The Great Movies III

He is best known for the elegant ghost stories in Kwaidan (1964) and the samurai drama Harakiri (1962), which many feel is better than Samurai Rebellion. Richie disagrees, praising Kobayashi's use here of 2:35-to-1 widescreen compositions to "even more effectively hem in his rebellious characters."The film's blackand-white cinematography is somber and beautiful, arranging the characters within visual boxes of space and architecture that reflect their relationships. Notice how when they are seated at meetings, their positions and body language precisely reflect their status, and how the departure of one character upsets the balance. Notice, too, the symbolism involved when Isaburo and his son prepare to do battle with the lord's men, and begin by disrupting the stark verticals and horizontals of the architecture with crisscrossed bamboo poles that make jagged barriers across the windows.

Samurai Rebellion can be seen as a statement against the conformity that remained central in Japanese life long after this period. It is the story of three people who learn to become individuals. Consider the dramatic moment when the lord's steward returns to the Sasahara household, bringing with him the kidnapped Ichi, who has been ordered to plead for a divorce. She has been told the only alternative is that her husband and father-inlaw will be ordered to commit seppuku, or suicide. Centuries of tradition require her to follow the script, but "They lie!" she cries out. "I am still the wife of Yogoro!"

The ending is tragic, resulting in death that is not glorious but obscure and hidden, leaving no record. Isaburo's dying words are gasps of advice to Tomi, his granddaughter. He tells her how brave her mother and father were, but Tomi is too young to understand. In another sense, the ending is triumphant: the three heroes of the story have expressed their will and their sense of right and wrong. We remember Isaburo shouting, "For the first time in my life I feel alive!"

enji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bail one of the best of all Japanese films, is curiously named after its villain, and not after any of the characters we identify with. The bristle-bearded slavemaster Sansho is at the center of two journeys, one toward him, one away, although the early travelers have no suspicion of their destination. He is as heartless a creature as I have seen on the screen.

The film opens on a forest hillside, where Tamaki, the wife of a kind district administrator, is discovered with her young son, Zushio, her younger daughter, Anju, and their servant, making their way down a difficult path. The dense underbrush here is reflected throughout the film, which is set in eleventh-century feudal times, and reflects the director's feeling that humans and nature are the sides of a coin. The little group has had to flee for their lives after her husband drew the wrath of the cruel Sansho and was exiled. They hope to rejoin him.

In this shot, and throughout the film, Mizoguchi closely observes the compositional rules of classic cinema. Movement to the left suggests backward in time, to the right, forward. Diagonals move in the direction of their sharpest angle. Upward movement is hopeful, downward ominous. By moving from upper left to lower right, they are descending into an unpromising future.

They stop for the night, build a rough shelter from tree limbs, and start a small fire. In the darkness, wolves howl. Their little domestic circle in the firelight is a moment of happiness, however uncertain, that they will not feel again. Then an old priestess finds them, and offers them shelter in her nearby home. In the morning, discovering their destination, she suggests that a boat journey will greatly diminish the distance. She knows some friendly boatman. As they leave her house, a furtive dark figure, almost unseen, darts behind them in the shrubbery.

The delivery to the boatmen is a betrayal. The woman and servant are captured by body merchants, the women to be sold into prostitution, the children into slavery under Sansho. He runs a barbaric prison camp of forced labor, and it here that the children will spend the next ten years. Sansho is an unlovely man, a bully and sadist, who is surrounded by servile lackeys, all except for his son.