Director Akira Kurosawa and star Toshiro Mifune collaborated on many of the 20th Century's most acclaimed and appreciated films, including "The Seven Samurai," "Rashamon" and "Red Beard." In my opinion this particular collaboration isn't quite as impressive as these films or "Stray Dog," but it is a solid dark melodrama that explores its characters even while it follows them on a fatal journey. Mifune plays Koichi Nishi, a man who marries into the family of the vice president (Matsayuki Mori) of the Public Corporation in order to get revenge on the executives who caused the suicide death of his father.
There's several problems for me with the story. First of all I never really believed that Nishi was in love with his wife (Tatsuya Mihashi). Yes, I can believe that he can recognize the quality of her spirit and I find the melodrama of the conflict between his revenge death-wish and his personal feelings compelling, but I don't think it was established well enough beyond the simple fact of Nishi stating that it was so. Also I think there's an insurmountable cultural difference that tends to take at least a modern American audience (if not very possibly a modern Japanese audience) out of the movie to some extent there's an assumption built into the story that we will accept that these suicides were the natural consequence of the corporate misdeeds perpetrated by Iwabuchi and his underlings. However in our culture you would be more likely to go talk to a federal watchdog agency than to jump out of a window if you discovered that your superiors were grafting the public coffers. That makes the whole melodrama feel a bit overwrought and Nishi's anger somewhat misplaced.
However these relatively unconvincing elements are made up for to a great extent by a variety of really astonishing setpeice scenes. Probably the most memorable is when Nishi takes Wada (Kamatari Fujiwara) to watch his own funeral, even providing a soundtrack of his superiors gloating over his death as broadcast by 2 track tape device! The inter-cutting between the horrified Wada and the solemn attitudes of the pallbearers and mourners is truly striking and bizarre. I also thought the scenes where Wada was presented as a "ghost" in the alleyway were very well done. The film starts to bog down in the extended sequences where the kidnapped Moriyama (Takashi Shimura) is starved into confessing his corporate secrets. But the ending is suitably dark and offers no escape from the decisions made at whatever point in the past.
Perhaps I will have more comments on this one if I watch it again in the future, but for now this is all I really have to say.
There's several problems for me with the story. First of all I never really believed that Nishi was in love with his wife (Tatsuya Mihashi). Yes, I can believe that he can recognize the quality of her spirit and I find the melodrama of the conflict between his revenge death-wish and his personal feelings compelling, but I don't think it was established well enough beyond the simple fact of Nishi stating that it was so. Also I think there's an insurmountable cultural difference that tends to take at least a modern American audience (if not very possibly a modern Japanese audience) out of the movie to some extent there's an assumption built into the story that we will accept that these suicides were the natural consequence of the corporate misdeeds perpetrated by Iwabuchi and his underlings. However in our culture you would be more likely to go talk to a federal watchdog agency than to jump out of a window if you discovered that your superiors were grafting the public coffers. That makes the whole melodrama feel a bit overwrought and Nishi's anger somewhat misplaced.
However these relatively unconvincing elements are made up for to a great extent by a variety of really astonishing setpeice scenes. Probably the most memorable is when Nishi takes Wada (Kamatari Fujiwara) to watch his own funeral, even providing a soundtrack of his superiors gloating over his death as broadcast by 2 track tape device! The inter-cutting between the horrified Wada and the solemn attitudes of the pallbearers and mourners is truly striking and bizarre. I also thought the scenes where Wada was presented as a "ghost" in the alleyway were very well done. The film starts to bog down in the extended sequences where the kidnapped Moriyama (Takashi Shimura) is starved into confessing his corporate secrets. But the ending is suitably dark and offers no escape from the decisions made at whatever point in the past.
Perhaps I will have more comments on this one if I watch it again in the future, but for now this is all I really have to say.