Wednesday, March 1, 2017
060 - The Lower Depths, 1957, Japan. Dir. Akira Kurosawa.
Yesterday we watched The Lower Depths (1936).
Today we are watching The Lower Depths (1957).
Maxim Gorky's play was first staged in 1902 at the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by and starring the father of modern acting, Constantin Stanislavski.
Thirty-four years later the great French director, Jean Renoir, turned it into a movie starring France's great film star, Jean Gabin.
Now twenty-one years after that, or fifty-five years after the original staged play, the great Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa, turns it into a movie starring Japan's great film star, Toshiro Mifune.
Along with many other members of Kurosawa's steady stock company.
This play has some staying power.
In fact, in addition to the French version of yesterday and the Japanese version of today, the play would be made into movies in India (1946), China (1947), the Soviet Union (1952), and Finland (1966). It appears it has not yet been filmed in the United States or England.
Kurosawa is one of the great directors in cinema history. Now is a good time to meet him. We will watch more of his films later in the year.
This is 1957. It is twenty-one (21) years into Kurosawa's film career--when he started in 1936 as a Third Assistant Director--and fourteen (14) years after he directed his first feature, Sanshiro Sugata (1943). Yet it is still thirty-six (36) years before the last film he will direct, Maadadayo (1993), and it is in the middle of his fifteen-to-twenty year run of directing films as one of the world's great masters.
Many of the actors in this film are people we often see in Kurosawa films as samurai--Japanese warriors. Here we see them as passive indigent tenants in a slumlord tenement.
After reading yesterday's blog (059, February 27), you will recognize similarities with today's plot.
An older landlord Rokubei and his younger, angry wife Osugi run the tenement. Her younger sister Okayo is conscripted into helping them. The thief Sutekichi is secretly having an affair with Osugi but is tiring of her and beginning to look at Okayo. A new man arrives with an unknown past. He is Kahei, the equivalent of yesterday's Baron.
In this film we do not see the Baron's, or Kahei's, life when he was rich. In yesterday's version, Renoir developed the play into more of a cinematic story, moving to different locations, adding back story, and changing the narrative to suit his purposes. This version is more like the play in that it limits the action to one location, inside the tenement, and does not add back story.
The wife Osugi will try to convince her paramour Sutekichi to kill her husband Rokubei, but Sutekichi will have no part of it. It nearly happens anyway when the husband Rokubei discovers his wife Osugi is having an affair with Sutekichi and begins a fight with him.
Do not start a fight with Sutekichi.
You will not make it out alive.
Unless, the old man Kahei is hiding in a stall in the room and overhears you.
Kahei makes a big yawn just in time, revealing his presence, startling the two fighting men, and allowing Rokubei to escape. Kahei spares Rokubei's life and keeps Sutekichi from jail.
To no avail.
Sutekichi will end up killing Rokubei anyway.
The husband and wife, Rokubei and Osugi, will eventually start brutalizing her sister Okayo. The tenants will overhear it and come to intervene. The thief Sutekichi will lose his temper and fight Rokubei. Others will get in punches as well. In his rage Sutekichi will kill Rokubei.
Yet now that Sutekichi has saved Okayo's life and defended her honor, siding with her over her cruel older sister, Okayo blames him. She gets confused. She thinks that Sutekichi did in fact go in with her big sister Osugi as Osugi had tried to plan from the beginning. Okayo accuses the two of them of conspiring to commit murder.
Her opinion prevails. The two go to jail.
Wait.
In the French version the thief and the younger sister run away together and live somewhat decently ever after.
But here in the Japanese version the thief and the younger sister never come together and the thief goes to jail.
Apparently, the Japanese version stays truer to the original Russian play.
Oh, for the romance of the French!
* * * * *
In both versions of the play, one of the indigents, a character called the actor, hangs himself in the end.
Hanging a picture on the wall is different from hanging a person. Therefore, the two concepts are differentiated in the English language in the past tense.
The past tense of to hang an object is hung. "I hung the picture on the wall."
The past tense of to hang a person is hanged. "The hangman hanged the bandit."
The English subtitles in both films get it wrong. In both the French and the Japanese versions, they state, "The actor hung himself," where it should have been, "The actor hanged himself."
The latter is a more precise and elegant way of speaking.
* * * * *
Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune made 16 films together. Here is a list of them.
1. Drunken Angel, 1948
2. The Quiet Duel, 1949
3. Stray Dog, 1949
4. Scandal, 1950
5. Rashomon, 1950
6. The Idiot, 1951 - adapted from the novel by Fyodor Dostoyesvki
7. Seven Samurai, 1954 - remade as a Western in America as The Magnificent Seven
8. I Live in Fear: Record of a Living Being, 1955
9. Throne of Blood, 1957 - adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth with samurai
10. The Lower Depths, 1957 - adaptation of the play by Maxim Gorky
11. The Hidden Fortress, 1958 - influenced Star Wars
12. The Bad Sleep Well, 1960 - loosely based on Shakespeare's Hamlet
13. Yojimbo, 1961 - remade as a Western in Italy as Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, starring Clint Eastwood
14. Sanjuro, 1962
15. High and Low, 1963
16. Red Beard, 1965
Meanwhile, Akira Kurosawa and Takashi Shimura made 21 films together. Make your own list.
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