Word: doomward
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...Censoring both the author's ideas and his scatological eloquence, the film script turns the story into a cliche-stocked, ho-humdrum thriller about a TV star (Stuart Whitman) who murders his rich-bitch wife (Eleanor Parker) in Reel Two, and for the next 80 minutes is dogged doomward by the police (Barry Sullivan), his wife's father (Lloyd Nolan), a former mistress (Janet Leigh), and his own conscience. The few amusing moments are provided by Actor Whitman, a young man with a large chest and a small talent who apparently intends to portray Modern Man in Search...
...structure of the film is stark but never static; Kurosawa impels his drama with demonic drive. From its first frenzied episode of plunging stallions and roaring knights, the film hurtles doomward like a great black boulder flung from a catapult. The spectator scarcely has time to realize, as the images deafen and the noises decorate his imagination, that he is experiencing effects of cinema seldom matched in their headlong masculine power of imagination. Among them...
...seconds, he has chopped a few feet out of the film, patched it together again without transition. The story can still be followed, but at each cut the film jerks ahead with a syncopated impatience that aptly suggests and stresses the compulsive pace of the hero's doomward drive. More subtly, the trick also distorts, rearranges, relativizes time-much as Picasso manipulated space in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. All meaningful continuity is bewildered; the hero lives, like the animal he is, from second to second, kill to kill. A nasty brute. Godard has sent him to hell...
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