Whipped Cream Difficulties

When I was a teenager in the suburbs of Houston, there were three people who, more than anyone else (except my parents, who I’m excluding from this list), influenced the development of my taste in movies:

• Jeff Millar, the long-time movie critic and columnist for the Houston Chronicle (and the guy who writes “Tank McNamara“). The HouChron hasn’t had a better critic since he retired; Mr. Millar, if you’re out there somewhere, I hope you’re having a wonderful life.
• the late Gene Siskel.
• and Roger Ebert.

This was in the days long before the Internet. Actually, it was mostly in the days before I had a personal computer. My exposure to Rog and Gene was from “Sneak Previews” on our local PBS station (and, later on, “At the Movies” in syndication).

This was also in the days before home video changed everything. We had VHS tapes, but access to foreign and obscure stuff was iffy; that kind of thing wasn’t well stocked in our local video stores, and NetFlix didn’t exist yet. Rog and Gene were pretty good about including those movies on their show (and my mother used to gripe every time they did) but the art film theaters in Houston were a good drive away.

One week, Rog and Gene reviewed the release of the uncut version of Seven Samurai: if I remember correctly, that version had never before been seen in the United States. I remember thinking, “Hey! Japanese guys with swords! This sounds pretty cool! I want to see this!” Then I found out it was playing at one of the art houses in Houston. I don’t remember which one, though I want to say it was the River Oaks.

So I made use of my considerable powers of persuasion, and got the car for a night. Then I made use of those powers again and somehow managed to talk two friends of mine, Monica and Joe, into going with me. To see a Japanese samurai movie. On a school night. I seem to recall our English teacher, Mrs. Flynn (and if you’re out there somewhere, ditto on the wonderful life) helping me out a little with that. Off we went into deepest darkest downtown Houston.

Remember I said this was a school night? One thing we hadn’t realized was that “uncut” meant “uncut“. As in, 207 minutes. As in, 3+ hours. It was a late night, and I think both Monica and Joe were a little put out at me by the end of it. But it was a revelation to me. I don’t think I was any more provincial than the average teenager, but for the first time in my life, I was seeing something from a non-Western perspective. I was seeing a film with a different grammar than I was used to from Western film of the 1970s and 1980s. And I was seeing a movie that dealt seriously with questions of honor and dignity.

Not long after that, I moved to Austin and started attending the university. At the time, the student union had a serious film program. It was there that I saw a lot of great movies for the first time. A Clockwork Orange.  2001 – A Space Odyssey as it was meant to be seen. (No, not stoned: on a big screen without commercials.) The Wages of Fear. And the Kurosawa. You’d think the people who ran the film program had only ever heard of one Japanese director. But if you’re only going to pick one, Kurosawa isn’t a bad one to pick.

I saw the uncut Seven Samurai again with Lawrence. We saw Throne of Blood, Kurosawa doing Macbeth. Yojimbo. Stray Dog. Ran, Kurosawa does King Lear. The amazing High and Low: what other director would have had the courage to take one of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, King’s Ransom – not just a truly American novel, but specifically a truly New York centered police procedural – and turn it into a uniquely and fully Japanese movie? The Bad Sleep Well. Dersu Uzala. Frankly, those last two are probably the least successful of the Kurosawa we watched. What didn’t play at the union, we rented from one of the good local video stores and watched at home.

Harlan Ellison once wrote that there were only seven genius-level directors, “unmistakable talents of the highest order of Art”, people whose work is “never safe, never calm, never predictable” working currently in film: Altman, Coppola, Fellini, Resnais, Kubrick, Buñuel…and Kurosawa. That’s a hard list to argue with, especially Kurosawa. Whenever you walk into a Kurosawa film, you know you’re walking into something that’s not safe and not predictable. Kurosawa’s films are the singular vision of one man.

It is difficult to contemplate where film would be today without Kurosawa. His Wikipedia entry, especially the section under “Influence“, is a good start (though it suffers from Wikipedia’s usual flaws). No Star Wars. What would Scorsese or Herzog’s movies be like without Kurosawa’s influence? What would Sergio Leone have done?

Kurosawa was someone who had to express his vision, no matter what. There’s a quote in Something Like An Autobiography that I love. Kurosawa is talking about censorship during the war:

Toward the end of the war I even made a pact with some of my friends: If it came to the point of the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million and every Japanese would have to commit suicide, we vowed to meet in front of the Ministry of the Interior and assassinate the censors before we took our own lives.

(I have to add my other favorite Kurosawa quote: “When Kurosawa met [John] Ford, the American simply said, ‘You really like rain.’ Kurosawa responded, ‘You’ve really been paying attention to my films.'”)

Kurosawa was a man of honor and integrity, and one of my teachers, even though I never met him. He would have been 100 years old today.

Domo arigato, Kurosawa-sensei.

Edited to add: By special permission of Lawrence, his Kurosawa memorial haiku, written shortly after Kurosawa’s death in 1998.

Fate’s swift sword flashes
A celluloid giant falls
Farwell Akira

Shadow Warrior? No.
A thousand swords honor a
Samurai’s passage.

Take Kurosawa:
Vision, honor, greatness, all
Bound by frames of light

Cherry blossoms fall
All the world mourns passage of
Japan’s favorite son

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.