Word: toshiro
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...Toshiro Mayuzumi: Nirvana Symphonie (Time Records). A 1958 composition in which avant-garde Japanese Composer Mayuzumi mixes orchestra and male chorus with purely electronic beeps, whistles and growls as a means of "creating my own musical Nirvana." Whatever he created (he also refers to the piece as "a sort of Buddhistic cantata"), the music is fascinating-full of swelling sonorities and eerie spatial sounds...
Compression is evident in the 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...
...festival, but in the U.S. the idea has taken root only in San Francisco. Last week the top prize at San Francisco's Fifth Annual International Film Festival went to Animas Trujano, a Mexican picture about a slow-witted Zapotec Indian, played, curiously enough, by Japan's Toshiro Mifune. But -as is customary at film festivals-the most talked-about film in town was not the big winner. It was a cartoon from Communist Yugoslavia called Ersatz...
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...
Samurai now propounds its moral: that a headstrong man is of no use to his nation unless he is tamed by virtue. While regiments of armed men scour the hills for Toshiro, a deceptively jolly priest (Kuroemon Onoe) and a frightened girl (Kaoru Yachigusa) ensnare him with kindness. Brought home, Toshiro is trussed up like a maniac and suspended from a tall tree. Each morning and evening the priest inquires if his spirit is broken, and Toshiro answers with howling curses. The girl frees the prisoner, but the wily priest traps Toshiro again, this time locks him in a tower...