies a lot of these movies are available on criteria channel and i know that times are tough right now but if you were gonna get yourself something like that to to pass the time while we're stuck at home, you could do a lot worse. Chris, I want to thank you for whipping out the katana and cutting things up with me. I really appreciate it. You are the only person I'd

want to do this podcast with. Thanks for having me, man. Okay, buddy. Please stay tuned to The Big Picture. Next week, Amanda and I will be back and we're going to be doing a movie swap. It's time to return the movie swap. Last year, you might have heard us talking about Into the Spider-Verse and Sense and Sensibility. I'm happy to say that next week, we're going to be talking about one of my favorite movies of all time, Aliens, and one of her favorite movies of all time, Four Weddings and a Funeral. We'll see you then. Thank you.