Word: shimura
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...silent films, which Kurosawa greatly admired. Toshiro Mifune's feral performance as the bandit is legendary, and Machiko Kyo brings off the task of presenting what are in reality four different women. Masayuki Mori as the husband is excellent; his serpent-like look of contempt is unforgettable. Takashi Shimura as the woodcutter is the quiet core of strength and humanity in the film, almost the movie's moral center. The music, which was written to resemble Maurice Ravel's "Bolero," is notoriously distracting, but this is an unfortunate cultural accident. At the time the movie was made, the Ravel piece...
...steals his .38 Colt on a crowded bus. He plunges into the Tokyo underworld to find it; and in a long sequence without a word of dialogue interrupting the flow of images, Kurosawa pulls the viewer right in after him. Mifune joins forces with a wise old sleuth (Takashi Shimura), and the two men track a killer through a series of crimes keyed to the seven deadly bullets in the missing...
...ingredients, of which his own voice is an essential one; and every actor can be validly judged only when that entire complex is presented inviolate. Otherwise, as Stanley Kauffman put it in his letter of protest, "I would never have heard the voices of Louis Jouvet, Edwige Feuillere, Takashi Shimura, Vittorio De Sica and Victor Sjostrom. These are only a few of the actors about whom I would know much less if Mr. Crowther had had his way." And I myself still recall the disconcerting experience of looking at even such light-weight stuff as a Bob Hope comedy...
...plate fills the first frame of the film. "This X ray shows the stomach of the main character in this story," the narrator calmly announces. "Symptoms of cancer can be detected. But he is still unaware of the fact." The face of the victim (Takashi Shimura) fills the screen. He is a dull-eyed, dried-up, middle-aged bureaucrat, a worn and fading rubber stamp. He goes to the hospital, learns his fate: six months to live. He is shattered. For the first time in 30 years he misses work-one. two, three days in a row. He starts...
...will surely scare away most U.S. moviegoers. Director Kurosawa is in such raging and relentless earnest that he labors almost every point he makes. And the film maintains its intensity at much greater length (2 hr. 20 min.) than the average spectator can be expected to tolerate. Furthermore, Actor Shimura, though at moments transcendently right and revealing, rather too continuously resembles a Japanese Jiggs who has just been beaned by the eternal rolling pin and is about to say tweet-tweet. But the minor actors are often superb. The camera work, the cutting, the use of flashback and sound track...