Word: rashomonics
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...doubt about it now: Japan's Akira Kurosawa must be numbered with Sergei Eisenstein and D. W. Griffith among the supreme creators of cinema. Rashomon (1952) introduced him to U.S. audiences as a powerful ironist. The Magnificent Seven (1956) demonstrated his mastery of movies as pure movement. Ikiru (1960), one of the screen's great spiritual documents, revealed him as a moralist both passionate and profound. Throne of Blood, a resetting of Macbeth among the clanking thanes and brutish politics of 16th century Japan, is a visual descent into the hell of greed and superstition, into the gibbering...
...characters, too. Kurosawa's Macbeth is no reflective and susceptible villain, "too full o' the milk of human kindness." He is a sweat-simple soldier, as physical as his horse, and he is played with tremendous thrust and mien by Toshiro Mifune (the star of both Rashomon and The Magnificent Seven), who is surely the most prodigiously kinetic cinemactor since Doug Fairbanks. Similarly, Kurosawa's Lady Macbeth is no ambivalent amateur of crime who must "stop up the access and passage to remorse." She is simply the self and image of her husband's worser nature...
Daiei, a serious company that also made Gate of Hell, Ugetsu, and Rashomon, is trying to do something more than ring the box-office gong. Scores of Buddhist monks and scholars have been hired to guide Director Kenji Misumi through the life of the young Indian prince who, in the 6th century B.C., turned away from worldly pleasure to seek enlightenment of the soul. The advisers are trying to keep the sex in balance with the substance, the taste with the tasty; and Buddha himself -played by 23-year-old Rising Son Kojiro Hongo-will only appear in the flesh...
...hope that it will soon get profitably lost in the Christmas rush. The loss will be bearable: Seven is not a great picture-not nearly as good as the Japanese Magnificent Seven (TIME, Dec. 10, 1956), the brilliant episode of chivalry, directed by Japan's Akira (Rashomon) Kurosawa, from which it is adapted. Nevertheless, it is the best western released so far in 1960, a skillful, exciting, and occasionally profound contemplation of the life of violence...
...festival, concerned an aging lecher whose strategy is to restore his virility by making himself jealous. According to that prescription, he virtually thrusts his daughter's fiancé into the arms of his own young wife (Machiko Kyo, whose musky, lotus-eyed sensuality was muffled in Rashomon). The young man is hardly more attentive to her than the camera, which pans up slowly on her nude body from feet to calves to knees to thighs to a lap dissolve. Topping that, the film contains what is probably the most uproarious juxtaposition of images in the history of cinema...