Word: samurais
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...Samurai (at the Telepix). A superior Far Eastern "Western," recounting the life of the legendary Japanese warrior Musashi, powerfully portrayed by Toshiro (Rashomon) Mifune. Handsomely color-photographed, this won an Academy Award as "best foreign film." For those whose Japanese is shaky, there are excellent English subtitles...
...there was the Civil Rights Western, and all the persecuted Piutes, molested Mexicans, downtrodden Jewish drummers and tormented Chinese laundrymen had their day. Scriptwriters are now riding farther from the train, rustling plots (from De Maupassant, Stevenson, even Aristophanes), introducing foreigners (an Italian tailor on Zane Grey Theater, a samurai on Wagon Train) and dabbling in rape, incest, miscegenation, cannibalism...
...ready. The bathers were in the tub, and a crowd of admirers was pressed around Photographer Launois. Suddenly the door was pulled open, and an old man, shouting fiercely, ordered him to take down his equipment. "He was gesturing wildly," reported Launois, "and barking in the old samurai style which I had only heard in the movies before." The village chief tried to convince the old man that Launois' motives were dignified, but he had no success. Finally, when the bathers became frightened by the commotion and departed for home, the old man himself undressed and slid into...
...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...