Word: rashomon
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Akira Kurosawa's Sanjuro might disappoint you if you are expecting a movie on the order of his Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, or even perhaps Yojimbo...
...organic character of Kurosawa's best movies. The violence and the comedy are disproportionate to the story, and are never quite integrated in it. This is not to say that Sanjuro is a bad movie. It isn't. But it belongs to a lighter level of entertainment than Rashomon or Seven Samurai. The story-line itself has no less potential that that of Seven Samurai; but here Kurosawa has chosen to keep it exaggerated and farcical rather than to develop it in depth...
...Outrage, at best, is a 97-minute rehash of the vivid Japanese classic Rashomon. At worst, it is a clear case of Occidental death. In remaking Director Akira Kurosawa's 1952 Oscar winner, the producers have added a bumper crop of cactus, presumably hoping to repeat the success of The Magnificent Seven, a western based on Kurosawa's epic tale of the samurai. Assigned to this prickly task are Star Paul Newman, Director Martin Ritt and Photographer James Wong Howe, all covered with pay dirt from their triumphant collaboration in Hud. The result this time is a slick...
Shadow of the Bomb. The historians of the new cinema, searching out its origins, go back to another festival, the one at Venice in 1951. That year the least promising item on the cinemenu was a Japanese picture called Rashomon. Japanese pictures, as all film experts knew, were just a bunch of rubber chrysanthemums. So the judges sat down yawning. They got up dazed. Rashomon was a cinematic thunderbolt that violently ripped open the dark heart of man to prove that the truth was not in it. In technique the picture was traumatically original; in spirit it was big, strong...
Trained as a painter, Kurosawa got interested in the movies because they seemed to him unnecessarily stupid. Rashomon was his tenth picture, and since Rashomon he has produced a relentless succession of masterpieces. Seven Samurai (1954), considered by many the best action movie ever made, is a military idyl with a social moral: the meek shall inherit the earth-when they learn to fight for their rights. Ikiru (1952), Kurosawa's greatest work, describes the tragedy and transfiguration of a hopelessly ordinary man, a grubby little bookkeeper who does not dare to live until he learns he is going...