Word: samurai
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fluidly mounted flashbacks, four separate versions of the event are re-enacted. Up to a point the facts jibe. A bandit (Rod Steiger) has stalked a passing samurai (Noel Willman) and his wife (Claire Bloom) through a bamboo glade, decoyed the husband with promises of buried loot, trussed him up, and raped his wife before his eyes. The samurai is later found dead. According to the bandit, the wife baited him into killing her husband to gain her. The wife swears she killed him to spare him dishonor. Through a medium, the dead samurai claims that he heartbrokenly committed suicide...
...score, Oliver Messel's turntable forest of disenchantment. Apart from a U.N.-like babel of accents, the brilliant cast often achieves a triumph of mime over matter. Radiant, in white kimono, as netted moonlight, Claire Bloom is part lotus flower, part flower of evil. Noel Willman's samurai is a bred-in-the-bone aristocrat, and Rod Steiger's bandit a bite-to-the-bone outlaw...
...moment of truth for these characters sadly shatters the mythic mood of the play. When the bandit is revealed as a braggart, the samurai as a snuffling coward and his wife as a trollop, the Kanins' script, unlike the film, fumbles away the Swiftian savagery of Akutagawa for something close to farce. What Akutagawa intended as the subtle shadow play of appearance and reality becomes, in the wigmaker's summing up, little more than an optical illusion: "Truth is a firefly...
...fortuneteller studied Kawamura's palm, said gravely: "You are indeed accursed. But I can tell you how to end all your troubles. Go to the little field that lies outside your home. There you will find a neglected grave, the burial place of an ancient samurai. His spirit is angry and is taking revenge on the nearest living person, and that happens to be you. It is necessary that you appease...
...intoned the fortuneteller. "Now that the samurai's spirit has identified you with the neglect of his grave, you would be followed all over the world." He told Kawamura to clear away the earth and brambles from the tombstone, "then burn incense before it and pray. This will console the samurai...