Word: samurai
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
HOUSE OF JAPAN. Shoeless, seated at a low table, the happy diner is served hot sake, then a kimonoed doll of a waitress kneels and cooks sukiyaki. Meanwhile, entertainers in the colorful costumes of samurai, geisha and fishermen dance every thing from kabuki to the twist, and an Oriental chanteuse, Momotaro Akasaka, sings sonorous torch songs...
HIGH AND LOW. Without a samurai in sight, Japanese Director Akira Kurosawa sets the screen crackling with excitement as his camera trails a vicious kidnaper through the Yokohama underworld...
HIGH AND LOW. Without a samurai in sight, Japanese Director Akira Kurosawa sets the screen crackling with excitement as his camera trails a vicious kidnaper through the Yokohama underworld...
...Kurosawa is an eclectic film genius who has borrowed plots from such classic sources as Shakespeare, Gorky and the Hollywood western. This time, he takes a routine American thriller by Ed McBain (pseudonym for Evan Hunter, author of The Blackboard Jungle) and proves that he needs neither sex nor samurai to set the screen crackling with excitement. Basically hackneyed, and at times impausible, High and Low is a Kurosawa triumph of man over matter...
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...